The latest, most concise, best advice for tweaking VR performance

I've done a lot to get VR to be pretty decent, but there are some edge case scenarios where performance still drops below 40 fps (Rift upscales 40 to 80 so it's not that bad, but anything less is terrible). So can anyone provide a short list of tips, settings, config file tweaks, etc. that give the most bang for the buck, performance-wise, for VR? I don't want to nerf graphic quality to oblivion if I can avoid it. Here are some specifics for my system that might be useful in providing me feedback:
  • My system is GPU rather than CPU bound (NVidia 1660ti). I have plenty of CPU to spare.
  • I use Oculus Rift S, launching ED from Oculus software.
  • I'm NOT using SteamVR with ED.
  • The main areas I have problems are asteroid rings (sometimes but not always), CZs when Anacondas show up and start shooting (???), planet outposts and Guardian sites.
  • My performance seems variable - sometimes I go into a station and it's buttery smooth, other times I get frame drops.
  • I have zero need for the 2D "mirror" on my monitor, would love to turn it off completely to spare some GPU, but I'll settle for whatever settings give me best HMD FPS. It does seem that the mouse is bound to this 2D display, so I guess I'm stuck with it.
  • I have the Oculus debug tool installed, but I can't say I really understand a lot of the options.
I know what I'm looking for is probably buried in the archive of this subforum, but I'm not 100% sure what to even search for, so any friendly help from a nice VR veteran would be greatly appreciated!
 
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The best thing I did was switch from 90hz to 60hz mode in WMR. You can't do that , is there something similar in Oculus?

I generally have my settings set to ultra (not VR ultra) and then lower :

AO off
DOF off
Jet effects low
lighting effects low
AA max.
Bloom medium
Star chart low

Stations get a bit jittery with me also , which is why I turn the lighting effects down. Asteroids get a bit jittery with loads of ships - cpu bound.
I think the game needs an engine overhaul to be honest. Odyssey is going to make it worse.
 
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I just discovered something very interesting. Apparently in Open, ED is not GPU bound, it's network bound. I am losing a good 40 to 70 fps when in Open at a busy station (CG) as compared to Solo. FYI, this is me testing various settings in 1080p 2D uncapped framerate. Normally when I run my performance monitor, I max out my GPU, but in Open this is not the case - I hit an average of 60% on GPU (and something like 40% on CPU), which leads me to believe that the main thread is waiting on network traffic.

I believe people have observed this before, but I didn't realize that it was a literal bottleneck. This may explain why my experience in the CG RES tanked to a slideshow when I winged up with other CMDRs. The presence of other players literally puts my GPU to sleep! While I have room to spare in 2D (I never dropped below 110 fps), I don't in VR, which makes me think that I'll just have to avoid busy places like CGs in Open when I'm playing in VR.

This is a real shame. Overall framerate should not be tied to network code, nor should the main thread be "sleeping" while waiting for updated telemetry from other players. I guess I'll have to save the social side of CGs for space trucking in pancake mode. :(
 
I've done a lot to get VR to be pretty decent, but there are some edge case scenarios where performance still drops below 40 fps (Rift upscales 40 to 80 so it's not that bad, but anything less is terrible). So can anyone provide a short list of tips, settings, config file tweaks, etc. that give the most bang for the buck, performance-wise, for VR? I don't want to nerf graphic quality to oblivion if I can avoid it. Here are some specifics for my system that might be useful in providing me feedback:
  • My system is GPU rather than CPU bound (NVidia 1660ti). I have plenty of CPU to spare.
  • I use Oculus Rift S, launching ED from Oculus software.
  • I'm NOT using SteamVR with ED.
  • The main areas I have problems are asteroid rings (sometimes but not always), CZs when Anacondas show up and start shooting (???), planet outposts and Guardian sites.
  • My performance seems variable - sometimes I go into a station and it's buttery smooth, other times I get frame drops.
  • I have zero need for the 2D "mirror" on my monitor, would love to turn it off completely to spare some GPU, but I'll settle for whatever settings give me best HMD FPS. It does seem that the mouse is bound to this 2D display, so I guess I'm stuck with it.
  • I have the Oculus debug tool installed, but I can't say I really understand a lot of the options.
I know what I'm looking for is probably buried in the archive of this subforum, but I'm not 100% sure what to even search for, so any friendly help from a nice VR veteran would be greatly appreciated!
Ive spent a few days tweaking VR. I use a Rift S with a 1660ti but am CPU limited with an i5 4590, which is basically min spec for VR. What I find is that (probably because of my CPU) I can put things quite high, use re-projection at 40fps, but still "feel" stutters regardless because of poor frame time performance, despite the average displaying as constant.

So to make sure it feels as smooth as possible, I really do have most stuff on low, except for shadows at medium, and planet tech at high (terrain work i put on about half). Textures I put at high (6gb should be enough for that). I have to watch out for "Fx", i turn that off because I get bad stutter near stars with it on, this can also be a problem when lots of thrusters are onscreen. AO I have off. I have "bloom" off as well. I put my resolution in the debug/tray tool at 1.1 (because 1.25 is too high really, I don't know why the ingame menu forces such increments) and leave the ingame HMD quality at standard. Feel free to go lower but I think 1.0 is too blurry for this kind of game. ASW i put on "auto", mainly because it hits 80 in space and gets a smooth 40 in stations and on planets. If you still get any issues at stations, reduce model distance until it stops. One tip if you don't like the little blips you may perceive between ASW on and off is to just leave it always on, which is useful if you are just chasing high quality and are happy with your frame time performance (and are not too sensitive to the artefacts cause by motion retrojection).

Final tip: install Process Lasso, set your oculus runtime environment and elite dangerous game to always run at high, and make sure other backgorund processes are tethered down or not running (its a great tool if you're not already aware of it). I avoid using 3dmigoto or anything like that because they likely add some frametime lag, which would be fine if i had frames to spare lol.

Oh and I'm not sure it works with ED but turn adaptive scaling off, it's horrible to have your res change in games where you are focussing on distant objects
 
I believe in my scenario that 3DMigoto is actually improving my performance, because I turn off a LOT of shaders, some of which are demanding. Even if it isn't, I don't know if I could go back to playing vanilla ED.

Someday I'll test it just to know.
 
I'd love to have this as well. Tuning for performance with my 3070 + Quest 2 has been consistently painful. I've heard people with similar hardware talk about cranking their settings up to (non-VR) Ultra and getting a consistent 90hz but my experience hasn't been anywhere near that.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/quest-2-3070-graphics-settings.565732/ has the settings I was using, although something in various drivers / oculus patches since then has made it not run as well.

This video and its associated charts has been a pretty useful resource. And Dr. Kaii's EDProfiler has a VR preset that a lot of people like.
 
It is possible to go 'Headless'.
Firstly you need to stop Windows asking for a login and setup an Admin with no password ( ! )
Setup Oculus to start on Windows startup.

For a halfway house, and to keep some sanity in your security, you can also use one of these.
 
My sweet spot has been (rift s 2080ti i7 8700k) supersampling to .5 (lowest) and set hmd quality high (2.0 for me) to give the most fluid experience.
 
I've done a lot to get VR to be pretty decent, but there are some edge case scenarios where performance still drops below 40 fps (Rift upscales 40 to 80 so it's not that bad, but anything less is terrible). So can anyone provide a short list of tips, settings, config file tweaks, etc. that give the most bang for the buck, performance-wise, for VR? I don't want to nerf graphic quality to oblivion if I can avoid it. Here are some specifics for my system that might be useful in providing me feedback:
  • My system is GPU rather than CPU bound (NVidia 1660ti). I have plenty of CPU to spare.
  • I use Oculus Rift S, launching ED from Oculus software.
  • I'm NOT using SteamVR with ED.
  • The main areas I have problems are asteroid rings (sometimes but not always), CZs when Anacondas show up and start shooting (???), planet outposts and Guardian sites.
  • My performance seems variable - sometimes I go into a station and it's buttery smooth, other times I get frame drops.
  • I have zero need for the 2D "mirror" on my monitor, would love to turn it off completely to spare some GPU, but I'll settle for whatever settings give me best HMD FPS. It does seem that the mouse is bound to this 2D display, so I guess I'm stuck with it.
  • I have the Oculus debug tool installed, but I can't say I really understand a lot of the options.
I know what I'm looking for is probably buried in the archive of this subforum, but I'm not 100% sure what to even search for, so any friendly help from a nice VR veteran would be greatly appreciated!
Most cost effective and computationally efficient VR setup for Odyssey is to buy a grey burquah and play on a big screen TV.
 
When I was looking into my Rift VR performance, I found everything boiled down to frame render times.

I have a 1080ti and an I7330K and wondered why my gpu and cpu were not beng 100% utilised in ED and my research leads me to understand that once the system cannot render frames sub 11ms, AWS kicks in and whatever hardware you have becomes under used. My system ticks along at 60 to 70% usage both when ASW is on and off as ASW essentially halves the render work it is doing.

My takeaway from this is that with a system like ASW, there is no point doing incremental hardware upgrades for VR as you won't see that much of a difference, instead you have to go big bang everytime, the aim being to get the render time in your desired VR game below 11ms with the best graphics setting you can.

The othe thing I do is adjust my graphics settings depending on what activities I am doing in game: higher settings for trade and exploring, lower of mining and bounty hunting.
 
When I was looking into my Rift VR performance, I found everything boiled down to frame render times.

I have a 1080ti and an I7330K and wondered why my gpu and cpu were not beng 100% utilised in ED and my research leads me to understand that once the system cannot render frames sub 11ms, AWS kicks in and whatever hardware you have becomes under used. My system ticks along at 60 to 70% usage both when ASW is on and off as ASW essentially halves the render work it is doing.

My takeaway from this is that with a system like ASW, there is no point doing incremental hardware upgrades for VR as you won't see that much of a difference, instead you have to go big bang everytime, the aim being to get the render time in your desired VR game below 11ms with the best graphics setting you can.

The othe thing I do is adjust my graphics settings depending on what activities I am doing in game: higher settings for trade and exploring, lower of mining and bounty hunting.
I completely agree with the AWS mode. Once I set it off in the Oculus Tray Tool all my games got 20-30 fps increase in my old Rift. I still have doubts if the Adaptative GPU scaling or the OVR Server priority. To be honest, I have no idea of what they do.
 
So you're all saying to turn AWS off? What if I can't hit 80 FPS without it, won't I get sick?

I wouldn't turn AWS off, it is horrible without it.

My point is more that VR requires substantial hardware leaps to improve performance rather than tinkering with settings. If your AWS is kicking in in ED, all tweaking with the settings does is delay the AWS kicking in until a few more ships appear in a combat zone or you get a bit closer to the planet surface, but kick in it will.

It is a question of when you want it to kick in. For me, it is hardly noticeable exploring, but I can't stand it in a REZ.
 
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It is a question of when you want it to kick in. For me, it is hardly noticeable exploring, but I can't stand it in a REZ.
Unfortunately for me it's a question of when it kicks off, when FPS drops below what even AWS can handle. Thankfully this is relatively rare, but when it happens, it's quite literally nauseating.
 
I just discovered something very interesting. Apparently in Open, ED is not GPU bound, it's network bound. I am losing a good 40 to 70 fps when in Open at a busy station (CG) as compared to Solo. FYI, this is me testing various settings in 1080p 2D uncapped framerate. Normally when I run my performance monitor, I max out my GPU, but in Open this is not the case - I hit an average of 60% on GPU (and something like 40% on CPU), which leads me to believe that the main thread is waiting on network traffic.

I believe people have observed this before, but I didn't realize that it was a literal bottleneck. This may explain why my experience in the CG RES tanked to a slideshow when I winged up with other CMDRs. The presence of other players literally puts my GPU to sleep! While I have room to spare in 2D (I never dropped below 110 fps), I don't in VR, which makes me think that I'll just have to avoid busy places like CGs in Open when I'm playing in VR.

This is a real shame. Overall framerate should not be tied to network code, nor should the main thread be "sleeping" while waiting for updated telemetry from other players. I guess I'll have to save the social side of CGs for space trucking in pancake mode. :(
This is very interesting. I find that I get a lot of crashes in VR (rift S), running via steam (I bought after it was possible to get a frontier key and run without steam login), even though I can run at fairly high settings most of the time (ASWing a lot obviously, I think setting everything to pancake ultra results in more crashes). Few crashes in pancake mode on ultra, but still some.

Things I've noticed:
VRAM usage seems to climb through a play session (not checked GPU usage) , and crashes seem more likely after a certain amount of time (not often I get a crash in the first half hour).
Crashes are more likely in systems with lots of stuff in (convinced FCs especially), and I think also busy with players, or I'm winged.
Common crashes are on or around transition from SC to low space, particularly into or out of glide at planets.
Crashes more likely when it's hot (undervolting my processor seems to improve things, though I get a few bluescreens). I run an i7-4790k and it is always topped out and pretty hot running (gtx 1080 card), 16gb RAM. I understand VR is more CPU intensive that pancake so I must check that too.

Frontier said crash reports had a lot of VRAM errors but nothing really informative and they couldn't offer advice.

There was a weird experience I had early on where I could run the game from oculus home for about two weeks. I found it really quite stable in that period, suddenly everything was fine. One day it just couldn't connect anymore and I had to log in steam as usual before launch. The latter is "working as intended" behaviour, and Frontier couldn't explain why I'd had this 2 week authentication holiday. And now it almost feels like it was an impossible dream, did it really happen. The game runs native, not in steam vr (which is even worse) and steam is just supposedly an authentication step.

Anyway this collection of things has led me to wonder just how much of my problem is netcode or connection related, and your post seems to confirm that it really interferes with performance. I fly always in open so perhaps I'll experiment in a few solo sessions and see how crash frequency changes. Although I sense I have a few overlapping problems.
 
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