Search Results for 'The I of the Dragon'

[TCPcitizn]

The exe is unchanged. It runs in geometry mode without an ENB on. When I use the ENB I’m getting 3D, looks like Zadaptive and my frames are great, but Geometry is unavailable as it simply doesn’t change after activating it. So its working.. I just can’t figure out why Zadaptive or Z-normal works but not geometry. The game sometimes freezes on startup but I’ve found a sequence of activating the sensor with my finger at the right time which limits that. Again I don’t get the 3D box at the main menu with the dragon logo, nor while playing the game savegame/loadgame/settings/exitgame etc. The vorpx settings after hitting delete key works tho

[abstractrobbie]

Hi

I have both versions installed (steam) and they are vanilla, no mods whatsoever and fresh installs.
Skyrim did on first run with Vorpx set up properly, after the beginning of the game where the dragon appears and you are first able to run. I ran direct VR upon entering the tower. Everything worked and head tracking was on. Great.
However, upon coming back to the game later and having to run direct VR again, it constantly fails and nothing works. I have tried a new game and reinstalling as well as deleting the files in documents. Still seems to be having the same issue.
SE does this from the start, it never allowed me to get it working. However the failure is different. It doesn’t report a problem, changes the FOV etc just the head tracking isn’t working.
Does anyone have any ideas what may be the problem?

My system is a DK2 Oculus. MSI GT72 2QE – 980M.

Thanks.

[chukovskiy]

In addition: when a savegame loads, the black rectangle with tips on it appears in front of 3D-model – the one you can rotate – mallets, dragons, etc. Same story happens even in main menu. Screenshot. Never happened to me before.
This and above issues were experienced on clean Skyrim install with VorpX re-install (just didn’t delete registry records).
FPS has dropped significantly since I played the game last, a couple of weeks ago.

[mikester1980]

Gregan – When I run Skyrim outside of VR it runs flawlessly. Zero FPS drops anywhere, even in Whiterun. But switch to VorpX and the FPS plummet to an unplayable level. And I am playing with fresh, clean installs of both VorpX and Skyrim.

Alegse – I did apply the Direct VR mode which, as you say, helps things look very smoothly – but only while I’m indoors. Step outside and the FPS plummets. And again, switching from Geometry to Z3D gives me 0 FPS boost, which doesn’t seem right.

All – My computer can run other games in VorpX without any FPS drop. For instance, I can run Dragon Age 3 on highest settings in VorpX and it’s smooth as silk. Vanilla Skyrim which is 3 years older should therefore be running flawlessly, in theory. So I think the issue is narrowed down to not my hardware which seems plenty powerful, but some sort of VorpX configuration issue.

Thanks for continuing to help VorpX users.

[Gregan]

One more comment for a big thank to make Skyrim VR a reality, and for supporting your next update that we all are waiting for, even more than Christmas or the Touchs itself!
Hope to be able to slain the dragon manually :)
Cheers.

[Fredthehound]

Looks good so far!

Some bugs (FOV switches off 120 when fast traveling into Whiterun) but overall it’s performing really well. With Vsynch turned off I get 43-45 interior and 33-45 outside on a fully modded game with big rez textures and high poly meshes. Which is damn impressive. Dragonreach stairs are low 30s daytime, 40-45 at night.

Looking forward to the finished version. You’re doing the Work of Mighty Talos, Ralf.

[Myrilion]

Hi,

I would like to read the documentation of the stereo 3D settings, but can’t find anything.

“Depth weighting (far – near)” seems to be do the opposite it says. In some games it doesn’t change anything at all. Without knowing what these settings actually do in detail it’s trial and error.

For example in “Dragon Age: Inquisition” I would like to bring closer things closer to me, so that they actually pop out of the screen. This worked in “Dragon Age 2”. But now the settings seem to behave very differently.

Generally there is too much relative depth “change” in the distant objects in “DAI”: The close hill seems far away, the mountain in the distance is very far away and the sky is immensly far away. This makes no sense, in real life there is almost no difference between mountain and sky.

Close objects on the other hand don’t show much difference in depth. That’s very sad, because it should be the other way around. It seems like the Z-buffer in “DAI” is working very differently and has to be rescaled.

Or if that’s not possible, there should be settings that deal with this issue. I guessed that “Z-buffer adaptive” were meant to do this trick, but I was not successful to do it.

[stoop411]

I have the new MSI dragon series gaming laptop. Everything in VR works except I can’t get big screen or virtual desktop to work. Anything that shares my screen seems to not work. Any tips with that would be helpful. Has anyone got this to work on a laptop?

[Fredthehound]

Made a very interesting discovery.

There are a few guys now reporting that 2100 on water is the upper limit until the full voltage is unlocked, but the cooler the card, the more stable the clock gets.

What is interesting is that leaving the memory clock at stock gives enough voltage to the card to get my install of Skyrim completely playable with the supersampling back up to 2. and the AA/Ansio/AO back up full. I have no explanation for this as my clocks are now only about 2050ish. I bumped the overclock on core back to +235, but the top speed did not rise enough to explain the result.

Outdoors it is over 40 and mostly 43-45fps. The WRF/FWR run holds that with only a couple dips under 40. Dragonreach stairs are at worst, a momentary flash to 34 (draw calls most likely.

Markarth however is a bear. The lighting mod really comes into play there as do all the particle effects and heading down the stairs/toward the exit from the Jarl’s place sees under 30fps consistently.

Overall, backing that memory clock down had a tremendous positive impact. I ran through these areas several times, rebooting on purpose between to ensure ‘clean’ runs.

Like I say…no explanation. I am not seeing THAT kind of benefit reflected in changes to the numbers Afterburner is showing me. But it’s there. Full up AA/Supersampling/AO/Ansio at 1920×1440. I’d be happier if I knew WHY this is happening, however I am not gonna question a miracle while I sort it out.

If I had to guess, I’d have to say that the FPS is solely a product of backing the memory down to stock speed and that would be in alignment with the reported effect, however that is a LOT of added load, as I say, to reap such an observed benefit. The drivers are still the same ones from the last few days. The fan speed is still ramped up where it was.

This GPUBoost3 is a very strange animal indeed.

[rtoast]

Personally I feel like it was well worth it overall. I think a lot of what determi es people’s satisfaction is managing expectations. I k ew going in that it was going to be a lot of work and a lot of tinkering. After about a week and a half and finally gaining some experience using the utility I feel much more confident in my ability to use the program to it’s strengths.

At the outset, what would take me half a day to set up vorpx with a particular game now takes me maybe an hour tops. And if it doesn’t work I’m at least satisfied that theres nothing else I can do and that the vall at that point os in Vorpx’s court. At that point all you can do is wait for further updates and hope that whatever game your trying to run gets better support.

Going in, my main goals were to get Dying Light, Skyrim, Stalker (call of pripyat), Alien Isololation, and to a lesser extent Far Cry 4/Blood Dragon working in VR.

Of those I’ve got the 2 working perfectly, Alien near perfect (lighting glitch in one eye), Far Cry working in Z3D, but so far Dying Light is the only complete failure.

But in my eyes, 2.8 out of 4 of my primary titles working as I’d hoped ain’t bad. So I’m pretty happy with my results, now I’m kind of just hoping for a breakthrough with Dying Light.

Overall though I just think that anyone expecting this to be a magical solution to adding VR to old games out of the box is setting themselves up for disappointment.

[Fredthehound]

Part 3 – Skyrim Flora Overhaul.

OK, now that we have the basics in place and vastly upgraded textures, it’s time to start going for the real eye candy. Skyrim in it’s normal form is a pretty sparse place and to be fair, thats geographically accurate to a degree. But since we are in a place with the forementioned talking dragons and knee-arrowed former adventurers, a few extra trees isn’t gonna break the illusion of ‘reality’ for anyone outside those stalwart loremongers that haZ sadZ every time someone installs a CBBE mod.

Skyrim Flora Overhaul (SFO adds a LOT of new trees, plants, grass and variety thereof. It transforms vanilla Skyrim into a more fleshed out place. This is both good and bad. Good because it’s nice to look at. Bad because that performance comes at a relative cost. On lower end machines running on a normal monitor, SFO can make a game unplayable because it simply adds so much more ‘stuff’ for the computer to render. When you add things like lighting mods/ENBs, all that ‘stuff’ then casts shadows. Which have to be rendered as well. So adding SFO can quickly spiral out of control and have a devastating impact.

SFO comes in several flavors and can be found on the nexus page here, including the assorted add-ons and details…
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/141/?

For this install I’ll be using the ‘Regular’ version because it is not as brutal as the latest build and I have to consider what effect the upcoming lighting and weather mods will result in. No other mods you make to Skyrim in VR will have the level of impact that SFO and a lighting/weather mod will. An ENB WOULD, but they are currently not usable. The only other thing we can use that would be so damaging to framerates is the Static Mesh Improvement Mod (SMIM) which massively increases the polygon count of the meshes/models. It is a fantastic mod and I use it for regular modding, but at VR resolution, the increase in detail just is not worth the performance cost.

So… whats the result of adding SFO? To be honest, I was really surprised at the impact this mod, on it’s own, had to frame rates. Almost nothing as it turns out. It would seem, at least as far as the Titan is concerned, it’s not much of an issue until the forementioned lighting and weather mods come into play.

On the WRF run, framerates stayed at/in the same roughly 44-45FPS range with occasional dips to 42-43. In the vast majority of the run, the framerate sat in the mid 44s. So effectively I lost about 1FPS. With 2.0 upscaling, x8 AA and x16 AO still enabled. Now Skyrim is looking VERY good, gameplay is still smooth as silk and the CheeZburger Cat haZ his happy. As do I.

There are now more trees, bigger trees in more places, more and different ferns/plants/flowers and grasses and Skyrim is more lush overall and less desolate/barren. Think more like Upstate New York/Adirondack mountains or the Alaskan wilderness than arctic circle/Tundra.

The Titan is starting to do some work as reflected in Afterburner with GPU use now in the 60% range and seeing a blip/high spike to the 80s on one occasion. CPU rose a bit as well, but overall, there’s a ton of headroom yet to take advantage of.

And that, dear reader, will be the topic of the next entry. Now that we have seen our first ‘negative’ in performance, how do we mitigate it knowing full well that the weather and lighting mods are going to ALSO lower our framerates? We HAVE to stay within a playable rate. there is zero point in modding Skyrim to the point of screen archery if it’s going to mean we can’t enjoy playing it.

Thats where the heavy voodoo comes into play. INI file tweaking, for starters. There is a lot of performance tweaks to make and it never hurts to offer up the PCMR prayer to Lord Gaben of the Steam Empire. “May our framerates be high and our temperatures low!”

[Fredthehound]

Hi all,

As promised, This thread will be dedicated to giving you the rundown of my experience with the new Titan X Pascal and Skyrim/Fallout. Expect it to go on for a while as there are a ton of variables to cover.

——–
Computer:
i7 4790K @4.7Ghz on water
240GB x2 Kingston HyperX Savage SSDs in Raid 0
16 gig of 2400mhz Gskill Trident DDR3 ram
Titan X Pascal overclocked +230/+500
HTC Vive
Process Lasso software using Bitsum Highest Performance preset
——–

I’ll start by saying that if you saw the other thread about the 1080, you’ll already know that the Titan Pascal can handle a metric ton of mods IN GEOMETRY MODE and return smooth, playable framerates at an enjoyable level – depending on your tolerance. But to be clear, this card running in the upper 30FPS range feels smoother by far than my old Crossfire 390s running in the 40s. No microstutter is a beautiful thing. The best part is you’ll rarely see under 40FPS even with a ton of mods on the TXP (Titan X Pascal) if you mod smart.

Now to begin with, I loaded a fresh and bone stock install of Skyrim. No ini tweaking, nothing. 100% stock install as Todd Howard intended. No updates beyond those baked into the Steam install. No Nexus patches. Just vanilla/stock Skyrim. With all sliders maxed in non VR at 1920×1080, FRAPS never moved off 60FPS no matter where I went or what I did. Glued. Not really surprising as my 390s would do the same thing. But thats the baseline.

For most testing, I’ll be using my normal three areas. Whiterun/Dragonreach, Whiterun to Riverwood and the forest outside Falkreath. I find they are the most demanding on the system with a ton of draw calls and it makes for a semi-repeatable benchmark. Leave Whiterun, go to Falkreath via Riverwood and you have three of the most CPU/GPU demanding areas of the vanilla game.

To get the basics out of the way, I’ll condense. Bone stock install. No ini tweaks. Geometry mode. Skyrim set in it’s launcher/config to “High” (not ‘ULTRA”) preset. VorpX set to the standard/recommended/Optimizer settings.

With that out of the way, Ill condense a bit more. I’ll refer to the Whiterun (top of Dragonreach stairs)/Riverwood/Falkreath run as WRF henceforth. Or FRW when reversing the run from Falkreath to Whiterun.

With the above settings in place, day or night, WRF or FRW, you get 43-45FPS. And it is smooth like butter.

If you increase the Ambient Occlusion to 16 from the setting of 8 that High provides, you get 43-45FPS. If you Supersample/increase internal resolution to 2.0, while at 16 AO, you get 43-45FPS. The only time you will see a different FPS is on a cell change or a load screen. The Titan, and the CPU, are just cruising with no effort.

————————————-

OK so that’s the baseline. If you are crazy enough to go buy a Titan, that’s what you’ll see for FPS playing bone stock Skyrim with no mods and no performance tweaking.

Why not start with Ultra? A couple reasons. One, as Ralf pointed out, the 1080/Titan will handle geometry mode on High settings in different games if you don’t get crazy. And another, because ‘Ultra’ Shadows/draw distances will immediately destroy your framerate and make the game unplayable. (well fix the draw distance problem with a mod a bit later down the road).

So basing everything off of High and moving up as we go along makes more sense to me and it will give those unfamiliar with modding a look at what Skyrim/VorpX can do with a Titan powering it. Ultra Shadow/draw distances combined with the almost non existent multithreading of the vanilla game will ruin your day in VorpX. On a monitor, FRAPS never leaves 60FPS on fully maxed settings no matter what. But it doesn’t take a Titan to pull that trick off. An old R9-290 will do it all day long. But VR is a different animal and modding in it throws conventional wisdom out the window. You basically HAVE to mod your way around issues like this. And you can.

Next up:

Before the weather and lighting mods, the first place most people go is higher rez texture packs. But while the Titan has VRAM to spare, Skyrim’s 32 bit DX9 code, combined with Windows 10’s 4 gig hard limit on it means that 4K textures are best left to the details that make the most difference…Bodies/Armor. And believe me, a supersampled 2K texture at x16 AO is VERY nice to look at even at the standard VorpX/Vive resolutions. In most cases, 4K textures are a waste. Personally, I would rather have 4K people and armor since those are what you see and interact with. The better those look, the easier it is to buy that a world full of talking dragons and plagues of knee-arrowed former adventures and less than photoreal textures is almost ‘real’. And thats what VR is all about in the first place.

For the next test, I’ll be installing the 2K ‘LITE” texture pack from the Nexus, followed by the known FPS killer. Skyrim Flora Overhaul. Conventional wisdom says these should show a very noticeable impact, especially considering that 2.0 upscaling is in effect. But lets see what happens to the framerate before we get into the Ini files to counter it with heavier voodoo.

Stay tuned.

[Fredthehound]

Ralf/all,

Just a quick update as I find myself lost in a whole new world and not wanting to leave ;)

With the Titan Overclocked +230/500, I am able to maintain 40-45FPS in most areas and gameplay ‘feels’ smooth down into the mid-upper 30FPS range. This is still on unoptimized .inis and with that crap ton of HD graphics mods I listed before.
the sob-40 areas are those traditional trouble spots. Whiterun/Dragonreach etc.

Yes folks. It works. VorpX can handle it. You CAN run HD textures but it takes massive power. It’s the brute force thing.

When I reload. I’ll specifically test without Skyrim Flora Overhaul because I’ll bet the farm that that is the mod causing the most intense usage and slowing things down, then re add it to see the difference.

(It appears that although CPU use is far from pegged…running under 50% load most of the time… it’s probably bottlenecking on pure frequency. A CPU with a bigger cache (I’m on a 4790 @4.7Ghz) would help a lot I think as long as it could clock high. Unfortunately Broadwell-E and 4.7GHZ arent exactly friendly.)

And considering the load, that’s not totally unexpected. We;ll see what I discover going forward. The benchmarks coming in from the tech sites show little difference between 1080 and 1440P performance in a number of games so it’s probably the case here.

I have to sort out why Windows isn’t seeing my Vive in Display, so I can’t change my rez to something higher to test that idea. Might need to do a reinstall of the Vive, although it works fine aside from that.

I was never able to find an answer for, or explain the 15 fps I saw in Time Spy. It seems to have been a glitch/ anomaly as now, everything is benching normally there.

The grand adventure continues!

[Fredthehound]

Hi all,

Well, first impressions are in. The card is a monster as expected. But there are some very strange goings on in the numbers that are going to take some figuring out because I’m not sure what to make of them. And not just in Skyrim.

Time Spy, the benchmark, returned a 15 FPS framerate so something is seriously amiss right off the bat.

On the other hand, Fallout 4 on a conventional monitor, with every setting it has maxed just freaking glued itself to 60FPS. Now for Skyrim…

First, in the worst case scenario, with all the mods piled on that I had listed above and more (for testing purposes), I went from a low of 17FPS to a low of 33 FPS on the Dragonreach stairs.

Outside is far better with 40-45 FPS being fairly common but upper 30s to lower 40s being the majority. And it looks beyond glorious. It is also a lot smoother at those framerates than you’d expect. Dare I say playable if your tolerance is high.

None of that is surprising considering the Time Spy strangeness. What IS surprising is that SHADOWS have such an impact. Even this beast of a card cannot overcome the Bethesda coding for shadows as it sits. If you back the shadow detail way off, it becomes very playable even with all those HD mods. But of course you lose a ton of the atmosphere they provide.

Further confusion sets in because the GPU never spiked higher than about 65% usage and the CPU was cruising in the 40% range the whole time. So I don’t think it’s draw calls that can be pointed to exclusively here. Even spinning it’s wheels with whatever is going on, I still saw a boost of significant proportions.

Lastly, I am not sure I can trust the numbers I DO have because although recognizing it as a Titan X Pascal, Afterburner may not be reporting correctly. Even overclocking +150 and diming the power target/temp threshold, the card never boosted above 1750 and all the reports are those settings will get you in the 1900+ range.

So as for my first impression. Was it worth it? Trust me. I just saw Skyrim like I have never seen it before. It was worth it. Now, it’s a matter of learning what this card likes and what it doesnt. And what exactly is going on/going wrong. With that 15 FPS in Time Spy, none of this current Skyrim performance should be trusted.

Also consider that as a rank noob to Nvidia, I have a lot to learn there so I’m just going with basic settings/and the standard (so far) overclock that the forums have discussed.

Lastly, consider that this is on an install of Skyrim whose ini files etc. were optimized for AMD/Crossfire and that could certainly be in play here as well. In fact, it’s a certainty.

So, what I’m going to do is a ground-up fresh install and document my experiences with it on a separate thread I’ll post once I get the basics together.

And start researching why the hell Time Spy is at 15FPS.

[Fredthehound]

I’m on a Sabertooth Z87 (I typoed it as 97 upthread but same basic thing really) with a 4790K overclocked to 4.7ghz and that may have an impact on frame rates compared to a non OC’d cpu, so bear that in mind. The OC may better utilize the faster ram.

I got a 5 fps boost on the worst of the worst minimums… Dragonreach staircase, where draw calls are pounding the hell out of the CPU. I can’t say for sure what my high FPS is with the 45 cap of VorpX but I can say the whole FPS range shifted up noticibly…meaning smoother overall and many places are now at 45 that were low 40s before at best.

Fallout 4 on a regular monitor took one hell of a leap forward as well (then again it is known to love fast ram.

I’ve read that anything above 2400/2666 on the Z series is rapidly diminishing returns because of the architecture so a Skylake 6700K OCd to 4.6 or 7/DDR4 rig would be the bext logical step beyond that to actually use DDR4 speed. But thats about $1K vs the $90 for the 2400 ;)