Low FPS on GTX1080 even at lowest settings.

Ultra

U
I'm having a bit of trouble with low FPS in Elite on the Rift, it only really happens in Rez sites but I'm pretty sure I should be getting better performance than I am.

I'm playing Elite through Steam VR.
I have a Palit GTX1080 but even when I turn all the settings to the lowest possible I still can't keep a solid 90FPS in Rez.
My other specs are i56600 CPU and only 8 gigs of Ram which I want to upgrade next month or so but surely that won't be giving me the bad performance? It was fine playing Elite on a 4K Samsung in ultra at solid 60FPS everywhere.

If I keep ASW turned on I'm nearly always on 45FPS when fighting in Rez and get relatively smooth gameplay but from what I've read people are playing with solid 90 on lower end cards with ASW turned off, even with some super sampling and options bumped up.
When I turn ASW off I'm always dipping below 90FPS when fighting in Rez, even on the lowest settings possible, Ie 1 super sampling and HMD, no AA and all settings either turned off or down to low.

Any help anyone could give me would be really great as I'm loving playing Elite on the Rift but really want to be able to Bounty Hunt smoothly.
 

THE BLOB

T
The only thing I can add is that I downloaded ED onto my steam account but found that elite ran worse through steam. I deleted ED from my steam account and ran it off the launcher as normal found it worked a lot smoother. I also run a 1080 and have been seeing drops around stations on the present cg with lots of Cmdr's about which is normal

My preset is high at the moment ss set to 0.65 and hmd set to 2 but I'm sure i have changed it to low settings with no real change in fps.

Hopefully some time soon things will sort themselves out one way or another, drivers or ED don't mind which :D

Rob
 

[HJ]-RedRaven

[HJ]-RedRaven
Agree with the Blob- try running from the normal ED launcher and see if its any different.

The 8GB of RAM might be slowing you down a bit - make sure everything else is turned off/closed when you play. Sounds like the issue is with the PC rather than ED itself.

GPU drivers up to date?

On a Rift and GTX1080 here too - I play from the regular ED Launcher on HMDQuality 1.25x, SS 1.0x, with everything set to High/Ultra except;
Shadows (Med)
Ambient Occlusion (Low)
Blur (Off)
Depth Of Field (Off)
Bloom (Medium)
 

Ultra

U
Thanks for the reply's.
I was thinking it's maybe something to do with it coming from Steam as the other games I'm playing are running fine through Oculus Store, though they're not as demanding as Elite.
How do I run through launcher and not through Steam?

Something I should add is I can boost the settings up to high/ultra, HMD 1 and SS 1.25 with ASW off and get a pretty solid 90FPS around stations, flying very low over Planets and driving the SRV is very smooth and stable (not to mention Awesome!), my GPU is at about 70/80% load giving temps of around mid/high 60s.
When I go into Rez however, even after lowering the settings my frame rate drops with ASW off, sometimes even as low as 50FPS in intense combat.
My GPU is only using about 30/40% load if that and the temp stays around the low 50s so it's like the GPU is not being tested in Rez but I can't keep the frame rate for some reason.

I've tried setting Nvidia to high quality and set quality preference in the Power settings so it's not that.

Any more help with this would be really appreciated.


RedRaven do you get solid 90FPS in high Rez with them settings?
 

Katkon

K
I too have a GTX 1080 running with an OC'd 3570K processor @ 4.5 Ghz. I use Dr Kaii's settings - mirrored them 100%, and don't get a constant 90 FPS in RES sites. Get a bit of judder, but it's OK. Mind you, the settings he uses are mostly high / ultra. I also use the Debug tool @ 1.5X. I found that if I use the in-game VR Medium or VR High settings my FPS is substantially lower than when I play with Dr Kaii's. I think it may have something to do with Blur and/or Bloom being enabled - that seems to kill my performance. Again: try Dr Kaii's settings - both the ones in the Nvidia panel AND in-game.
 

[HJ]-RedRaven

[HJ]-RedRaven
Ultra said:
Thanks for the reply's.
RedRaven do you get solid 90FPS in high Rez with them settings?
Click to expand...

No, I get mostly 75-80-ish when in actual combat with other ships around. Its 90 about 2/3 of the time though.
EDIT - I keep ASW turned OFF at all times... I prefer a little judder and generally higher frame rates rather than the 45fps+synthetic frames that ASW creates.

If you want to keep ASW turned on, your detail settings might just be a bit too high for a RES - especially with asteroids, the load in VR is quite high.

VR has 'deadlines' for your CPU to provide new geometry and tracking data, and later deadlines for the GPU to submit a completed rendered frame. Its not like playing a game in 2D where a frame is ready when its ready, and you just show the frame on the next screen vsync signal. VR is running 90 frames per second.

You GPU is showing a low load because it's missing the deadline - too much detail = too long to render - ATW/ASW will say 'no more time that's it!' and inserts a synthetic frame and things still stay smooth (to a point).
If you lower the settings a bit when in a RES, then the GPU will make the VR deadline more often it will complete more frames per second and the load will go up.

Have a look in your Elite Dangerous folder (wherever Steam has put it) - there should be a EDLaunch.exe - you can try launching ED from that rather than through Steam - you may see a small performance improvement.
Just make a copy on the desktop etc.

- - - Updated - - -

Katkon said:
I too have a GTX 1080 running with an OC'd 3570K processor @ 4.5 Ghz. I use Dr Kaii's settings - mirrored them 100%, and don't get a constant 90 FPS in RES sites. Get a bit of judder, but it's OK. Mind you, the settings he uses are mostly high / ultra. I also use the Debug tool @ 1.5X. I found that if I use the in-game VR Medium or VR High settings my FPS is substantially lower than when I play with Dr Kaii's. I think it may have something to do with Blur and/or Bloom being enabled - that seems to kill my performance. Again: try Dr Kaii's settings - both the ones in the Nvidia panel AND in-game.
Click to expand...

Blur is kinda unnecessary in VR - turn it off and recoup the GPU power it uses.
Turn Bloom to Medium
Also set Ambient occlusion to Low
Shadows should be as low as you feel is okay visually, but at High/Ultra, they do chew quite a lot of GPU power. Medium is usually ok, especially if you're being shot at and not taking screenshots or just admiring the view!
I also turn Depth of Field off too, also unnecessary in VR.
 
Last edited:

Oasis81

Oasis81
it's the CPU bottleneck imho

i had a i5 6500, h170 and 1070..same problem after some minutes that i've played.
it's not the ram, 8gb it's enought...
changed with i7 6700k and z170... more different and nothing problem.

ED in VR it's not optimized, so this create a problem.
the cpu and gpu are not used to 100%... and you can't remove the asw because cause stuttering... and using asw you have bad performance.
 

dape

dape
[HJ]-RedRaven said:
Blur is kinda unnecessary in VR - turn it off and recoup the GPU power it uses.
Turn Bloom to Medium
Also set Ambient occlusion to Low
Shadows should be as low as you feel is okay visually, but at High/Ultra, they do chew quite a lot of GPU power. Medium is usually ok, especially if you're being shot at and not taking screenshots or just admiring the view!
I also turn Depth of Field off too, also unnecessary in VR.
Click to expand...

I am again playing with settings (new 1080). Do you see any difference when turning Ambient occlusion on? I dont. What should i look for?
 

[HJ]-RedRaven

[HJ]-RedRaven
dape said:
I am again playing with settings (new 1080). Do you see any difference when turning Ambient occlusion on? I dont. What should i look for?
Click to expand...

Ambient occlusion adds shadows under and around objects to create more natural lighting. If you don't see the difference, leave it off! :)
 

Ultra

U
Thanks everyone for the help.

I tried starting through launcher but no change, in Rez last night it was so juddery every time a ship passed close by my nose with ASW on or off, even with everything that could be turned off turned off, everything else set to low and even with HMD set to 0.85, basically unplayable so somethings definitely wrong.

Checked my CPU through task manager and it's through the roof! Just sitting in a station fluctuates into the high 90s so looks like that's my problem.
I tested in steam VR test and passed with flying colours at the very top end for VR so it looks like something's making my CPU usage very high just in Elite VR.

Anyone know how I can try to solve this? I'd be very grateful for any suggestions.

I'll just add that I played Elite back on my 4K TV last night just to make sure everything was working ok and it played smooth as butter in 4K, everything maxed ultra with solid 60FPS everywhere even in the most intense combat in Rez, maybe a frame drop every once in a blue moon but no trouble what so ever.
 

Katkon

K
I've found the steam bootlegger - or whatever it's called - eats HUGE amount of CPU usage. So, if possible, I'd shut down Steam and all related apps so none of that stuff is using CPU capacity in the background. I've had that issue with non-VR games and Steam is the issue (many threads on the web about this).
 

Ultra

U
Ok so I've been looking up on high CPU usage in Steam VR and found a lot of people having this issue but couldn't find any solution, finally found something that sounded promising and it's pretty much sorted it for me! Not 100% but I'm up and running smooth with higher Graphic settings and gotta say I'm loving it!

So just in case anyone else gets this problem this is what I read to solve it....
When launching Steam VR, for some people it changes Windows power setting to high performance and this uses very high CPU with Steam VR running (making it max out and drop frames in games) so turn power settings to balanced after launching Steam VR, this then lowers CPU usage to a more reasonable level and stops games dropping frames.

I had my power settings already set to high performance but changed them to balanced to check, started Steam VR and it did indeed change it back to high performance.
I then changed it back, started Elite and it changed it again! I changed it back, it stayed this time and I could run Elite in VR high with some options heightened more and with SS 1.5, it ran nice and smooth even in Rez during heavy combat.

It hasn't solved it completely as I still need to have ASW activated so it stays at 45FPS, even though when I click it off it's usually 90FPS everywhere but Rez.
Massive improvement non the less and for the first time today I got to actually immerse myself in the Elite in the Rift without constantly checking frame rates, temps or loads, gotta say WOW! Best gaming experience ever!


Thanks again everyone for the advice, that link looks interesting Dape I'll give it a look and do a little more tweeking, see you all in the black.
 

[HJ]-RedRaven

[HJ]-RedRaven
Haha good stuff, glad you found a reasonable if not perfect solution.

Thanks for sharing the fix- repped.

A lot of software can have little "terminate and stay resident" parts like Steam, iTunes, everything from Adobe (ugh), GeForce Experience etc. Every time they check for an update, start downloading an update, checking in with their lords and masters etc while you're in ED, there's always the chance you could get a little judder, or even a big drop in frame rate.

GeForce Experience loves to pull me out of VR and back to the desktop just to tell me a new driver is available... I have taken to killing GFE before I run ED.
 
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