Oculus Rift v1.8 VR Performance - Better? Same? Rubbish?

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Hi guys -

Oculus pushed a new update 1.8.0 out a couple of days ago. It was a little un-graceful sitting in the dark for several minutes while the SDK updated (with no dialog etc).

How is everyone's performance after the move to 1.8.0? Faster, Same, Tanked??

For me, something has changed, and I 'feel' like I'm getting markedly lower VR performance.

With 3770K at 3.85GHz steady in ED, a Gigabyte G1 1080 set at +104gpu (1800) +430mem, 1.3x pixel density in Debug Tool.
I'm getting judder and the application frame rate is down at 53-55 fps. ATW is working hard but even the compositor is dropping frames (which gives the judder).

Sitting in the Engineer hangar at Kuk I'm seeing System Overhead of -78-80% even though cpu is only touching 25% and GPU is reading just 1696 MHz. Cores are pretty balanced (3770K is 4-cores with 8 threads) The other night (before the update, the gpu was sitting nicely on 2050 for hours on end. Using Gigabyte's overclocking software for the 1080GTX, in basic fashion just upping the memory by +400 and the core up by 104 (so gpu base clock is 1800 if memory serves).

In the game menu hangar with SRV/Eagle, I'm managing 85-90fps with -6-8% system overhead. Much smoother but obviously there's less going on in this game entry hangar. But when I load into the game (Solo) it tanks hard.

Was tired last night and didn't look into it further, but restarting ED, Oculus etc did nothing. (sometimes Chrome seems to have an effect if it has a lot of cached pages).

Hoping its a glitch. No changes to the video driver (v368.69 - it was good as gold before Oculus 1.8.0. Saw reports of poor performance with later 368's and 372 drivers so stuck with the 368.69. Might have to update it and see.

 

[Cliché]

The only thing I've really noticed is that my red tint problem is mostly resolved.
But with spud enabled, there is a bright dusty layer that my eyes can focus on like the screen door effect - but worse.
Still, I think it looks better than with spud disabled.

I'm attributing any FPS drops to either changing graphics settings or the beta servers being low performance.

 

[Blian]

After the update I got poorer performance (occasional stutters, black screen of utter nothing) and once an error that the system ran out of memory... I have 16 GB DDR4 so that's bull. Doubling the size of the virtual memory (or pagefile) size (from 5GB to 10GB) immediately resolved the issue.

 

[StiTch]

After the update I got poorer performance (occasional stutters, black screen of utter nothing) and once an error that the system ran out of memory... I have 16 GB DDR4 so that's bull. Doubling the size of the virtual memory (or pagefile) size (from 5GB to 10GB) immediately resolved the issue.

Not sure if related, but there has been a memory leak in ED mentioned a couple of times occurring only when VR is used.

 

[Cmdr Spencer]

Hi guys -
T
Oculus pushed a new update 1.8.0 out a couple of days ago. It was a little un-graceful sitting in the dark for several minutes while the SDK updated (with no dialog etc).

How is everyone's performance after the move to 1.8.0? Faster, Same, Tanked??

For me, something has changed, and I 'feel' like I'm getting markedly lower VR performance.

With 3770K at 3.85GHz steady in ED, a Gigabyte G1 1080 set at +104gpu (1800) +430mem, 1.3x pixel density in Debug Tool.
I'm getting judder and the application frame rate is down at 53-55 fps. ATW is working hard but even the compositor is dropping frames (which gives the judder).

Sitting in the Engineer hangar at Kuk I'm seeing System Overhead of -78-80% even though cpu is only touching 25% and GPU is reading just 1696 MHz. Cores are pretty balanced (3770K is 4-cores with 8 threads) The other night (before the update, the gpu was sitting nicely on 2050 for hours on end. Using Gigabyte's overclocking software for the 1080GTX, in basic fashion just upping the memory by +400 and the core up by 104 (so gpu base clock is 1800 if memory serves).

In the game menu hangar with SRV/Eagle, I'm managing 85-90fps with -6-8% system overhead. Much smoother but obviously there's less going on in this game entry hangar. But when I load into the game (Solo) it tanks hard.

Was tired last night and didn't look into it further, but restarting ED, Oculus etc did nothing. (sometimes Chrome seems to have an effect if it has a lot of cached pages).

Hoping its a glitch. No changes to the video driver (v368.69 - it was good as gold before Oculus 1.8.0. Saw reports of poor performance with later 368's and 372 drivers so stuck with the 368.69. Might have to update it and see.

I believe that the old VR medium setting has become VR high, so you might need to turn your graphics options down a bit to get back to how it was.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

It's been fine for me.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Not sure if related, but there has been a memory leak in ED mentioned a couple of times occurring only when VR is used.

No memory leak on my PC, ram usage sits pretty stable between 4 and 6 gig even after 3-4 hours. Never been an issue for me. I'm on 16GB too.

I believe that the old VR medium setting has become VR high, so you might need to turn your graphics options down a bit to get back to how it was.

That's true - but this setting is changed in the 2.2 beta, not in the live 2.1 version. I'm not in the beta, just in 2.1. (my bad not specifying)

I will update my video driver and see if that fixes the problem.

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

Given the reports here and the poor performance (FPS drops, stutter on SC exit) experienced in the beta I'm nervous about updating to 1.8, think I might wait until beta is over.

The only thing I've really noticed is that my red tint problem is mostly resolved.
But with spud enabled, there is a bright dusty layer that my eyes can focus on like the screen door effect - but worse.

I get that "dust layer" but it's only noticeable in very dark scenes and if I look up with my eyes and focus on it, was never really sure if was the same thing as the red tint or SDE that I hear people talking about. Tried disabling spud and it went away but the blotchiness of the galaxy backdrop was awful so re-enabled it.

 

[Blian]

Not sure if related, but there has been a memory leak in ED mentioned a couple of times occurring only when VR is used.

That might be it. But since I did this my physical memory usage is at around 45%. Maybe I'll try switching back to automatic virtual memory allocation to see what's what.

 

[stevesideas]

Should 1.8 be an auto update ?

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Should 1.8 be an auto update ?

TLDR; Oculus Home was updating and wouldn't let ED launch.

In answer to your questionYes, it was - the runtime updated itself. When I started ED (I use the regular Win client launcher), you'd normally see the Oculus Home window pop up, and then the ED monitor window would pop up and you'd get the Frontier logo etc as the game loads.

In this case, it just went to a black screen, and nothing in the Rift at all.
An error window popped up repeatedly saying it couldn't load something (can't remember the exact message).

What was happening was that Oculus Home had found an update, and was updating, but ED didn't handle it very well and threw the error. And it didn't want to close either lol. It took a while even for Task manager to close it.

Anyway after 3-4 minutes (and me having a minor tanty due to ED withdrawal ) Oculus did finally update itself, restart, and then ED launched fine.

----------------------

Last night I left the video driver alone, and focussed on the Gigabyte overclocking utility. Its fairly simple and I don't think anything is amiss.

When I load into ED, it sits up at the max gpu core freq set at 2060. As soon as you put the Rift on, and it shows you the grey room with the 2-second bar, it plops you into ED in the SRV hangar.

Problem is this - in VR, the gpu frequncy drops straight to 1696MHz.

Take the Rift off, lenses go dark - gpu jumps back up to 2060MHz.
Put Rift on (or cover the sensor), straight back down to 1696.

The 1696 MHz setting is sticking no matter what I have set in the Gigabyte overclocker utility.

I can make it jump up and down simply by covering and uncovering the Rift face/light sensor.

Any ideas?

 

[Captain Sharky]

Blacks became bit deeper and black smearing is back. Not on DK2 level, but noticeable and nasty. Any way to do something about it manually? No chance to roll back the driver, as always with Oculus.

 

[stevesideas]

Yep. I notice more black smear now. What the hell. I thought they were supposed to be moving forward with these updates, not backwards !

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

I wondering if they've disabled spud in this release. My "layer of dust" is barely noticeable now and it's not red anymore. But the black compression artifacts* are worse, especially if gamma is set low. All symptoms of disabling spud. *I wouldn't call it smear so perhaps we are talking about something different.

You could try:
1) different in-game gamma settings. Why setting to you guys use? I messed around and with gamma set to the lowest the galaxy background is really black but you get splodges around nebulas, stars etc. I've currently got it set to 0.4 and the galaxy background is distinctly grey but the blotches are not so bad - a compromise for sure.

2) setting usespud to 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/com..._rift_is_this_a_hardware_fault_or_can/d4l7r4p and see if it overrides the Oculus software. I haven't had time to try this yet. Use at your own risk.

EDIT: Some blurb from Oculus about this change:

We are pushing out a software update that can improve the visual experience in the Rift for many people. Already a percentage of people have received the change. By the end of this week, everyone should have the update.

Keep in mind there can still be some natural differences in the screens that won't be affected by this software update. So I don't want to over-hype it. But people that were experiencing red tint should see an improvement after they receive the software update.

If you were previously given the SPUD tool, you should revert back to normal in order to see the new fix.

https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/42908/rift-visual-experience-improvement-update

 

[buyback]

Yep. I notice more black smear now. What the hell. I thought they were supposed to be moving forward with these updates, not backwards !

Same here ... no good. Now feels like I go my DK2 back ;( I would advise against updating if possible.

 

[iTrooper]

Version 1.8 seems to basically kill my internet connection, until I close Oculus Home/Runtime and suddenly the internet snaps back to life, so yeah........nice work Oculus, ya done frakked up!

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Version 1.8 seems to basically kill my internet connection, until I close Oculus Home/Runtime and suddenly the internet snaps back to life, so yeah........nice work Oculus, ya done frakked up!

Wierd, it doesn't do anything like that for me. Is it updating an Oculus app?

Eve Valkyrie had a big update the other day and was chewing a fair bit although not impacting me in Elite - rather it was impacting the wife watching her soaps -she gave up watching them so I figured I'd done my duty and saved some of her brain cells in the process!