R290X Crossfire and Oculus

duckduckgoose

D
Hello everyone,


Recently got my Oculus DK2 and I have fallen in love with this device. It has completely changed my perspective on gaming and immersion. I already fell in love with Elite: Dangerous before the receiving the Oculus, but this device has taken the game to another level for me.


Put a machine together for currency mining early last year that I felt would also be adequate for gaming. I am running into slight problems maintaining proper frame rates in this game, more so with the Oculus.


Rough outline of the machine:
Asus Maximus VI Extreme motherboard
Intel 4770K processor (Watercooled)
16GB Avexir DDR3-3000 memory (Watercooled)
ATI R9-290X video cards x4 in Crossfire (Watercooled)
Samsung 840 Evo SSD x3 in RAID0 configuration
Two 1500W Platinum power supplies
Fresh installation of Windows 8.1
Latest Oculus runtime
Latest AMD 14.12 Omega drivers, settings on AMD's Catalyst Control Center is set to default.
Currently the machine is running at stock speeds for both the processor and videocards.


I seem to be having issues maintaining the correct frame rate and cannot for the life of me figure out why. I assumed I'd have adequate hardware to run the game at its maximum settings, but tend to run into serious frame rate issues when in a station, in an asteroid field, high conflict zone, deploy a chaff, loading instances (witch space) or generally any other random times. I cant seem to get an accurate idea of my frame rates as the CTRL + F function doesn't seem to work with the Oculus on. Turning down the graphical quality seems to help in some scenarios but not in others. Turning off shadows seems to have the biggest impact on frame rates, but still isnt as smooth as I'd like it to be.


I have tried turning off two of my three monitors and setting the refresh rate to 75hz on the remaining one. I have set the core parking at 100%. Set the Oculus to extended mode rather then direct.as well as the primary display. VSync off/on makes no noticeable difference.


Where would be the best place to start testing where the bottleneck is in my system if any? I am a bit lost as this machine is in the top 100 Hall of Fame in 3DMark for Firestrike Extreme. Would I have to revert back to overclocking to get the necessary frame rates? Not sure if I am missing anything AMD specific to setting this game up with an Oculus.


Any input or guidance would be extremely appreciated.
 

ket halpak

K
I found I had a great boost in frame rate by disabling hyper threading for my processor in the bios. My rig is an old i7 and 2xhd5870.

For crossfire I found initially having it enabled caused frame loss, I managed to fix that and both together now give awesome results by creating a profile for the elite executable, not the launcher, in the AMD Catalyst centre, I then enabled 'Frame Pacing' and selected 'AFR Friendly'. For some reason the nebula flicker in the background but I put that down to my old cards.
 

duckduckgoose

D
For any future searched with multiple ATI cards, Oculus and Elite Dangerous, it turns out leaving crossfire on was the issue. I checked everything originally except disabling crossfire. It is a shame that I cant use the full brute of the machine for this game, but I am glad that I can play the game well enough now that I rarely lose persistence. Hopefully Oculus will enable support for crossfire eventually.
 

Shyeer Alvarin

S
I'm a bit curious as to how your processor clocks next to mine. If you're basically running Oculus/ED on one R9 290x relatively perfectly, then my machine should in all technicality be golden. I'm running an AMD FX 8350 and a single R9 290x, 16gb RAM and Win 8.1
 

Mazhurg

Mazhurg
Crossfire still does not work properly with Elite. For now, the best performance is made by disabling Xfire in game - especially if using the rift as extended desktop (instead of primary).
 

duckduckgoose

D
Shyeer Alvarin said:
I'm a bit curious as to how your processor clocks next to mine. If you're basically running Oculus/ED on one R9 290x relatively perfectly, then my machine should in all technicality be golden. I'm running an AMD FX 8350 and a single R9 290x, 16gb RAM and Win 8.1
Click to expand...

You should be fine at stock clock speeds. Seems to be a lot more GPU dependent then processor dependent. If your leaving the Oculus off, you can just leave everything on ULTRA settings. If you plan on using the Oculus in extended mode, set your AA to FXAA and set your shadows to either Medium or Low. Leave everything else on the Ultra setting.

If your overclocking, the percentage of core overclock seems to scale in a 1:1 linear percentage to the FPS improvement that you should see in game. 10% overclock generally seems to give a 10% increase in frames per second from what I have seen.


Usually I dont overclock the cards much these days as I was used to letting the 4 crossfired cards do the brunt of the work, but overclocking a single 290X with a PT1 or PT3 bios and watercooling is enough to play this game on full Ultra settings and max this games persistence with an Oculus. 1350 core /1782 memory seems stable enough for me with a good dose in voltage, but this is a bit overkill.
 
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