VR performance in RES sites.

[the100thmonkey]

I've just submitted a bug report about it. It's here.

I like bounty-hunting in RESes. Zipping round the rocks/bergs in VR is pretty amazing. However, after sufffering from inexplicable FPS loss no matter what settings I play on, I rememberd how dual mining lasers can cause severe FPS losses when you're out in a mining ship, even on your own.

So I did a little experiment - I took the beam lasers on my Viper and scoured some rocks with them. The same thing happened. Shooting a rock next to a miner tanked my FPS to 25. I've tried changing all the settings, and even run at 1.0SS with 1.0 HMD quality with no AA (that was ugly!) and the same thing happens - regardless of settings, the junk from mining gums up performance in VR at RESes. This, combined with the particle effects from rail guns and the like has a cumulative effect - it seems that the client doesn't clear up after itself - and after an hour or so the stuttering and framedrops are pretty constant. Resetting the instance helps.

Does anyone know a way to mitigate against this?

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Hmm, I can't really say I've seen the same thing... I have beams on my Corvette but haven't noticed any abnormal frame drops. (But then I haven't really been raking the beams across the asteroids!)

I do keep ASW turned OFF so I see a more natural frame rate with ATW just filling in the gaps. I'm mostly around 85-90 with the occasional judder as ships spawn or I get all the fight in view along with the planet and rings etc.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Hmm, I can't really say I've seen the same thing... I have beams on my Corvette but haven't noticed any abnormal frame drops. (But then I haven't really been raking the beams across the asteroids!)

I do keep ASW turned OFF so I see a more natural frame rate with ATW just filling in the gaps. I'm mostly around 85-90 with the occasional judder as ships spawn or I get all the fight in view along with the planet and rings etc.

I'm still experimenting with setup, but as I note in the bug report, the same happens with standard flat panels - dual mining lasers are enough to bring a GTX970 and a GTX 1070 to stuttering halts. It's a general performance issue, imo, but it's especially acute in VR because even high-end cards are struggling to keep up with the game (hence these fancy reprojection techniques - they wouldn't be necessary if the cards were fast enough.)

If you're in a RES, try it. Put 4 pips to WEP and strafe a berg for 10-15 seconds.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Hmm, I read somewhere in one of the beta patch notes (cannot find it now) that the mining laser sounds had an issue. Perhaps its connected with that.

Particles generated by lasers etc, chaff, exploded ships/debris etc will all put additional strain on the cpu and gpu. I remember looking at an ASP that was mining in a RES yesterday while shaking down my new shiny Corvette, but I don't remember the frame rate tanking at all. The Asp was throwing out ore fragments and smoke etc with two mining beams active and two sidewinders as escorts - so it was a decent load on screen at once.

Will find a RES and hit a 'roid myself and see if I can replicate it.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Well, switching ASW (ASR in SteamVR-speak) on made the problem much less visible. I mean, it's still there, and you can see the FPS tanking, but the reprojection algorithm compensates well enough 95% of the time. Getting in-your-face close to the rocks still causes problems, but the moment you turn away from it, the FPS shoots back up.

Spoiler

And a whole 16 megabytes of RAM!? I'm jealous of your rig!

 

[Exigeous]

Another "it hasn't done that to me" pilot here. I fly in the Rift and my PC is an i7 4770k 3.5 Ghz, 32 GB Ram, SSD and GTX 1080, sometimes I'll drop to say upper 70's in a RES but never what you're describing. I run with MLAAX2 AA, 1.0 Supersampling and 1.5 HMD Image Quality (and all other settings are customized one at a time).

Can you share the details of your PC?

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Well, switching ASW (ASR in SteamVR-speak) on made the problem much less visible. I mean, it's still there, and you can see the FPS tanking, but the reprojection algorithm compensates well enough 95% of the time. Getting in-your-face close to the rocks still causes problems, but the moment you turn away from it, the FPS shoots back up.

Spoiler

And a whole 16 megabytes of RAM!? I'm jealous of your rig!

LOL, never noticed that it must be super-efficient!

My system as per sig (corrected now lol), similar performance to Exigeous - however I run SMAA and slightly lower HMDQuality at 1.25x, SS 1.0x.

I keep ASW off - that's probably the kicker in a RES - the Rift driver will drop you down to 45fps and feed you 45fps of synthetic frames to keep the 90fps eyeball feed. ASW seems very eager to turn on and tends not to turn off until it sees serious time @90fps. Kinda needs a slider adjustment for tweaking when you want it to turn on and off.

I prefer the native 80-90 fps with occasional judder @ 75fps.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Can you share the details of your PC?

Sure:

i7-6700k @4.4GHz
Asrock z170 Pro
16GB DDR4-3000MHz
Zotac GTX1070 Amp! @1900MHz core/8GHz vRAM (I could go higher, but given the circumstances, I strongly suspect it's a software issue.)
SSDs everywhere. I don't let games near metal these days.
OSVR HDK2 2160x1200/90Hz. (OSVR server core polling is modified to 1k/s to reduce CPU usage; issue was present before this)
SteamVR stable branch (beta isn't necessary; issue persists. ASW/ASR enabled for playability.)

It's not game-breaking; it's just that I hate slowdowns and nothing seems to really address the issue. It could be the game client. This is my strongest suspicion as similar behaviour can be elicited from the engine on a 60Hz flat panel: On both a 1080p/60Hz flat panel attached to my old PC (i7-2600K @4.3GHz, 16GB DDR3-1866, GTX970) and a 1080p/60Hz flat panel attached to my current rig, I can crash the framerate at will with a couple of mining/beam lasers in a RES by shooting rocks.

It could be an Nvidia driver issue, but it's odd that it would persist across card generations and driver versions. It's not even the same Windows installation. I guess it could be the OSVR drivers, but that doesn't explain why it happens on a vanilla panel.

Try it yourselves - get beam lasers and hold about 100m from a rock, then burn it. It would be useful to confirm if it's just my machine or not.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Try it yourselves - get beam lasers and hold about 100m from a rock, then burn it. It would be useful to confirm if it's just my machine or not.

Confirmed - Nope, its not your PC - mine tanks frame rate with or without ASW on. I had two small beams on my Corvette, finished my ferry trip back to Brhiztameno (sp?) and stopped at an icy ring RES site. Several ships around, frame rates were fine, took out a couple of pirates who dared scan me.

As soon as I pointed the beam at a rock that was fairly close, the frame rate tanked down to red 25-30-ish fps which'd be about right if you got 25, as I'm on a GTX1080.
Was in Solo mode at the time.

Huge and Large multicannon didn't have the same effect, possibly due to lower fire rate compared to the beams. Just a tiny bit of slowdown with other weapons... but beams kill it when fired up close, lesser effect when clipping a rock from long way.

I think its because you don't often fire at rocks that its not often seen in a RES site - I've been doing a fair bit of fighting and its possible I'd just not hit the rocks close up with the beams. Distance does seem to have some effect.

Will add to your post in the bug forum?

 

[the100thmonkey]

Confirmed - Nope, its not your PC - mine tanks frame rate with or without ASW on. I had two small beams on my Corvette, finished my ferry trip back to Brhiztameno (sp?) and stopped at an icy ring RES site. Several ships around, frame rates were fine, took out a couple of pirates who dared scan me.

As soon as I pointed the beam at a rock that was fairly close, the frame rate tanked down to red 25-30-ish fps which'd be about right if you got 25, as I'm on a GTX1080.
Was in Solo mode at the time.

Huge and Large multicannon didn't have the same effect, possibly due to lower fire rate compared to the beams. Just a tiny bit of slowdown with other weapons... but beams kill it when fired up close, lesser effect when clipping a rock from long way.

I think its because you don't often fire at rocks that its not often seen in a RES site - I've been doing a fair bit of fighting and its possible I'd just not hit the rocks close up with the beams. Distance does seem to have some effect.

Will add to your post in the bug forum?

Yes please!

 

[PravusJSB]

Hi guys, I don't think it's just with space rocks and more to do with beams. I was in a CZ the other night and there was an awful lot of beams about and I was getting freezing, FPS tanking and sound issues. The enemy was eradicated so each time a new one turned up about 10 shops opened fire with beams and generally I was in the middle. Maybe this is related, maybe not? But I've never had an issue and nothing has changed (apart from latest Oculus/Nvidia drivers, and I've been putting blame on this recent set of updates).6700k @ 4.5 H20, 32GB DDR4 @ 3000, G1 Gaming 1080, SSD, CV1.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Its probably related to the high fire rate beams have. They do generate a lot of particles and dust imposters when you hit rocks. Maybe they're a bit bugged in general CZ use as well.

As a 'continuous fire' weapon they might generate a lot of network traffic compared to say, cannons or pulse lasers.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Its probably related to the high fire rate beams have. They do generate a lot of particles and dust imposters when you hit rocks. Maybe they're a bit bugged in general CZ use as well.

As a 'continuous fire' weapon they might generate a lot of network traffic compared to say, cannons or pulse lasers.

I think I recall one of the devs indicating that beams are basically pulse lasers firing at 60FPS in an explanation for some of the super-weapons developed by the NPCs when 2.1 went live.