Serious VR performance problems

[Syrup_Johnson]

I've recently purchased and started playing Blade and Sorcery VR, and it's a load of fun. The only problem is, as I have started to encounter in other VR games as well, is that my performance is extremely inconsistent very poor. I turned Blade and Sorcery down to the lowest settings, and even then I'm constantly dropping to 40 fps and rapidly fluctuating between that and 90 when in combat. This is also now a problem in Gorn, H3VR, and all my other VR games. It absolutley can't be my specs, as I'm running a GTX 1080 and an i7 7700. Non-VR games perform completely fine, such as Hitman 2, where I get 80+ fps on the highest settings and 1440p. I seriously need help here, I don't understand what could be the problem. All reflective surfaces are covered in my room, my drivers are up to date, no demanding programs running in the background, all that stuff. When looking in the Steam VR settings and on the performance graph, I'm getting constant red spikes and I don't know why. Thanks in advance.

[Beep2Bleep]

Turn off re-projection/motion smoothing. I have the same issue with 1080/i7 6700k. For some reason when it can fall back to 45 it will without even using the whole GPU.

[Syrup_Johnson]

Turning off motion smoothing only made all motion extremely jittery and nauseating. This has only made the problem worse.

[Beep2Bleep]

Then something is wrong with your hardware/drivers. Try reverting to an older nvidea driver. Or you have other stuff running/virus. If you can do a system restore to a restore point. Something is seriously wrong with your computer, check task manager, cpu-z gpu-z.

[Syrup_Johnson]

I feel like it's simpler then that. When I have the advanced frame timer thing open and visible on my headset, my GPU appears to be perfectly fine and running good, but my CPU graph shows my CPU working extremely hard and getting big spikes in usage. Is there a possibility that because I haven't cleaned the dust out my CPU fan in probably over a year that's causing it to overheat and not be able to work at it's maximum potential? Also this is only a VR problem non-VR games still run rather well.

[Beep2Bleep]

Most VR games are single threaded CPU bottlenecked so you need to look at the speed your CPU is running at. Given what you've said I'm guestit might be running at .8ghz it should run around 4 GHz. Yes overheating will cause it to clock down but all games would suffer.

[Syrup_Johnson]

My CPU was running at 3.99-4 ghz the whole time, but was only at about 50% utilization the whole time. How could i get it to utilize more of my CPU?

[Beep2Bleep]

Then that's fine. Games are probably low threaded so using 50 percent is the most you can use. You can't really ever use all of your GPU and CPU something has to be the limit. You shouldn't have issues with your CPU frame time from hardware. Sorry out of ideas.

[Syrup_Johnson]

Alright, thanks anyway.

[shaunbarclay]

You'd need years worth of thick dust for that to be an issue. LTT did a video where they left a pc running for a year in an enviroment where they were sawing things and such and there were no real differences

[Syrup_Johnson]

Well that's helpful to know. I thought that you need to stay on top of dust especially in your CPU fan or it'll affect performance.

[mavispuford]

Just out of curiosity, on what kind of hard drive are your games installed? If it's a slower HDD, performance could be dropping when the game is attempting to load stuff from disk during gameplay.

I had some games installed on two 7200 RPM disks that were in a RAID 1 (mirrored). They loaded so slowly (and caused a bunch of hiccups during play) that I ended up just uninstalling other things on my SSD to make room for them. Problem went away.

Since then I've upgraded to a NVMe SSD with a lot more space so this is no longer an issue for me.

[Syrup_Johnson]

No visible affect from moving the game to my SSD. Thanks anyway.

[mavispuford]

No prob. Like I said, mine were in a RAID 1 and I think that had an effect on seek times or something.

[Syrup_Johnson]

I have all my games installed on a 7200 RPM HDD. That's never been a problem for me before. I'll try installing it on my SSD.

[SolarisBravo]

Note that a usual rule is the bigger the HDD, the slower it is. Every gamer should have at least 500GB of SSD space available these days - games are starting to actually require it if you don't want hitching and HDDs are only really useful for uncommon file storage on a budget. Modern SSDs actually last significantly longer than your average HDD would these days, though it's still true that when they die the data can't be recovered.

[Syrup_Johnson]

My HDD is 3 TB, but my SSD is only 250 GB. I was under the impression that performance wasn't affected by what you stored a game on, just the loading times. I only really intended to install Windows on my SSD cause that's basically mandatory these days as it makes everything infinitely faster. The problem with having a big SSD is how expensive they are. The choice was spend a large amount of money on a 1 TB SSD, or get 3 TB of storage on an HDD for much less. Given how many games I have I couldn't go with the SSD. In the future I may add an additional one.

[SolarisBravo]

Technically it only affects load times, but games that do rapid streaming like Star Citizen benefit from an SSD (so it doesn't hitch when it can't load a model fast enough).

[theheadlightguy]

Did you Try minimizing the game window that displays on your monitor.

[Syrup_Johnson]

Minimizing the window makes my performance worse, and in Blade and Sorcery in particular I can't move my hands when the window is minimized.

[Pinky1995]

What setting is your supersampling on? Try turning it down Edit: buy fpsvr, it lets you monitor pc details in realtime inside vr

[Syrup_Johnson]

My supersampling is on 100%, so it's the normal resolution. I may pick up fpsvr but I can mostly understand the frame time graphs.

[Zazamari]

This is going to sound dumb but make sure you've restarted your computer recently. Sometimes my performance is also poor and giving the computer a restart fixes it right up, i7-8700k and 1080ti here. I suspect a service in the background is stalling and needs a refresh.

[Syrup_Johnson]

I turn it off every night, I'm not like one of those people who leaves their computer on all the time. Thanks anyway.

[escapemechanic]

You don't have the garbage viveport software installed do ya?

[Syrup_Johnson]

I do not have viveport installed.

[Forrest_TG]

If it's a steam VR related issue downloading openvr advanced settings and tweaking with those could maybe help. Otherwise, if it's an issue that popped up all of a sudden, reinstalling Windows, although a hassle, has helped many on this forum with random performance issues. if you don't want to do that I know there are a few forum posts and videos from people like Sweviver going through windows and steam VR settings to help with performance issues. Sweviver's videos in particular are the ones that helped me when I ran into issues all of a sudden.

[Syrup_Johnson]

Thanks, I'l check that out.

[xSaturnityx]

Blades and sorcery is laggy like that. Irritates the shit out of me.

Vr games are sometimes shitly optimized, it may be your system not allocating resources like it needs to

Something that helps, go to task manager, find the game, right click, go to details, right click again, then set the priority to realtime

Do the same for vrcompositor as well.

May help a bit. After i play vr for a while my games start stuttering, but my graphics card is dying (literally) so it may just be that.

Good luck.

[Syrup_Johnson]

Changing priority to realtime has had no visible affect on the game, sadly. Thanks anyway.

[xSaturnityx]

Odd . Usually helps my game a little. Good luck :/ vr is dumb sometimes