Whats the mysterious 45fps bottleneck I'm experiencing with extreme VR settings?

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Having built a new PC, reusing the graphics card and PSU from my old rig, I've ended up with the following spec:
i9-9940x (14 cores @4.1ghz)
Cooled by an Alphacool Eisbaer LT 360 AIO
64gb DDR4-3200 Corsair Vengence RGB ram
Asus ROG Strix OC GTX1080Ti (2025mhz)
2TB Seagate Firecuda 520 NVME SSD
all clipped into an Asus Rampage VI Omega motherboard
powered by Corsair HX1000w PSU
bolted into a Lian-Li ROG edition PC-011wgx case
9x 120mm fans, 2 sets of 3x bequiet silentwings 2 PWM top and bottom, 3x corsair LL120 PWM on the Eisbaer radiator

I'm not meaning to brag by posting this spec, its simply to show that I'm running a pretty "full mongo" pc, and this is connected to an Oculus Rift CV1, so not overly high resolution, like say a pimax 5k+. Yet, with all settings maxed for textures shaddows, textures, galaxy map, etc, and SS at 1.0 HMD SS at 1.5, I still get 45fps on occasions. Temps are stable, the omega's fan control is doing its thing keeping temps of cpu lower than 65°, mobo lower than 55° the firecuda ~65° max, graphics card <70°.

The thing thats confusing me is neither the GPU nor the CPU ever seem to max out on usage, yet ASW still rears its ugly wavy HUD head on planets etc, so I've had to dial things back. And its bugging me that I've blown the sort of money that could buy an old BMW z3 on hardware that isnt giving its all to the pursuit of increadibly realistic VR in elite?

So what have I most likely done wrong?

 

[Morbad]

With 1.5x supersampling the game's internal resolution is going to be very near 4k equivalent. With all presets maxed out and having to power a wider FoV, spread across two viewports, I would expect a 1080 Ti (I have one with a similar OC) to fall below 90 fps in more demanding areas. Unless you can disable vsync, the next step down is 45Hz. 45Hz is well below what the hardware is capable of in most of these scenarios and GPU load will fall when the frame rate is capped like this.

If the goal was to get 90fps with these settings, you spent on the wrong upgrades. The main limiting factor here is still the GPU, and if you even had a CPU limitation before, throwing piles of cores at the problem won't help as much as faster cores. For just playing the game, even in VR, there is essentially no use for more than a 6c/12t or 8c/8t part, as far as core count goes.

90fps minimum at that resolution is 2080 Ti territory.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Thanks bud, when I look at the performance gain of the benchmarks a 2080ti has to offer against the 1080ti I don't feel the 17% in stock performance gains is worth the financial hit on it. Coming from an i7-4770k it was entirely plausible that I was CPU limited before, so I bought as high up the performance ladder as I could afford. I was running some benchmarks this morning, superopsition and various 3dmark scenes, and at 4k it definietly is graphics card limited. There is talk of a new Nvidia generation coming out first half of next year, Ampere, what would that be 3080Ti's? Probably grab one of those next generation cards when they arrive, and in the interimn tone down some settings to get the frame rate back up.

 

[BigDuke6ixx]

Stop looking at the frame counter and just play the game.

 

[Wildcat67]

I have a 1080 ti and a 2080 ti. With the 1080 ti, even overclocked, it is mostly 45 fps at 4K, even sometimes in Supercruise. With the 2080 ti, it is enough to stop the motion smoothing kicking in, and you get 90 fps a lot more. Having said that, I actually find 45 fps pretty smooth and acceptable anyway - it is the switch between 45 and 90 that you get a glitch. 90 fps obviously better though!

 

[dogbite]

Your not going to hit 90 all maxed on a 1080ti and running a 4.1 Ghz proc certainly won't gain points. Not that the cpu is as important as the gpu in ED, but where it is, clock is the most important factor.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I've picked up on something Tijat said and now run ASW on option 2 (force 45fps no ASW) and it feels better, I admit that I underestimated the gpu workload the desired settings would incur. However, given I'm only at ~20% CPU when the game is running, and dropping into ASW, with GPU utilisation being in the inieties, I can see that as has been suggested on this thread, I am indeed GPU bottleknecked. I cannae bring myself to buy a 2080ti when there is 2080ti super and 3080ti (ampere) around the coruner (next year some time). playing a bit of back of an envelope maths on it, given the average of 30% performance gain per generation, increase 2080ti's performance benchmarks by 1.30% =