VR Performance degrading over time?

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Hi,

I'm playing Elite in VR on a Rift S, and, although my system is beefy enough (Ryzen 7 1800X with a 2080 SUPER), my PC is struggling at times. I've by now found a good compromise between looks and performance, but lately I've noticed performance dropping the longer I play. Not so noticable out in the black, more so in rings and near the galactic core.

Yesterday I spent a few hours in a Hig RES site and noticed it again. When starting a fresh session (fresh boot or Oculus service and Elite restarted) everything is peachy, I get stable 80 fps when I drop into the RES. The only drops are short dips when I turn look or turn quickly.

After some time however, the framerate breaks down and especially pitching the ship is very jarring. The Oculus performance HUD tells me I'm at 40 fps and ASW is permanently active. It's not the ASW that is locking the framerate though, even if I force ASW off I sit at those 40 fps even if I turn away from the rings and look at space.

It's not my hardware that is choking though; none of my CPU cores is used more than 30%, and the 2080 sits at below 40% load (compared to around 80 to 85% when it's running at stable 80 fps), yet Elite is choking and the Oculus HUD tells me I have negative performance headroom.

At first I thought it might be Elite literally gathering dust from not completely despawning jet cones or something; but the problem persists even after reinstancing the RES.

What's going on here? Can anyone confirm this behaviour? Elite is really the only games my PC struggles with from time to time. Well, not true - I tried NMS, and its VR performance it atrocious . I played HL:Alyx on Ultra with dynamic resolution off without a single framerate dip .

Oh, for reference, I'm playing Elite using Open Composite; the performance using SteamVR is even worse even with Steams SS at 1.

Thanks!

 

[TorTorden_VR]

Yeah, the performance in HL alyx is amazing.
Show what is possible huh?

As for Elite, yeah I have noticed some degradation during play, but lately I have only been running the beta, which can have other issues as, well as complete crashes to desktop every hour or two, thus clearing it all out.

 

[Old Duck]

I've noticed this too, but I think this has to do with ED rather than VR. I also noticed something similar on PS4 back when I played on console. Normally, when playing 2D, my PC has plenty of extra horsepower to compensate for increased load over time. But in VR my GPU is maxed out to begin with, so any degradation in performance becomes noticeable. While probably not a memory leak, it feels like a "leak" of some sort, where things start off fluid but get bogged down. Orphan processes, bad garbage collection, stalled shaders, I dunno, but something is happening inside ED's code.

 

[TorTorden_VR]

Yeah, it's definietely an ED issue.
Can't say I noticed it in Pcars2 or DCS.

Granted the latter of those never reach 80fps outside of very special, empty circumstances as is.
Then again, it's what can be expected when they run the entire sim off a single thread.
But why would you run either open composite or stream vr with a rift ?

Running it natively on the oculus software should always be the go to solution, which most VR titles do, apart from HL:Alyx.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Thanks for the confirmation, guys, then I can stop looking for a fault in my setup.

Normally, when playing 2D, my PC has plenty of extra horsepower to compensate for increased load over time.

It's similar for me, in pancake (my panel is 1080@60Hz) my system has plenty of resources for Elite so basically I can turn everything to the max. Pretty too, but doesn't remotely compare to the fun I have in VR even with settings lowered for performance (the missing AA is a bummer). Plus in 2D I can't really fly, can't even hit the mailslot . Usually I only switch to 2D for the SRV, because it still makes me want to vomit in VR .

 

[Paso]

I've noticed it too. This is the third time in one year when I have to lower my settings so I can get stable 80 fps in res sites. Very annoying.
And to be fair ED doesn't even look that good, compared to other vr games.
Alas there is no point in complaining about it, I don't think the VR side of ED is in fdevs crosshair right now. Hasn't been for a long time.

 

[bw]

Same issue on a RTX 2070 super here. Great performance for the first half hour, and it steadily drops to <30 fps. A hard reboot works to reset it for another period.

Only Elite Dangerous has this issue. Other VR titles work fine over extended periods.

 

[leftright]

I recently upgraded to a 6900XT and to get ED-Horizons to work I had to set HMD and SS to 1 along with severalED graphics settings to medium with only some at high and I still get stuttering at HAZ Res's, in combat, in stations or near terrain. Frame rate locked at 72 for my Pimax.

Yes there has definitely been a degradation of ED's VR performance.

 

[Stanis]

Try to disable damage decals in configuration xml. Could help. The more damage you have everywhere, the more performance is degraded.
The render of damage decals is not very good.