Indecisive Lurkers: Why you must get the rift

drkaii · Aug 10, 2015

I just saw this SMBC comedy sketch from 5 years ago where someone goes back 25 in time to a bunch of geeks who ask her questions about what 2010 is like. One of the questions is "what happened with VR". Well she only painted a dark picture of how they had reached the level of the Wii remote bowling lol. If they remade this sketch, I think they'd have to change it quite significantly!

[video=youtube;HVlIsUoQsjY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVlIsUoQsjY[/video]

SlackR · Aug 10, 2015

Desert63 said:
I had a great experience last night in the Rift (not ED yet!). After 15 somewhat disappointing demos of blocks turning into stickmen and dancing I tried this one were I was in a plane from the 1930s. The head tracking was amazing. Sitting in the seat I could not get enough of looking out the window, looking down the isle, standing up a bit to look over the seat next to me, looking over and under, bending across the seat, etc. It was the first of the demos that made me feel present, and I could fly in that plane for sometime. So I expect the cockpit in ED is going to be pretty darn cool.

Almost there, but I am noticing performance issues. In the demo "Dont let go" where you hold your hands on the CTRL keys where things try to scare you I get really poor performance, 25 FPS, and then very randomly it locks at 75FPS. In the beautiful Peso opera one I get terrible performance and this is the one I want to show my wife to explain why all the UPS trucks showed up at my house for two weeks.
What is that APP you run that shows your CPU and GPU utilization in certain demos? I have a 970, but a five year old CPU, so want to see if I am CPU limited.
Thanks!

I use playclaw 5 because you can physically move and customize which values you want to see and it is one of the few that can be viewed whilst wearing the headset.

Dweezil_Moon · Aug 10, 2015

Desert63 said:
I had a great experience last night in the Rift (not ED yet!). After 15 somewhat disappointing demos of blocks turning into stickmen and dancing I tried this one were I was in a plane from the 1930s. The head tracking was amazing. Sitting in the seat I could not get enough of looking out the window, looking down the isle, standing up a bit to look over the seat next to me, looking over and under, bending across the seat, etc. It was the first of the demos that made me feel present, and I could fly in that plane for sometime. So I expect the cockpit in ED is going to be pretty darn cool.

Almost there, but I am noticing performance issues. In the demo "Dont let go" where you hold your hands on the CTRL keys where things try to scare you I get really poor performance, 25 FPS, and then very randomly it locks at 75FPS. In the beautiful Peso opera one I get terrible performance and this is the one I want to show my wife to explain why all the UPS trucks showed up at my house for two weeks.
What is that APP you run that shows your CPU and GPU utilization in certain demos? I have a 970, but a five year old CPU, so want to see if I am CPU limited.
Thanks!

What kind of CPU do you have? five years old sounds ... well .. old. My guess is that your bottlenecking your gpu.
I used to run the Rift on my GTX660 with a seven year Q6600 quadcore and, whilst still good the judder was very noticeable in most demos as my GPU wasn't running at its fullest. The old and relatively slow CPU, in combination with the old mobo kept the GPU from running at its full potential. I got a new mainboard, the cheapest i5 Quadcore I could find and some fast ram (yeah .. money doesn't come free) and the difference is amazing.

Hexcaliber · Aug 10, 2015

I will wait until retail units hit market then decide if I want to invest, assuming enough software devs are showing interest. This is the second time VR is been promoted as the biggest development in gaming, and having been around the first time, I will wait to see if amounts to more than a molehill this time round.

Desert63 · Aug 11, 2015

Dweezil_Moon said:
What kind of CPU do you have? five years old sounds ... well .. old. My guess is that your bottlenecking your gpu.
I used to run the Rift on my GTX660 with a seven year Q6600 quadcore and, whilst still good the judder was very noticeable in most demos as my GPU wasn't running at its fullest. The old and relatively slow CPU, in combination with the old mobo kept the GPU from running at its full potential. I got a new mainboard, the cheapest i5 Quadcore I could find and some fast ram (yeah .. money doesn't come free) and the difference is amazing.

Thankyou..it is not hard to guessimate that an older motherboard/CPU 'could' bottleneck, but I need a technology driven answer. All I have read says that ED is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. So "if" I can come up with $300, do I spend that on a new motherboard/CPU, or an upgrade to my GPU? Where will I get the biggest boost?
So what does technology say? In other words what do you all run that tells what my CPU and GPU are doing? I can run task man, but I want a better report or better history. With task man I just have to end, and run and look at the little 'heart' graphs to see, surely there is something better than that.

ranix · Aug 11, 2015

Hexcaliber said:
I will wait until retail units hit market then decide if I want to invest, assuming enough software devs are showing interest. This is the second time VR is been promoted as the biggest development in gaming, and having been around the first time, I will wait to see if amounts to more than a molehill this time round.

I wasn't around the first time, or at least I didn't have enough disposable income to participate back then. What was that like? What's similar between then and what's going on in VR today?

Dweezil_Moon · Aug 11, 2015

Desert63 said:
Thankyou..it is not hard to guessimate that an older motherboard/CPU 'could' bottleneck, but I need a technology driven answer. All I have read says that ED is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. So "if" I can come up with $300, do I spend that on a new motherboard/CPU, or an upgrade to my GPU? Where will I get the biggest boost?
So what does technology say? In other words what do you all run that tells what my CPU and GPU are doing? I can run task man, but I want a better report or better history. With task man I just have to end, and run and look at the little 'heart' graphs to see, surely there is something better than that.

You own a gtx970, so your problem shouldn't be your GPU.

Karnath · Aug 11, 2015

Desert63 said:
Thankyou..it is not hard to guessimate that an older motherboard/CPU 'could' bottleneck, but I need a technology driven answer. All I have read says that ED is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. So "if" I can come up with $300, do I spend that on a new motherboard/CPU, or an upgrade to my GPU? Where will I get the biggest boost?
So what does technology say? In other words what do you all run that tells what my CPU and GPU are doing? I can run task man, but I want a better report or better history. With task man I just have to end, and run and look at the little 'heart' graphs to see, surely there is something better than that.

You could use a program called Msi afterburner, it's mainly used for overclocking video cards but has a decent monitoring facility where you can select all sorts of things to monitor and record

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/msi-afterburner-beta-download.html

Desert63 · Aug 12, 2015

Karnath said:
You could use a program called Msi afterburner, it's mainly used for overclocking video cards but has a decent monitoring facility where you can select all sorts of things to monitor and record

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/msi-afterburner-beta-download.html

yep, thanks, I have an MSI card and will use that.

Desert63 · Aug 12, 2015

ranix said:
I wasn't around the first time, or at least I didn't have enough disposable income to participate back then. What was that like? What's similar between then and what's going on in VR today?

I am not sure there was ever a true launch of home VR in the 90s. I tried arcade machines and went overboard to find them. Seattle was one of only two cities that got the first run of the arcade VR machine called Terdacktle Nightmare (I never could spell it - flying dinosaur), and I played it constantly - it was very impressive for what it was and for moments you did feel present in a very limited digitial world. I actually flew to Vegas once when I heard the MGM had a new VR arcade game. Gambling was a bonus, but I wanted VR...seriously I called ahead and apparently was a nut that flew down just to play a VR game

. At one point I went to a computer trade show where some early flat screen could be strapped to your head and you could "play" Wolfenstein 3D - sortof - by awkwardly moving your head around but always looking mostly forward. That was promised to be a home version and I am not sure it ever launched - certainly I wasnt buying and I was their target market. One of the console companies had a sort of headset in the mid nighties that was blah. I believe media and the tech explosion of the 90s fed a desire and belief VR was coming but it was not to be. The 90s was the decade I entered hardware support as a career and knowing what I know now, VR was never going to be possible in the 90s. Heck in 90/91 I was running around showing people how amazing it was to upgrade their windows 3.0 to 256 colors - NOT 256k colors, but an entire 256 colors from 16 colors. If THAT was a big deal on an expensive 486, how could the idea of home VR be even close.
It was sci-fi fantasy and marketing to feed an early tech explosion in the 90s- but its here now!!!

Desert63 · Aug 14, 2015

Desert63 said:
yep, thanks, I have an MSI card and will use that.

Ok, a story is not being told here somewhere in these benchmarks. Again, a 970 and a 6 proc AMD five years old or so. (AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1090T Processor)
I run afterburner and go through various Rift demos. One in particular that I really want to show my wife is Kite and Lighting Senza Peso crazy Opera VR demo. When running at Max - 1920 I get 50-60 FPS in Afterburner, which means only 25 per eye in the RIFT, yet my GPU is at 30%, and CPU at 28%. When I crank the demo down to 1280 the FPS actually drops and my GPU goes down to 13%, and my CPU down also.
So - why is my card not burning itself up at 100% trying to give me more FPS?
Old motherboard but when I got it I bought the latest DDR3 RAM, so not testing that, but will.

And yes, what does this have to do with ED? Glad you asked, downloading as we speak. Well actually I stopped the download to do some testing and it will resume when I head to bed.

So I have a bottle neck somewhere - or there is some kind of hardlock behavior with that demo, but I get poor FPS on any high bandwidth demo, such as Convergent,,,, thoughts please? I mean its fine to just say I have an entry level performance GPU and too old of a CPU, but why then arent they maxing out?

Edit - I just tested on the Asunder Rift demo (my favorite demo by far) and on that my CPU is at max - 98% and my GPU is at 78%. So that is more of that I would expect. Again, if those demos above are more GPU or CPU dependent, then why doesnt one or the other component max out?? Why crappy FPS, and neither component over 40%?

Edit2 - wth, just went back and tested Senza Peso 6 times and now Afterburner is making sense. My CPU is a bottleneck at 98% and my GPU at 80+% each time. Not sure why it was reporting odd the first time but in line with my expecations now, as I should be CPU limited if anything. Most of you have said that ED is more gentle on CPUs so we will see, otherwise I will have to not eat for awhile and upgrade (I believe this was recommended by the OP)

Thanks all.

Desert63 · Aug 15, 2015

Alright, finally after around 7 months of waffling, I am in!

Damned impressive. My expectations were quite high as I have watched most of all your videos, so ED in the RIFT had alot to live up to. Even though I have heard you all say it, I just found myself floating among the asteroid belt and looking around...I bet I did that for 20 minutes, keying my engines just a bit here and there to move around, stopping and staring, and then moving a bit again, and staring. And my staring is not from the graphics, as I have not configured it yet and the graphics leave alot to be desired, it is the awesome scale of things...
Sounds like a cliche after so many of you have said it, but its true. The way the cockpit just spreads out in front of me. I mean I know my crappy card table is right in front of me with my keyboard on it, right where the cockpit is, I KNOW its there, but then again its not, there is a real cockpit in front of me...looking left and right and especially up through the windows...and then pulling the stick back and looping while using my head all the way back to watch things as I come out of a loop...another favorite move I did over and over again and its just not possible in a regular game...it feels like my comfy chair is part of it all. It was almost as if the game (if you call it that) starts at the back of my real world chair and extends forward into the "game world". That is the only way I can describe it, my real world chair is the center of the game and this whole ship extends out and around it. I spent 60 minutes or so in the training and all I did was wander aimlessly.

I have never been in ED before right now, I just installed it and put the RIFT on immediately, so I dont have a perspective of seeing it on the monitor.
Lots of configuration to do, and I just started it with no config and I the text is still ugly.

Question - why does it appear like my RIFT goggles are like multi focal glasses. For instance when I look straight on through the center I see things more clear, but when I use my peripheral vision in the RIFT its slightly blurry? Is that normal, because it seems like the center focal point is really narrow, and I can only see really clear right through the middle of the RIFT glass?

Anyways thanks for all of you posting your stories and keeping me on task

. If I had just relied on RIFT demos I would have had fun and showed it off for a bit and probably sold it. I think I have tried at least 25 demos now, and nothing comes close to ED in the RIFT. The idea that I can explore my own Galaxy in first person...boggles my mind.