Rift Judder and FPS discussion thread.

[Gods3nt]

How I fixed the black smear and micro stutter.

Okay so I'm not sure if anyone's brought this up or not, but for those who don't have state of the art hardware like i7's and $600+ gpu's I went out of my way to dig into fixing the graphical problems for my DK2.

First off there were stuttering issues along with the black smearing. At first I was just gonna buy a new GPU and CPU but since I'm moving next month I just don't want to spend that kind of money.

Right, so I stumbled on a reddit post here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2dysny/elitedangerous_chromatic_aberration_improvement/

Found something called chromatic aberration.

After finding this to compliment the instructions of said post, I proceeded to get to work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r99nYdA4MKk

This entire process to me about a minute. I restarted the game, everything loaded up and the black smearing is gone including the stuttering.

Now, the only gripe I have are the pixels, if there was a way to smooth those out I should be in business.

 

[TrueFranco]

That was for Beta 2 to fix chromatic aberration when using 0.4.2 oculus runtime, that was fixed long time ago. The game is now compiled with the new runtimes (0.4.3) and I don`t think is a good idea to change those hexadecimal values anymore cause you don`t know what they do with this runtime version. Not sure what black smearing are you talking but if you refer to the shadows when you move your head in black areas there is no fix for that as far as I know, it`s one of the DK2 screen problems that we hope they fix when the CV1 come out.

 

[Gods3nt]

That was for Beta 2 to fix chromatic aberration when using 0.4.2 oculus runtime, that was fixed long time ago. The game is now compiled with the new runtimes (0.4.3) and I don`t think is a good idea to change those hexadecimal values anymore cause you don`t know what they do with this runtime version. Not sure what black smearing are you talking but if you refer to the shadows when you move your head in black areas there is no fix for that as far as I know, it`s one of the DK2 screen problems that we hope they fix when the CV1 come out.

...........

This post gave me a headache

 

[ronaldog]

I replaced the hex values as specified, but now the game does not launch properly.

I've tried directly launching the .exe, but I get an error stating I need to use the launcher. I've tried using the launcher, but the game does not launch.

Any suggestions?

 

[Gods3nt]

I replaced the hex values as specified, but now the game does not launch properly.

I've tried directly launching the .exe, but I get an error stating I need to use the launcher. I've tried using the launcher, but the game does not launch.

Any suggestions?

Oh please tell me you made a copy of the exe. If not I'd suggest you delete it and reapply the gamma patch. Just click on it in the launcher. And follow the instructions to a tee. Watch the video and read the reddit post. Next time copy the exe before you go digging in.

 

[JMC002]

Oddly, I quit another game tonight because the "black smear" was awful. I'd never even noticed any before and I've been playing the game for weeks! I'm thinking that tweaks that I've made recently to get ED running OK might have caused my new problem with the other game.

 

[ronaldog]

Oh please tell me you made a copy of the exe. If not I'd suggest you delete it and reapply the gamma patch. Just click on it in the launcher. And follow the instructions to a tee. Watch the video and read the reddit post. Next time copy the exe before you go digging in.

Haha, don't worry, I made a copy.

I replaced the four hex values that are found in the same area of the file and also set the file to read only via Windows Explorer.

Are there any steps I missed?

 

[Jonathan E]

Hmm... I'd hesitate editing the .exe as I'm sure I saw FD say they will be implementing checks so they can ban hackers, I think it was on one of the threads about memory scraping and suchlike.

 

[bonsek]

Head tracking judder, help

I caved in an got myself DK2.

If i look straight and pitch and roll the ship it's very smooth, but I move my head left-right or up and down I have these micro judders and ghosting. It's almost sickness inducing inside of a station.

I have Win 7, a10-5800k overclocked 4.4hz, gtx750ti, 8gb ram, DK2 in extended mode
I've set the graphics to low settings and turned of shadow, bloom, blur, AA and AO off and I still get the micro judders.

It's fun during dogfights, but anything else the judders are very noticeable.

Does anyone have an advice perhaps?

 

[TrueFranco]

...........

This post gave me a headache

I`m really sorry english is not my native language, and by the way I made that video you post there

 

[Adam Lusardi]

Does the desk demo work ok? and are you locked at 75Hz?

 

[Shigawire]

The black smear is a screen display limitation in the DK2. The only way to fix it, and this helps by the way, is to modify the contrast and brightness in game or in windows (for the DK2). Once you've done all this, and found the sweetspot between contrast and brightness, the black smear is no longer visible. From what little I know, I believe the problem has been pinpointed to this:
When a pixel is told to display true black, that pixel turns itself off. And when that same pixel is told to light up again (as the view rotates), there is some latency for the pixel to turn itself on again. So it changes between an RGB value of 0 (which Oculus Runtime or game thinks means "pixel off") to whatever new RGB value (1 to 255) in the view change.

There is already an idea for how to fix it. Either via the Oculus Runtime or the game engines themselves. That is to slightly nudge all the true black values so they never become RGB 0, but RGB between 1 and 5. I don't know how this is going though. They probably have many other problems they are working on first.

 

[jumbobreakfast]

It's hard to give advice since Oculus themselves have admitted a "CPU spiking" problem with SDK 0.4.3: https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=16287

Just the usual checklist:
Set Oculus config utility to extended mode
Double check that Elite graphics settings for the rift are 1920x1080 and refresh rate is detected as 75Hz (sometimes takes a restart of the game to show 75Hz after enabling rift mode)
Try low graphics settings for now, disable blur and set Disable GUI effects to "on"
Try changing the oculus usb connector to a different port and make sure that the Oculus USB adaptor is plugged into a wall socket (especially for head-tracking problems)

Try setting your main monitor to 75Hz (reduce resolution until you get a mode that supports 75Hz) before launching the game
Try disabling hyperthreading (HT) in the BIOS for i7 CPUs (not an ideal fix but was suggested by several people)

And from my recent experience, I've been complaining about stutters etc since Gamma 1.03 but it turned out that my main SSD was failing. I discovered this by checking windows event viewer and looking at Custom Views-->administrative events and seeing lots of disk errors.

Oculus Direct mode should in theory make most of the tinkering redundant. Just remember that it's a devkit and the oculus SDK is still in beta so I'm sure that doesn't make it easy for Frontier to get everything working perfectly.

 

[bonsek]

It's hard to give advice since Oculus themselves have admitted a "CPU spiking" problem with SDK 0.4.3: https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=16287


Just the usual checklist:
Set Oculus config utility to extended mode
Double check that Elite graphics settings for the rift are 1920x1080 and refresh rate is detected as 75Hz (sometimes takes a restart of the game to show 75Hz after enabling rift mode)
Try low graphics settings for now, disable blur and set Disable GUI effects to "on"
Try changing the oculus usb connector to a different port and make sure that the Oculus USB adaptor is plugged into a wall socket (especially for head-tracking problems)

Try setting your main monitor to 75Hz (reduce resolution until you get a mode that supports 75Hz) before launching the game
Try disabling hyperthreading (HT) in the BIOS for i7 CPUs (not an ideal fix but was suggested by several people)

And from my recent experience, I've been complaining about stutters etc since Gamma 1.03 but it turned out that my main SSD was failing. I discovered this by checking windows event viewer and looking at Custom Views-->administrative events and seeing lots of disk errors.

Oculus Direct mode should in theory make most of the tinkering redundant. Just remember that it's a devkit and the oculus SDK is still in beta so I'm sure that doesn't make it easy for Frontier to get everything working perfectly.

I've tried every setting within the game. The rift shows up as 1920x1080 and 75hz, 75hz is red thou.
Haven't tried tinkering with the USB ports.
As for my main monitor, it's a Benq projector and the highest setting I can set for it is 60hz.

 

[jumbobreakfast]

The red 75Hz is normal.
You could try running something like msi afterburner and log the framerate to make sure that you are hitting 75Hz (so you can rule out the 60Hz projector as a problem):

Install MSI afterburner (it will also install riva tuner statistics server)
Go to settings-->monitor tab and put a tick beside framerate
Also tick the "log history to file" option on the same tab

Run the game for a bit and check the logfile to see if it is hitting 75 FPS +/- 1 FPS consistently

 

[JMC002]

That sounds right. The pity is that it is very nice to have true blacks, especially in space games or dark, spooky games.

 

[bonsek]

The red 75Hz is normal.
You could try running something like msi afterburner and log the framerate to make sure that you are hitting 75Hz (so you can rule out the 60Hz projector as a problem):

Install MSI afterburner (it will also install riva tuner statistics server)
Go to settings-->monitor tab and put a tick beside framerate
Also tick the "log history to file" option on the same tab

Run the game for a bit and check the logfile to see if it is hitting 75 FPS +/- 1 FPS consistently

i just downloaded afterburner and checked everything in the monitor tab, but the FPS stays at zero?! it looks like it doesnt monitor it at all

 

[ghcannon]

Dude, quite simply that 750 is just not enough. Your GPU has to do massive work even on low quality settings with the rift. You're suffering particularly from having not enough rasterizers (ROPs) and shader/compute units to do the pixel shading.

 

[bonsek]

Dude, quite simply that 750 is just not enough. Your GPU has to do massive work even on low quality settings with the rift. You're suffering particularly from having not enough rasterizers (ROPs) and shader/compute units to do the pixel shading.

I need to find a card that is enough for the rift and short in length because of my micro atx motherboard.

 

[jumbobreakfast]

i just downloaded afterburner and checked everything in the monitor tab, but the FPS stays at zero?! it looks like it doesnt monitor it at all

Perhaps it only monitors the first display. My rift is plugged into the first port on my graphics card so it appears as Display 1 in windows and my main screen is Display 2 even though it is set as my primary display.