Rtx 2070/Rift S performance?

[Smooth2904]

I’m recently overhauled my pc as well as upgraded from the CV1 to the Rift S. I’ve also just started playing ED with this new system, so I have nothing to compare it to and I’m having a hard time finding examples of similar rigs to compare to. I would hate to be missing out on the performance my system should provide but I’m unsure of how whether or not I should even be troubleshooting.

My system is:
R5-2600x(no OC)
EVGA RTX 2070 Black Gaming(+200 core clock-stable)
16gb DDR4 Vengeance LPX 3000mhz ram
B450 Tomahawk MB
1 TB intel 660p M.2 SSD
Rift S

Right now the only way I can avoid ASW in stations and planet surfaces is to select VR low(1.0 SS 1.0 HMD quality). OTT says my performance headroom is about 10-20%. However I typically play with settings similar to VR medium except ambient occlusion off/Blur off/1.0 SS 1.5 HMD). I can avoid ASW in the black with only the occasional frame drop when dropping out of hyperspace into a new system and sometimes when bringing up UI panels. My performance headroom is around 10-20%. However when near stations, planet surfaces or rings. It’s guaranteed ASW and negative performance headroom, frequent frame drops, especially with a lot of ships around. I’ve been monitoring my GPU and CPU temps and they are fine. CPU load is 30-40% GPU is almost always 100% even when locked in ASW.

Ultimately, if this is normal performance I can live with it, but I would hate for there to be a setting I’m missing or driver issues that are holding my system back. No matter what I’m loving this game and the experience and will be hooked for quite a while I’m sure.

 

[A D]

You have a beast - 3.7 GHz 6 core CPU, latest Nvidia graphics card with 8 GB video ram, 16 GB ram and SSD card - that's a good game machine so something is not right.

I have a 3.7 GHz i7 8700 (6 core) OC to about 4.2 GHz, GTX 1080 ti (11 GB video ram), 16 GB ram and an SSD card - run ED on ultra settings, HMD at 1.75, terrain detail at 50% and model draw distance uncapped, and a bunch of third party add on's - 68 degrees Celsius steady with no stutter. Would be getting ASW kicking in for sure, but I have gone nuts on the game settings after all. At medium settings though my rig wouldn't break a sweat.

Can't help much, but maybe do some benchmarking with software that reports on your CPU, GPU, SSD and other components to see where the bottleneck is. Plenty of good free or trial benchmarking programs on the net that report on the performance of the individual components. Posted mine recently using Passmark which is free for 30 days - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/rtx-2080-win-10.473205/page-3#post-7860052

 

[Smooth2904]

Thank you so much for the reply!

So much and not much has changed. I decided I was going to take all the guess work out of the equation and bought a EVGA 2080ti XC ultra. While this did improve my performance overall, I still find that my frame rates and performance overhead are still struggling in stations, planetary bases, and RESs. I can literally turn everything to the lowest settings, I’m talking .5 SS/ .5 HMD quality, and while my performance overhead will go up to 30 or 40% I still get tons of frame drops in the high demand areas. Often when ships are coming into the picture and I get a -5 FPS drop every time a UI pops up. On the setting I like to run(1.75 HMDQ, VR high minus ambient occlusion, etc.), I get fairly consistent 80fps(Rift S) with occasional frame drops when away from these areas, but pretty much locked in ASW in the previously mentioned places.

One thing I noticed while at one of those large planetary installation/cities was my GPU utilization around 55-75% and my cpu utilization around 30-40% with no single core ever really coming close to being maxed, even with ASW off. Frame rates in the 40s to 70s. Oculus debug tool says my GPU render time is hopping rapidly around 12-15ms and CPU render time just quicker than that. It sort of seemed like my cpu was bottlenecking my GPU. Really no matter what settings I changed I couldn’t meaningfully reduce the load or increase the performance of my cpu.

Things I’ve tried while troubleshooting this issue:

-Updated to windows 10 version 1903 from 1809.
-Windows 10 Fresh Start
-Clean install of Nvidia drivers and CPU chipset/drivers.
-Reinstalled both the oculus software as well as elite dangerous. (Multiple times)
-Downloaded ED direct from Frontier and launched game from the ED launcher(Oculus software still opens)
-Read seemingly ever performance related forum post or guide I could find, and tried all possible solutions that could apply to me.
-A whole host of graphical/appconfig tweaks as well as OCing both my CPU and GPU as much as possible.
-I even bought a brand new sea sonic 850w gold power supply to make sure I wasn’t have issues there.

Almost nothing has improved performance with the exception of 3Dmigido to remove space fog/ dust and other effects. This improved my baseline FPS by 5-10 frames especially inside stations. However, I still have tons of frame drops and low frame rates in RES and planetary bases.

I absolutely love ED. It’s absolutely captivated me more than an experience has in a long time. But I’ve spent the last two weeks pretty much just trying to fix these problems. If I can pry myself away from the problem areas I can almost forget about it, especially now with the 2080ti. But as soon as I’ve got to pull into a station or want to drop in for some RES farming, I’m confronted with what I have to believe is underperformance. I’m sure there are things I’m probably overlooking, and hell, I might be just expecting too much. It just seems like my PC has performance still available but ED isn’t using it.

Again, thank you for your reply and I have recently purchased 3D marks as well as the vr benchmarks. I’ll be running those as soon as the heat blows over from my wife, who I’ve driven to the brink by running to the computer to try a tweak with every spare moment.

 

[A D]

You have my heartfelt sympathy as you appear to have done everything right and the EVGA 2080 ti is icing on the cake.

Personally, I wouldn't be too concerned about ASW kicking in around stations, res sites, conflict zones, if its not noticeable to the eye. A lot of players would be in the same position (including me). The worry is the dropped frames and stutter. That shouldn't be happening with your 'puter specs. Try using the default clock speeds on your CPU and GPU. My intel CPU doesn't mind OC, but I also have an EVGA GPU and it hates OC (goes totally weird on me).

As to the settings, I don't get stutter, lag or frame drops generally (rarely at most) using the following:

If they are too high turn down the heavy users (i.e. shadows, AO and Terrain LOD) - AA (FXAA is cheap and good for ED jaggies), Terrain work to a third. Also SS at 1 (ATM you are making your 'puter do work just to shrink the pixels and its basically sledge hammer AA - stick with HMD for quality).

Also keep your Nvidia control panel settings at default (or Application Controlled where available - including vertical sync) ATM.

Nice to see you are using 3DMigoto. I'm assuming you are referring to this Mod (post 183), but if not you now have the link - shameless self-promotion

I'd be interested to see the benchmarks if you can be bothered posting them,

 

[Smooth2904]

Lol yes that the exact post that I got downloaded the mod from. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t put two and two together or give you credit. But thank you for the mod! It’s helped the most so far, for sure. After running some benchmarks this evening I noticed at least one occasion where my cpu temp spiked and there was a resultant drop in frame rate. I’ll probably run a stress test just to get an idea of how the fan is cooling overall and then check thermal paste etc.

I feel I’m headed in the right direction, and again, thanks so much!

 

[A D]

Lol yes that the exact post that I got downloaded the mod from. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t put two and two together or give you credit. But thank you for the mod! It’s helped the most so far, for sure. After running some benchmarks this evening I noticed at least one occasion where my cpu temp spiked and there was a resultant drop in frame rate. I’ll probably run a stress test just to get an idea of how the fan is cooling overall and then check thermal paste etc.

I feel I’m headed in the right direction, and again, thanks so much!

Good stuff - for your temps, use MSI and mod the fan speed curve so it keeps the temp under 70. EVGA GPU has fan sensors which MSI plays nicely with. Not sure about the CPU but keeping that cool may mean having to run it at the default clock speed, but 3.7 GHz default is still pretty decent.

 

[Smooth2904]

Okay. Really narrowing the problem down, and may have fixed it all together.

First, I ran prime 95 this morning and was really having trouble keeping the cpu temp below 85*C, even with more aggressive cpu and case fan curves. I undervolted my 2600x by -.075v and this helped some, but ultimately cpu temps got high pretty quickly with prime 95. On a side note, I’m not even sure that sub 85*C is what I should be shooting for. Either way I’m not comfortable with it and I’ll be at the very least getting better thermal paste and reapplying.

Next I decided that with the new undervolted vcore and more aggressive cooling, I should try ED and watch temps and utilization through the oculus dash while in game. Loaded up ED and parked above a RES site and watched the fireworks for a while.

CPU and GPU temps were fine - the whole time. Utilization’s where 40% and 70% respectively. Still though, tons and tons of frame drops. Doing this though, made it very clear what was causing it. It’s mostly other ships and especially combat. So I started googling that specific issue and found a lot of suggestions I’d already tried, but almost in passing, a suggestion to set OVRserver to high priority. Jumped back into ED with OVRserver set to high priority, and I’d say about 80%-90% of the frame drops were gone. The ones that were left were what I would call stutters if I wasn’t watching the performance overlay. So I cranked my settings back up to what I would like to play with and really didn’t have any additional frame drops. Yay!!!! I headed over to a planetary installation and frame rate suffered but none of the cascading frame drops which are much harder for me to deal with. I set ASW back to auto for the first time in a while and I found that ASW seemed smoother and much more tolerable. Which makes sense because from what I understand, if my problem was mostly cpu related, there is a strong possibility I was getting the frame drops in ASW before also. ASW plus tons of frame drops is no fun. Now with ASW back in the mix I said the hell with it and cranked everything up, 2.0 HMDQ and the works. My performance headroom went ultra negative but honestly it felt pretty smooth. All in one of the areas I’ve found to be the most demanding. I’m definitely gonna scale things back but I think for the most part this has solved the problem.

If this is giving off red flags to things on my PC I might to address, I’m still definitely open to further tweaking.

Thank you so much A D. You were the only person who replyed to my post, and let me know that I wasn’t expecting too much from my system and pointed me in the right direction. I hope this can help someone else who might find this, Googling at there wits end.

 

[A D]

No probs, glad to have another convert to the ED cult ,,, but do try to lower your CPU temp. 85C is a bit hot for long gaming sessions (even if within specs). I personally would shoot for 75C average. Lower voltage does help and worth experimenting with and testing with benchmarking (stress test). I use a water cooler which keeps mine at a happy 68C so, if you are tech savvy and your 'puter case has room, a water kit would be a worthwhile addition - just a hassle to install.

 

[dunno]

Perhaps the high CPU temps could be due to BIOS defaults being to high.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssuqhyqah2k

 

[A D]

@Smooth2904, just wondering how you got on?

I reviewed my settings and did some testing after this thread. Can 100% confirm that:

• my CPU can easily be OC to 4.6 Gz without changing the default voltage.
• Temps stay below 70C under load.
• Can run ED VR with max settings (even 2.0 HMD) without noticeable stutter - but 45 FPS in stations, etc and the frame drops are higher than they should be.
• Can run ED VR at 90 FPS even in stations etc. if I lower the game settings to high (and reduce HMD to 1.5). Frame drops also negligible.
• 3D Mark benchmarking and stress testing all good - valid 98% percentile result and no heat problem.

That made me think for sure that you should be flying with your rig and wondered whether you got the kinks sorted? If you have a clockable motherboard you should be able to get these results or better without upping the voltage and cooking your CPU (with the rider that I use a water cooler on my CPU so my temps will understandably be lower).

 

[A D]

whoops - duplicate post