sudden FPS drop, no recovery until game restart

[Anonymous]

I have the following problem: after about 1 hour of perfectly normal gameplay with vorpx FPS suddenly drops to 12-15. If I continue playing, it does not recover. Restarting the game fixes the problem for another 1 hour. Moreover, changing resolution in game or alt-tabbing also fixes the problem for another 30-45 min, but then FPS again drops, this time catastrophically: first to 3-5, and then degrades within few seconds to 0-2 (at 0 FPS I have a black screen; once I had a slide show for one of the headset’s screens, while the other was black). The problem occurs with every game I play, and with whatever in-game settings (including resolution) I start from. Does anybody have an idea what is the reason and how to fix this?

Some additional info. I use HTC vive and GTX 1080. I’ve checked the temperatures, and saw nothing criminal (GPU max 72 C, CPU max 77 C). In fact, the problem only appeared a few weeks ago. Before this, everything was working fine, no FPS drops in any games for hours of gameplay. This might be a coincidence, but the problem started right after the recent steamvr update, the one that made vorpx crystal image too bright (https://www.vorpx.com/forums/topic/brightness-suddenly-too-high-on-vorpx/). Following the suggestion by Ralf, I updated to steamvr beta, and it fixed this particular problem with vorpx. But the problem with FPS drop remains. To be honest, I am not 100% sure this problem occurs only with vorpx. But I did try to play a VR game without vorpx (raw data), and had no issues after about an hour of gameplay.

Sorry for the lot of details, I am looking forward to your help!

[reanor]

It seems that you haven’t played long enough to produce a viable result in comparison with VorpX engaged. Play without VorpX for about 2 hours, see if problem comes back. As I understand it, when you use VorpX, you render the game differently, which requires additional resources. Also, make sure you don’t overclock your CPU and GPU because overclocking produces all kinds of artifacts after a while and decreases the life span of your hardware.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for a quick reply. I’ve played raw data for 2 hours (a nice workout!) on high settings without any problems. The card was overclocked. If I play with vorpx, I get the problem in any case, whether the card is overclocked or not. I never overclocked the CPU on this system.

[Anonymous]

One more detail I forgot to mention. Previously, before the problem appeared, I was doing the following: start vorpx watcher, start a game with steamvr off, play, exit game. Vorpx then started steamvr automatically, closed it upon finish, and everything was fine. Now, if I start a game with steamvr off and then quit the game, steam shows that the game continues to run (steamvr is off). I have to start steamvr again and exit it in order to terminate the game.

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