Small stutter/pauses in VR

VR - wickfut

VR - wickfut
Last night I decided to put Elite on, after having a month or so break. Straight away I noticed a regular brief pause/stutter every 2-3 seconds. CPU is reading 20% and GPU is reading 40%. No spikes.

I did a fresh installation this morning and it's still there. I have turned off all my usual windows game mode, nvidia geforce experience and onedrive.

RTX2080Ti and HP Reverb.

Any ideas?

edit: it was a USB powered 8x8 midi interface drawing too much power with the headset connected. Had to jiggle a few devices around.
 
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ebbrell

ebbrell
40 percent is low when using VR, I have a 2080ti and I have mine running in the 95 percent range.
What resolution are you running at, within steam VR

Base percentage and application can be set separately, what are you set at,


And are you using image smoothing this will half the frame rate and use less GPU power, but it makes this look bad when moving fast. In combat zones its horrible

In steam you can turn both reprojection off and smoothing, I get lag spikes then. If you use reprojection, and tweak your resolution to be under the reprojection threshold you maybe be ok... I am

If will use more of your GPU however, but it means you are not getting weird ghosting and not spikes hopefully
 
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VR GodrikUnderscore

V
I can't presume to speak for the OP, but from my personal experience and some if not most of the other people experiencing the issue, the skip/ jump/ jitter issue is unrelated to any of the settings. Example: My frametime is aroung 8-9ms, reprojection rate is around 10% and I have 5 dropped frames over a 1 hour session, but I am still getting the jumping picture. The issue occurs even with SS and HMD set to 1 or below in game and at 100% in SteamVR even with the VR preset at "Low". I am using a 8700k along with a RTX 2070 and 32GB RAM. Said issue occurs only in Elite. After having read a good 75% of all the threads on the issue and messing with the various settings including Nvidia Control Panel I no longer believe the problem can be solved by a simple setting, or combination of settings. If there is a silver bullet I have certainly not been able to find it.
 

Darth Ender

D
I'm pretty sure there is a network issue that is blocking the main loop of the game periodically and seemingly at random.

My main evidence of this is that I was having multiple sets of these pauses occur when "discovery" messages were being shown immediately following the pauses. (however visible network messages dont always follow the pauses...just that absolutely nothing else was going on except this in the game (was docked) and that cuts down on other variables)

That and the pauses occur while not using VR as well.

The fact that it is seemingly random also points to an intermittent server issue ...rather than a local issue ...which would be much more reproducible.
 

VR GodrikUnderscore

V
T'is true, it doesn't always seem to occur for me but it does 95% of the time. And it occurs in non VR as well, just that is is much much less noticeable. I am not convinced though that the answer is as simple as attributing the problem to a single root cause, I think there may be a combination of things going on which might help explain why some users are having the issue but not others, or for that matter why some people seem to be able to apply a solution while that same solution will not work for others.

As for the issue only happening/ being worse when discovery messages are popping in, I can confidently say thatin my own personal experience the frame freezes/ frame jumps or whatever term one wants to use to describe the problem is independent of any notifications or messages. It is interesting to note however that the person reporting the problem on the Issue Tracker, states he has also observed this happening "often when hears or sees the contact tabs in the HUD updating ", thus corroborating your own findings.

Hopefully we can get it on Frontier's list of bug fixes by upvoting the issue report I linked to above. The video posted in the report shows very well what the symptom looks like, much better than what I was able to capture.
 
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Old Duck

Old Duck
Darth Ender said:
I'm pretty sure there is a network issue that is blocking the main loop of the game periodically and seemingly at random.
Click to expand...
Does switching to Solo make a difference? I'm noticing some minor stutters lately too, though I've changed so many settings that who knows if it's related to OP's issue.
 

Darth Ender

D
No, because solo isn't offline.

At least some of the pauses I've had were due to the discovery of stellar bodies for instance. There are other network related comms that happen in various parts of the game that are totally separate from the match maker server


The issue just reeks of a corner case of dealing with network comms that blocks the game's main loop. The length of time is too long to be physics or graphical, happens in Linux and windows, vr or no vr. Introduced after a recent patch.
 
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VR GodrikUnderscore

V
I don't think it is as simple as that.The threads stating it's happening after a recent patch being introduced go all the way back to 2017. I think there are multiple root causes resulting in a single observable issue. For some people it doesn't happen until an update is made, triggering some other underlying problem. Others such as myself have had this issue for years, intermittently at best, persistent at worst. I'd definitely encourage people to contribute to the issue tracker I linked to earlier(edit: and thanks to those who already did)
 
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Darth Ender

D
well to be fair. The pauses I and others i've had direct interaction with have experienced is not a regular pause every couple seconds. But random pauses that can last a few moments to multiple seconds where absolutely nothing before and after show signs of any kind of high cpu usage or hdd use or graphics use over what is going on before and after that the game obviously has no trouble dealing with. The only variable that makes sense is network comms.

I think if you're seeing pauses in the game that happen regularly and frequently ..then maybe that points to a totally different problem. Normally i'd suggest this was a driver issue or something in the windows OS causing a problem (maybe it's spinlocks ...since it seems that's a fairly common thing for game studios to try and develop in-house that they ALWAYS do wrong...since userspace spinlocks on a multi-processing OS your game dosen't control the schedular to is a bad idea always) .... but it's not the OS since it happens in linux too and wine is a pretty good fill in for windows but i doubt it's that good to simulate the same buggy random hardware driver.

so my two guesses are network or userspace thread locking buggy implementation.
 

VR GodrikUnderscore

V
Darth Ender said:
well to be fair. The pauses I and others i've had direct interaction with have experienced is not a regular pause every couple seconds. But random pauses that can last a few moments to multiple seconds where absolutely nothing before and after show signs of any kind of high cpu usage or hdd use or graphics use over what is going on before and after that the game obviously has no trouble dealing with. The only variable that makes sense is network comms.

I think if you're seeing pauses in the game that happen regularly and frequently ..then maybe that points to a totally different problem. Normally i'd suggest this was a driver issue or something in the windows OS causing a problem (maybe it's spinlocks ...since it seems that's a fairly common thing for game studios to try and develop in-house that they ALWAYS do wrong...since userspace spinlocks on a multi-processing OS your game dosen't control the schedular to is a bad idea always) .... but it's not the OS since it happens in linux too and wine is a pretty good fill in for windows but i doubt it's that good to simulate the same buggy random hardware driver.

so my two guesses are network or userspace thread locking buggy implementation.
Click to expand...

Yes, it does occur like every other second or so.

Honestly you just blew my mind a bit. I had to look up what spin locking means but that seems to perfectly describe the issue I and others have been observing. Which is, that the frame simply seems to freeze for less than a second rather than actually dropping a frame. It also makes sense in that the usual "change your SS and HMD Q settings/ lower your graphics quality" suggestions fail to address the problem. And, it makes sense in that most of us have great frametimes and no measured dropped frames as can be seen in the performance overlays. I've suspected for a while now that it's the game itself and not some setting or hardware bottleneck causing the problem.
 

Darth Ender

D
the pauses i've had were definitely notable because they didn't drop frames either. It was like the game just paused and resumed where it left off with nothing occuring in between. I had chalked it up to being in linux for a while (i was using monitors in linux before moving to just VR in linux and the issue has happened in both setups) but then i had buddies saying it happens to them in windows too. Since i had that one instance where it happened multiple times while Discovery messages were being displayed ..made me think ...meh..probably just some networking bug . But yea, spinlocks have been in the developer news the past week because another game studio tried calling out linux on having a bad scheduler bug (google stadia is based on linux) but it turns out the problem is in fact due to userspace spinlocks and the extremely common mis-use of spinlocks in general.

thread locking in a game is always a huge time suck so everyone tries to implement their own clever idea to be faster than standard mutex's. Almost all fail ...either due to that or due to implementing the wrong kind of locking mechanism (like spinlocks) in an environment that isn't meant for it.
 

VR - wickfut

VR - wickfut
ebbrell said:
40 percent is low when using VR, I have a 2080ti and I have mine running in the 95 percent range.
What resolution are you running at, within steam VR
Click to expand...

I lowered the settings to minimum believing that something had updated and altered my Steam resolution.

Anyway. I'd solved the problem a whole month before anyone replied :)
 

justice25

J
I'm getting this since the last patch, every few seconds a pause (sometimes with an egg timer floating at about 4 o'clock).
Also noticing most of the area i'm not looking at is not rendered if I turn my head when this glitch happens.
Was fine pre-patch.
Using Rift S
7700K
1080Ti
16gb ram etc etc.

It's pretty much unplayable for me right now :(
 

Arioch

Arioch
justice25 said:
I'm getting this since the last patch, every few seconds a pause (sometimes with an egg timer floating at about 4 o'clock).
Also noticing most of the area i'm not looking at is not rendered if I turn my head when this glitch happens.
Was fine pre-patch.
Using Rift S
7700K
1080Ti
16gb ram etc etc.

It's pretty much unplayable for me right now :(
Click to expand...
I’m getting the hourglass pause during hyperjumps and every so often on planet surfaces.

This may be not Elite’s problem, but may be due to Oculus’ recent v12 software upgrade - quite a few RiftS and Quest Link users have reported this stutter and yesterday Oculus announced that after requesting error logs about a week ago, they have been able to “use this to identify, test, and verify a fix”.

Fingers crossed, this might be solved in the near future.
 

justice25

J
Arioch said:
I’m getting the hourglass pause during hyperjumps and every so often on planet surfaces.

This may be not Elite’s problem, but may be due to Oculus’ recent v12 software upgrade - quite a few RiftS and Quest Link users have reported this stutter and yesterday Oculus announced that after requesting error logs about a week ago, they have been able to “use this to identify, test, and verify a fix”.

Fingers crossed, this might be solved in the near future.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.

Yes I had heard about this and it could be the issue.
Especially since I am experiencing another issue.
Every few minutes my POV changes to 90 degrees starboard on the floor of the cabin in front of my avatar.
Certainly suggests a tracking issue.
Having said that, I’m not seeing this in other titles.
I play ED with no guardian as it’s a sitting down experience- I’ll try it with the borders on later and see if that helps.
 
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