Low FPS (45) and low GPU usage.

Dipso

Dipso
Been trying to get optimal performance out of my rig. But I seem to have hit a roadblock.

Currently testing in a high res in an ice ring and i get very weird results.

The game seems to some times drop down to and stabilize at 45 fps (ASW off) with about 50% gpu and CPU usage.

I can't for the life of me figure out what is happening and why.

Tried every trick in the book.

Seems settings have little to no effect on it either....

Its as if the game decides, nah f*ck it, lets just render every other frame, it will be easier on both me and the system.

The system is not thermal throttling, clocks and temps are stable and normal.

Any suggestions?

System specs:
Ryzen 7 1700x
16 gb 2400mhz ram
GTX 1080
 

TorTorden_VR

T
Ice belts has some severe performance penalties compared to rocky\metallic rings, I honestly avoid them at this point.
Heck it used to be so bad that if you fired a beam or mining laser in proximity of an ice roid you wouldn't get more than single digit FPS in 2d or VR.
Haven't tested in beta yet.
Dipso said:
..
Its as if the game decides, nah f*ck it, lets just render every other frame, it will be easier on both me and the system.
Click to expand...

That's pretty much what I gather is happening as well.

Regardless of settings, and power in your rig, Elite does not render faster than about 20ms per frame.
Low settings, high settings barely makes any difference unless you crank settings high enough to cause more lag.

VR is terribly effect by component limitation, if anything in your rig is causing some lag time on the frame generation all other parts are.

Honestly there is nothing wrong with our rigs.
FD simply need to knuckle under and start implementing newer graphics protocols that VR benefit from.

I'm not upgrading to an i9 9900k and 2080ti to horsepower my way through a software problem on their end.
 

Dipso

Dipso
You dont happen to have it locked to 45 FPS either in game or in NVidia settings?
Click to expand...

No and it jumps above 45 and runs 80-90 in other situations with higher gpu usage....

Going to try things out in the Beta again later. I think it was better there.
 

Dipso

Dipso
I was just thinking, its interesting that it seems to be locking at 45fps. Could it be something similar to ASW builit into the game? Could the game be locking at 45 to ensure that headmovement inside the cockpit remains smooth?

It seems to me that there is something in the code of the game causing this. Either some weird limitation somewhere or something else... Especially since i can clearly see the system resource use cut to 50% just as the framerate does basicly the same....
 

Ashnak

Ashnak
What is "low" GPU usage? If it's just above 50%, then it may simply be the usual ASW (or equivalent) lock. The game/GPU wants to run at 90 FPS. If it can't do that, for whatever reason, it locks down to 45 FPS. There is no inbetween, like running stable at 70 or 80 FPS.

So, if you would need 110% GPU/CPU load for 90 FPS, your system locks down to 45 FPS at a cool 55% load instead of running simply at a stable 80 FPS and 95% load.
 

Dipso

Dipso
Ashnak said:
What is "low" GPU usage? If it's just above 50%, then it may simply be the usual ASW (or equivalent) lock. The game/GPU wants to run at 90 FPS. If it can't do that, for whatever reason, it locks down to 45 FPS. There is no inbetween, like running stable at 70 or 80 FPS.

So, if you would need 110% GPU/CPU load for 90 FPS, your system locks down to 45 FPS at a cool 55% load instead of running simply at a stable 80 FPS and 95% load.
Click to expand...

This is with ASW off....

What i'm asking is if the game actually does something like this on its own, even when ASW is off? And why does it do this only in some situations? Because i usually have framerates around 70-80 in the cases it drops below 90, but then suddenly some times it just goes 45 with 50% usage.
 
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CylonSurfer

CylonSurfer
Ashnak said:
What is "low" GPU usage? If it's just above 50%, then it may simply be the usual ASW (or equivalent) lock. The game/GPU wants to run at 90 FPS. If it can't do that, for whatever reason, it locks down to 45 FPS. There is no inbetween, like running stable at 70 or 80 FPS.

So, if you would need 110% GPU/CPU load for 90 FPS, your system locks down to 45 FPS at a cool 55% load instead of running simply at a stable 80 FPS and 95% load.
Click to expand...

The op seems to indicate that he has ASW off:

"The game seems to some times drop down to and stabilize at 45 fps (ASW off)"
 

Flapdrol1337

F
game mode off?
game dvr off?
shadowplay off?
all overlays off?

Windows powerplan on high performance?
nvidia control panel on prefer max performance?
 

Dipso

Dipso
Flapdrol1337 said:
Guess it must be the higher cpu load of the res sites then.
Click to expand...

CPU load is less than 50% (Usually at 20-30% and not with any cores running abnormaly high either)

I'm starting to think its a bug.

Going to test some more in beta to see if i can get some consistent data, and file a ticket if i find something that is reproducable.

(I think it was better in beta when i tested last time, so it might have been fixed/improved there. Gonna have to go to the same place where it was at its worst to confirm)
 
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Gortron

Gortron
I had similar problems in the past and it was down to the CPU but that was an i5 4670k @ 4.3 GHz. I’d expect a Ryzen to be much better than that.

What was happening with mine was the CPU just couldn’t tell the GPU what to do fast enough in certain situations and ASW or the older solution ATW (I think it’s called) would kick in. The CPU demand would plunge because it was making half the draw calls to the GPU and because the GPU was only working at 45 FPS the the GPU would be hardly doing anything either.

You end up with what you are saying apparently loads of spare performance and 45 FPS. If I ran with ASW off and performance monitors going for CPU use GPU use and FPS I could see CPU use going up until a thread hit nearly 100% and then both drop down to <50 %.

What confuses it even more is even with ASW off ATW will still kick in if FPS drops too low (not sure where but I reckon about 70FPS).

Perhaps the problem is partly with Ryzen as they aren’t as good at very high frame rates. I’m getting far better performance than I used to on an i7 8700k to my i5. However, there is got to be more to it than that at Elite seems very poorly optimised for VR.

Ryzen should be perfectly fine but it’s perhaps something you could test.

Hope you get to the bottom of it.

Edit: 90FPS in VR is really like 180FPS as two screens are being rendered and I think that might what many of the problems people have are down too.
 
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Gun Star

Gun Star
Did you update your GPU drivers recently. I was getting bad stuttering on my GTX 1070 oc with the latest drivers. Rolled back to one about 6 months ago and have constant 60 FPS again.
 

Dipso

Dipso
I had problems with a previous driver in VR, but the latest drivers seems to have been fine. (except in these spesific and weird situations)

I think Gortron is right about his analysis. There is definately something weird going on with how the game handles certain situations.

One of the issues is that the game has such a huge gap between open space and such, and other activites like rings and planet surfaces. So you really have to accept a lower visual quality in space and stations, if you want to have a smooth framerate in the more demanding situations.

Lots of modern games do more dynamic quality scaling, and i think elite would benefit from that, dropping down the quality of certain elements and in certain situations to maintain a good framerate.

Also the UI should have been rendered in a separate process that allowed them to supersample it before outputting to screen, so you could have crisp text no matter what resolution you run in. (Would do wonders for readability on HMDs) (i know easy to say, but probably a nightmare to code, and get implementet in a good way)

The cobra engine is starting to show its age sadly. Hopefully they know that they need to work on that too, if they want the game to stay relevant going forward.

Well i will keep poking at it when i have the time.

Right now 0.5 SS and 1.5 HMD quality seems to have helped ever so slightly with the situation, but at the cost of quite a bit of fidelity.
 
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Gortron

Gortron
I was playing X-Plane 11 a few mins ago and thought of this discussion. X-Plane 11 is terribly optimised and I'm having the exact same problems I had before with ED.


https://photos.app.goo.gl/NWuNYQT2bRyP75Gd8

Noticed the single swamped thread? That is responsible for holding back everything else back.
 
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Dipso

Dipso
I'll have a closer look next time, but from what i have seen in my monitoring software, no single thread is overloaded. But i could be wrong.

If this is the case, it could be interesting to try to use Ryzen master to lower the core count and increase the clock. (It should do this somewhat on its own (core prioritizing) if one single thread is getting a higher load then the rest, but i might be able to help it)
 
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