Looking for VR Advice

With all respect, unless you know exactly what you are doing (and more importantly why), leave well alone.

LOL, I get what you are saying.

More IT certifications then I care to list here. Director of IT for an international organization. I know too well the consequences of mucking about with things that are not understood through the example out my less than qualified general office staff. The only new twist for me is the VR aspect and how it utilizes resources.

Good warning none the less! We all need to be reminded of our own fallibility!
 
You are always seeing 90 frames displayed in the Rift CV1. Unless you have a huge amount of network traffic/monitoring going on, your frame rate should not be affected.
If you're running in Solo, or in Open etc but noone is in the instance with you (no other player CMDRs) then you're running your own instance alone, with minimal outgoing ED-related traffic. ED doesn't use a central server to keep the player locations/vectors alive. it does that internally and via P2P when other CMDR's are present.

VSync makes no difference in VR.
Anytime the ED frame rate is locked hard to 45fps, then ASW is kicking in.
To turn ASW off, press Ctrl NumPad 1 (with NumLock on)

After a quick review of the cpu stats, I'd say the cpu is holding you back a bit - floating point is a bit weak, despite the overclock.
If your PC is running fairly clean ie no other programs running, the 1080 is running well on a recent driver, and your internet connection is reasonable, then I think you're possibly close to the limit for your PC.

Oculus Debug Tool:
Try loading the Oculus Debug Tool, starting ED, then turning ASW off as above.
Use the App Render Timing HUD in the debug tool - it will show you some of the timing its taking to render the scene. The application frame rate will be the same as ED's. One way to test is to drop all detail settings to low and see what the application rate does... if it doesn't go up, then your cpu is holding thingsup by taking too long to calculate geometry.

VR is pretty hard on the cpu - even though it says the usage is down at 75%... this is not a good measure as the cpu has to wait for the new tracking data to come in for EVERY frame. So VR is set up in a timer-centric code. Each of the 90 frames has 11ms. Not a lot of time.
Tracking data comes in, CPU calculates geometry - for two eye camera viewpoints (double the load right here compared to 2D). One will be rendered by the GPU while the cpu finishes the second viewpoint. Both frames must be completely rendered by the GPU before about 10ms as the compositor puts the two images together, applies the barrel distortion for the lenses, and sends to output. The 11ms timer is only part of it - timers are set sooner in the process so if things are running late.taking too long, ATW will kick in to render a synthetic frame, or ASW will lock the application to 45fps, allowing 22ms to do a real frameset, and show you synthetic frames in between.
Because VR is dealing with two separate viewpoints, cache misses in the cpu are more common.

As a guide, I'm an enthusiast, built my own PCs since 1992. I have an i7, and a 1080 GTX, both mildly overclocked, and water cooled.
I run all Ultra settings in my Rift except for Blur, Depth of Field and Bloom (not needed, all off or minimum posible). Shadows to high.Ambient Occlusion to Low.
I'm running HMD Quality on 1.25x to improve the low resolution in VR.

I still do see judders as things load in - planets, stations, sometimes terrain on planets. This is much more noticeable in VR compared to 2D.
All up I think you're probably seeing reasonable VR, but ASW is working a lot of the time, and yeah, hopefully judders will improve in 2.3. Fingers crossed.

Good post, good info.

I'm currently running an i5 3570k (oc'd to 4Ghz), 16gb Ram and a GTX1080 - and I lock out at 45fps in stations and on planet surfaces. Turning ASW off shows that a good amount of the time i'm around 75-80 frames in these situations.

For me, shadows and ambient occlusion are the killers, so shadows are at medium and ambient occlusion is low. That said, I do struggle with the poor resolution of the CV1, so I run the HMD at 1.5 to try and offset that a bit - I've tried 1.75 but the judder is just too much. (changing the HUD colour to a light cyan/blue or green helps greatly with text)

I am getting some weird shadow issues on planets, swathes of black sweeping in as you turn your head, annoying as hell as I don't seem to be able to affect it be tweaking settings.

I got my Rift in January and i seem to be spending more time fiddling with settings in ED than actually playing the game (an overstatement, I'm sure!)

;)
 
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I am getting some weird shadow issues on planets, swathes of black sweeping in as you turn your head, annoying as hell as I don't seem to be able to affect it be tweaking settings.

Looking at other threads I think we all get the shadows thing, definitely an issue with the game's rendering engine - it happens in 2D as well, just more noticeable in VR. I just turn shadows off in VR as I'd rather have no shadows than weird looking shadows. I don't get the black thing though.

I got my Rift in January and i seem to be spending more time fiddling with settings in ED than actually playing the game (an overstatement, I'm sure!)
It's not just you - I've had my Rift since June and still tinker every now and then in case I haven't quite got the perfect balance of FPS and image quality :)
 
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The performance monitor with windows is quite lacking, especially for multicore cpu's.
They seem to lump all resources into a single bucket, but that's not how things work.

For four core cpu's, perfmon consider each core 25% of total capacity and many services process or vr only use one core, but one core at 100% is only considered 25% of total, but the cpu is already at limit and other processes and are either left out or waiting for cpu time.
Thus stuttering and other reductions in performance.

Since you say you don't go past 70% on an 8 core cpu, that sounds to me at least 5 or six cores are running at max capacity.
And you don't need to max out an entire cpu, a single thread is enough to cause bottlenecking.
 
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If it helps, I had an 8390 OC to as high as I could get away with, with a GTX970 and 8Gb RAM. It was adequate, but many games were just not 'right'. I then got a i7 4790k. Life improved dramatically. The CPU made all the difference - maybe even the chipset too, who knows.

The new Rizen CPU's are going to absolutely rock, I can sense it. But today, even an i5 will be better than pretty much any AMD CPU. The architecture of the CPU is just so old. On paper, the argument seems to be that it should be just as good... take it from me 0 it absolutely isn't.
 

Good post, good info.

I'm currently running an i5 3570k (oc'd to 4Ghz), 16gb Ram and a GTX1080 - and I lock out at 45fps in stations and on planet surfaces. Turning ASW off shows that a good amount of the time i'm around 75-80 frames in these situations.

For me, shadows and ambient occlusion are the killers, so shadows are at medium and ambient occlusion is low. That said, I do struggle with the poor resolution of the CV1, so I run the HMD at 1.5 to try and offset that a bit - I've tried 1.75 but the judder is just too much. (changing the HUD colour to a light cyan/blue or green helps greatly with text)

I am getting some weird shadow issues on planets, swathes of black sweeping in as you turn your head, annoying as hell as I don't seem to be able to affect it be tweaking settings.

No probs, happy to help.

I run all Ultra except for;
Blur to off,
Bloom to medium,
Depth of Field to Off,
Ambient Occlusion down to Low, and
Shadows to medium,

But I'm only running 1.25x HMD Quality. 1.25x makes the biggest jump, and 1.5 makes an extra bit of improvement, but I get a bit more judder at 1.5x.
I always turn ASW off - yeah similarly, I'm also seeing 75-85fps in lots of places, and ATW by itself does just fine.

Everyone is different regarding smoothness of frame rates, level of desired detail etc - when its in-your-face visceral like VR is, those differences get amplified somewhat.

Yes, the creeping shadows and blocky planet texture errors are in-engine issues. We have no control over them settings-wise. Hope they're fixed soon!
 
I have read the threads, tried the tricks and cried in frustration.

System Specs

AMD 8370 -OC to 4.3 ghz
Asus Strix 1080 GTX - OC
16 GB DDR3 2133MHZ
Oculus CV1

Nothing I have tried has allowed me to run at decent FPS with anything above VR low specs consistantly. I have tried Oculus Debug, EDProfiler and other user's suggested settings.

Symptoms
Stutter/Judder when dropping Frameshift and approaching stations.
Slight judder when first entering witch space.
Res zones almost unplayable except on lowest settings.

I am an IT professional and have built my own machines for the last 20 years. The game is stupid pretty on monitor, but just cannot get satisfaction in VR. I think my rig should at least handle VR medium or high.

Thoughts?

Afraid its your CPU and possibly your MB too. I was running a 980Ti with my AMD 8350 and it really struggled. I then switch to an Intel CPU (i7 5960) and MB with everything else the same and it was a dramatic improvement.
 
Further testing is pointing to CPU/Board/Memory.
Reducing textures to low and increasing SS and HMD Quality gives me a good enough image with minor judder. This tells me that the GPU is up to the task, but anything passing through the CPU such as texture loading or geometry is my bottleneck. Not what I wanted to hear, but it is what it is. Looks like a new build is in my future. The only question is do I get an Intel now or what to see how the new Zen chips compare before I make a decision? To be honest the new chips may be out and reviewed before I have the time to order/build.

Thanks for all the input!
 
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I am now able to run at High/Ultra without shadows, ambient occulsion or other doodads.
SS 1.25
HMD Quality 1.5

Stopped unnecessary services from starting
biggest improvement was fixing router settings. For some reason latest update set maximum download to 9Mbps. I Removed setting to allow unlimited maximum giving me 90+ Mbps.

Thanks for all the assistance.
 
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It's not just you - I've had my Rift since June and still tinker every now and then in case I haven't quite got the perfect balance of FPS and image quality :)

LoVL.....Had mine since only Friday last and i have tried EVERYONES ED Profile :) in the ultimate quest of achieving 90FPS and the sharpest image available. Not sure if Dr Kaii set a profile limit in ED Profiler, but i'll test this out for sure. Everyone who has published their settings on here has their own named profile in my EDP :)

S
 
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