Interesting performance factor observation.

TL;DR all the other posts. But I think the answer here was given by a dev. Judder due to many planets is nothing to do with polys (are planets even polys at all? They are way too round - I suspect trickery), but the textures. There are 4 levels of details to the textures and each one is loaded at a specific rate. I recently turned up the resolutions at each LOD and my judder increased. Someone mentioned the workload tweak and that should fix your issues.

Has anyone tested the difference between an SSD drive and a standard drive, is it possible it is a texture load issue. Maybe poor ram optimization. I know even outside the Rift when approaching a planet I get a quick studder, like it's loading textures, sometimes I also get it when I first start ED and jump to my first star, but it becomes less and less prominent the longer I am in the sim, which suggests buffering issues with ram or HDD.
 
Has anyone tested the difference between an SSD drive and a standard drive, is it possible it is a texture load issue. Maybe poor ram optimization. I know even outside the Rift when approaching a planet I get a quick studder, like it's loading textures, sometimes I also get it when I first start ED and jump to my first star, but it becomes less and less prominent the longer I am in the sim, which suggests buffering issues with ram or HDD.

Perhaps this helps:

WorkPerFrame has an effect on how much work the GPU has to do per frame when a texture updated is needed.
If you are having problems with the frame rate this is the number you have to lower. The tricky part with this number is that the work is measured in pixels per axis. So a value of 256 means each frame is going to create a piece of work of 256x256 pixels. This means that reducing this number to the half will drop the work to a quarter.
Modifying this value will make to take more frames to generate a texture of the same size and that will make you to visualize the back side of the planet (part of the texture with less quality).
oscar_sebio_cajaraville
Programmer- Elite: Dangerous

from this thread: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=52907

From what he says, it sounds like it has less to do with the HDD and more to do with the GPU itself. Though mind you I did read someone say recently that switching to SSD fixed his judder permanently. I also saw someone say it made no difference. I can't remember where though
 
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TL;DR all the other posts. But I think the answer here was given by a dev. Judder due to many planets is nothing to do with polys (are planets even polys at all? They are way too round - I suspect trickery), but the textures. There are 4 levels of details to the textures and each one is loaded at a specific rate. I recently turned up the resolutions at each LOD and my judder increased. Someone mentioned the workload tweak and that should fix your issues.

I understand the LOD stutter issue with planets but this isn't the same problem (although thanks for the tip off about that fix). The juicy bits happened to be in the other posts but the short story is that Judder becomes apparent for some when ships spawn in system, even when GPU,CPU is as low as 30%. Not in the vicinity being high poly rendered but as a dot elsewhere in the far reaches of the system.

Edit - to add to the weirdness, as per the Judder thread, flipping the Rift desktop display upside down seems to remove judder almost entirely.
 
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Yeah that's a separate issue. The more ships, the more judder. No idea why that is, but it's most likely the AI processing. Maybe switching PhysX to CPU or something would help?
 
It's probably a mix of network data, cpu, draw calls and shader generation in realtime while your flying in SC and new planets are popping into the camera for the first time and have to be generated.

I don't know if the game could check how much ram you have and set aside a small amount of resources to generate the whole system in the background while your doing your thing. Lots of people have 8-16gb of ram now.
 
It's probably a mix of network data, cpu, draw calls and shader generation in realtime while your flying in SC and new planets are popping into the camera for the first time and have to be generated.

I don't know if the game could check how much ram you have and set aside a small amount of resources to generate the whole system in the background while your doing your thing. Lots of people have 8-16gb of ram now.

You have to remember that ram usage is almost entirely controlled by the software, unfortunately if the code is not optimized to use all your ram, it really isn't going to matter how much ram you have above the current optimization. I asked about the HDD, because in the absence of Ram allocated to a task the code usually defaults to the HDD as a way of buffering texture information for usage. I know in some games a fragmented HDD or one that is not partitioned effectively can lead to increased load time of texture information. This can be easily tested by using an SSD drive since they are almost instant access, similar to ram and there should be a noticeable change in the delay if that is the cause of the problem. Be aware though testing on a system with both an SSD and a standard drive may not yield any changes since we really don't know which HDD the code will default too when buffering the textures. Just a thought, I am currently building a rig that only has SSD drives in it and will report my findings as soon as it is up and running.
 
It's probably a mix of network data, cpu, draw calls and shader generation in realtime while your flying in SC and new planets are popping into the camera for the first time and have to be generated.

I don't know if the game could check how much ram you have and set aside a small amount of resources to generate the whole system in the background while your doing your thing. Lots of people have 8-16gb of ram now.

You need to read the while thread to get the picture and it transpires that the apparent cause is different.

RE: Ram. How much can a 32 bit application use?

Edit ... This is going off at a tangent. Pls read thread before posting. Ta.
 
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I understand the LOD stutter issue with planets but this isn't the same problem (although thanks for the tip off about that fix). The juicy bits happened to be in the other posts but the short story is that Judder becomes apparent for some when ships spawn in system, even when GPU,CPU is as low as 30%. Not in the vicinity being high poly rendered but as a dot elsewhere in the far reaches of the system.

Edit - to add to the weirdness, as per the Judder thread, flipping the Rift desktop display upside down seems to remove judder almost entirely.

I have tried flipping my rift display desktop upside down and have not really seen any perceivable change to my framerates on my machine.
 
I have tried flipping my rift display desktop upside down and have not really seen any perceivable change to my framerates on my machine.

Did you check the Judder thread? It's been reported as an issue for Win 8.1. Links posted in p30 to Oculus developer threads explaining what they have found.
 
you have not 'have I skipped installing something',
but you have skipped something,
it is option number 1 on the Main menu after you open the launcher, log in and press Play for Elite:Dangerous

Ah, silly me.. Thanks for pointing that out! I have just automatically clicked on Start, never bothered to check all the other menu items! :)
 
Did you check the Judder thread? It's been reported as an issue for Win 8.1. Links posted in p30 to Oculus developer threads explaining what they have found.

32Bit application can use as much as a 32bit OS I think.

See I'm reading!
 
Did you check the Judder thread? It's been reported as an issue for Win 8.1. Links posted in p30 to Oculus developer threads explaining what they have found.

Actually after reviewing my setting, windows 8.1 I have to choose landscape flipped for the oculus to work properly.
 
Actually after reviewing my setting, windows 8.1 I have to choose landscape flipped for the oculus to work properly.

I find that Windows 8.1 reports landscape flipped but Nvidia or AMD control panels report something completely different (portrait I believe). So from a Win 8.1 pov, switching it to landscape (non flipped) will make the judder vanish which is great if you like playing with the image upside down!

This has been noted by quite a few developers in the Oculus forum but with no reason or resolution. I'd kill to see a fix. I would expect that Direct Mode would cure the issue because the display becomes detached from the desktop.

It's a shame we can't get an FD dev to talk about it but I suspect they're up to their armpits in work now the game has gone live.
 
I have spent way too much time trying to sort out my dk2 experience as I seem to be suffering badly from judder. Running an msi r9 290x so didn't think there would be a problem. I can absolutely confirm though that the biggest problem for me is in supercruise when other ships are about. This does not have to be players, npcs tank the framerate just as bad. I can literally be in supercruise with other ships around and getting 40fps,drop to normal flight and bang straight back up to the steady vsynced 75fps. Jump to an out of the way system with no ships about and maintain steady 75 fps all the way through supercruise. My only solution at the minute is to minimise turning my head whilst in supercruise which is not the best.
 
As far as I'm aware, players with monitors and track IR etc don't get this issue. It's a VR problem for which support is experimental I believe and I'm not sure how many of us actually suffer from it.

This is one thing I think I now totally disagree with. I think you DO see this when playing on a monitor.. you just don't "experience" the same issues when frame rates drop on a monitor.

For example... I might be at 75 in an empty system, and drop to 30 in my rift, creating a TERRIBLE experience. When I was playing on my monitor.. I would commonly test my FPS around 150fps... If that were to drop to 100, or 60 even... the gameplay still looks perfectly smooth (smooth enough to not really "hurt" your experience). But cutting frames/sec in half in the RIFT, is just flat out 100x worse for your visual experience. I bet the same framerate hits happen on a monitor, the symptoms just don't manifest themselves NEARLY as bad. (because we are SOO desperate for 75fps in VR).

How do we get this info in front of a dev that can start digging? This NEEDS to get fixed, or true awesome gameplay in VR in this game won't be possible.
 
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This is one thing I think I now totally disagree with. I think you DO see this when playing on a monitor.. you just don't "experience" the same issues when frame rates drop on a monitor.

For example... I might be at 75 in an empty system, and drop to 30 in my rift, creating a TERRIBLE experience. When I was playing on my monitor.. I would commonly test my FPS around 150fps... If that were to drop to 100, or 60 even... the gameplay still looks perfectly smooth (smooth enough to not really "hurt" your experience). But cutting frames/sec in half in the RIFT, is just flat out 100x worse for your visual experience. I bet the same framerate hits happen on a monitor, the symptoms just don't manifest themselves NEARLY as bad. (because we are SOO desperate for 75fps in VR).

How do we get this info in front of a dev that can start digging? This NEEDS to get fixed, or true awesome gameplay in VR in this game won't be possible.

Well the behavioural characteristics should be the same. We'd track the FPS against GPU and CPU usage. if it's anything like my VR experience, the FPS will tank during SC with ships and the GPU / CPU utilisation will actually also drop (rather than go up) at the same time. So Using something like MSI Afterburner, we should be able to see if it's the same - but as you point out, less noticeable.

If it only manifests during Oculus use, then perhaps we have grounds to raise a bug? Whaddaya think?
 
Well the behavioural characteristics should be the same. We'd track the FPS against GPU and CPU usage. if it's anything like my VR experience, the FPS will tank during SC with ships and the GPU / CPU utilisation will actually also drop (rather than go up) at the same time. So Using something like MSI Afterburner, we should be able to see if it's the same - but as you point out, less noticeable.

If it only manifests during Oculus use, then perhaps we have grounds to raise a bug? Whaddaya think?

No.. i think that it DOES manifest itself REGARDLESS of what monitor you're using... 2D 27", or 3D oculus. But because a slower than ideal frame rate on a monitor can still give you a totally playable enjoyable experience, but a less tahn ideal frame rate in the oculus makes you want to vomit.... it's only going to REALLY bother the following two people:

1. All rift users
2. Monitor users that can just barely get a playable frame rate, even on a monitor (i.e. 30fps in low pop zones, and 15fps in high pop zones.)

It looks like the devs are aware already, and are starting to look at fixes
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=86133&page=26&p=2039934&viewfull=1#post2039934
 
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