vorpX 0.9.0 Available Now

[Karlor]

Just a quick question:
What are the least taxing settings to run the spectator other screen display thing thats new to this update?

[Nikolay]

It’s strange… Everyone says about performance improvements since update, while I have severe performance impact. I have GTX960, 8GB DRAM. For example, Crysis 3 runs up to 100 fps on High settings without VorpX, and I had just about 20-30% performance impact while using VorpX 0.8.0.1 with Oculus Runtime 0.6.0.1 (Extended Mode). But after update the game runs just on ~15-20 FPS, and even lowering graphics settings to lowest doesn’t help at all! It seems that main problem is Geometry 3D mode: after I’ve switched it off to Z-buffer, performance got up to 30FPS on high settings and started to react to changing graphic settings adequately. What’s worse, same issue remains even with pretty old games with Geometry-3D support, like Mirror’s Edge: prior to 0.9.0 update the game used to run extremely fast: 120 FPS and higher with Geometry-3D activated, but now it runs 20-30 FPS only. Async Rendering set on “half” helps though, but it still doesn’t give even 75 FPS except disabling Geometry-3D which bumps it to 150+ FPS. I’ve tried Oculus Runtime 0.6.0, 0.7.0 and 0.8.0.0, updated NVidia driver to 358.78, tried to recover it back to official stable 358.50 – and I can confidently say that’s not the cause.

[CylonSurfer]

Ralf wrote:

@ Cylon : Occasional jerkiness: check your framerate with [ALT][F]. There are two values now. Game FPS and Direct Mode FPS. The Direct Mode FPS have to stay at 75fps at all times or you get judder. Game FPS should at least be half the headset refresh rate (~40 fps for the DK2), better 60, and ideally 75, of course.

The easiest way to achieve this is obviously lowering graphics settings, but you can also lower the game resolution now, as vorpX doesn’t have to run at the headset resolution anymore. You can even choose 4:3 resolutions now, which can help in some cases as less stuff is drawn that is thrown away later. And if you wish, you can even experiment with custom square resolutions which can be created in the nVidia control panel.

Another new and particularly easy way to optimize direct mode performance in demanding games is syncing the game framerate to exactly half the headset refresh rate. This can be done on the display page of the ingame menu, setting is called Direct Mode Framerate Sync.

Thanks for the suggestion Ralf – sadly it has no effect on the odd jerk I experience.

I double checked both The Direct Mode FPS and Game FPS. Direct Mode FPS is at a solid 75FPS, it never dips. Game mode goes from around 66FPS to the full 75FPS depending on what I’m looking at. The odd thing about the jerk is that it happens in areas where I get a full 75FPS on both Direct Mode and Game FPS…

Setting Direct Mode Framerate Sync to ‘Half’ causes the games to become a blurry mess. I only get nice smooth game play with it set on full.

I also tried the custom aspect ratio settings after you mentioned it and reading about the 8:9 ratios on Reddit, its a nice performance boosting tip and very nice new feature. Sadly it does not help with the odd jerk I get.

What I do not like is that the jerk happens in all games across the board, even ones that achieve 75 FPS at all times. It’s not the stuttering we experience with low FPS, its an actual jerk, like the game freezes for a millisecond, in GTA V for example everything appears to stop for that very brief amount of time, including the passing traffic. As I said in my previous post, its almost like everything is playing catch up every few frames or so.

[Ralf]

@ Karlor : Not sure if I understand the question. What do you mean by ‘spectator other screen display thing’? If that means the mirror window, you should be able to use it with just a little performance impact. Normally there should be no need to adjust settings to use it.

@ Nikolay : In general the raw FPS are about 10-20% lower than before due to the far more complicated rendering pipeline that was necessary for the Direct Mode. but that’s countered by the async timewarp, which makes things still look smoother. Can’t really imagine Mirror’s Edge at 120fps in G3D on your 960. With a GTX970 it always ran around 60 before in the start area. Crysis 3 didn’t have G3D before, 15-20 still sounds quite low even for a GTX960 in Crysis 3. With a GTX970 the game runs at about 35-40fps in the start area (ship in rain) when using Geometry 3D. Low settings IIRC. From testing various GPUs I would say a GTX970 is a reasonable recommendation, it’s also what Oculus suggests for the Rift in general.

You could also take a look at the Reddit thread linked below for advanced tweaking, a similar advanced tweaking sticky will follow here shortly:

vorpX 0.9 performance tip: custom 8:9 resolution
byu/eVRydayVR inoculus

@ Cy : That sounds odd, especially since it happens in games that run perfectly fine at 75fps. Anything special about your setup (SLI, Optimus or uncommon in any other way)? Can you make a video of this? A frame by frame analysis might be helpful to at least understand what’s happening. I could provide you with an FTP account to upload it.

[Phil_Giordana_FCD]

I’m wondering if there would be any way to make Elite Dangerous work with Vorpx and the 0.8 runtime. That would be awesome and would remove the need to switch back to RT 0.5.

Any ideas?

[Nikolay]

Okay, I can understand that G3D is really demanding mode, but what I don’t get is why when I play with graphics settings without G3D, performance changes accordingly, but with G3D there are almost no impact: 1-5 FPS from lowest to highest graphics settings, that’s all. It seems that there’s some kind of bottleneck with G3D. I wonder, what is it? CPU?

[Ralf]

That probably depends highly on the game you play.

You may also be victim of a bug in the Oculus runtime 0.7/0.8 and/or nVidia driver that consumes an entire CPU core. Happens on almost every PC and is especially bad on Core i5 and below which do not support hyper threading.

Check your task manager for a “System” process while you run a Oculus app without Oculus config utility open. It’s always there, but if you have this bug, it consumes a large amount of CPU time when you run any Oculus app for the second or third time after a reboot: 50% on dual core, 25% on a quadcore i5, 12.5% on a quadcore i7.

More info: https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=25914

[petokaske]

hi, when I put in mirror mode to shoot a game, the game in the window is clear and bland colors.
It comes from where?

In the rift, the colors are normal.

[Ralf]

That will be fixed in the next vorpX version. For now the only thing you can do is lowering gamma after recording the video in your video editing program unfortunately.

[petokaske]

ok and how to watch videos on youtube now there are more mod extend?

I managed to watch a video with vorpx desktop viewer putting on SBS and drawing back the zoom background here but does not do great.

[petokaske]

In any case, I am very happy with this version of vorpx because you can finally play games with OpenGL as SOMA, PREY or DOOM3 and that’s good.

One should have a switch for direct mod and mod extended.

[Ralf]

Not sure if I understand the Youtube issue, I’m afraid.

Extended mode is gone for good unfortunately. Oculus removed it completely with the 0.7 runtime.

[Phil_Giordana_FCD]

I’m unsubscribing from the thread, my mailbox is full. :)

[petokaske]

Before the extended mode, you could watch the video on youtube VR.
Now the rift does not light up when I turn google chrome.

I talk about the video games I made.

https://www.vorpx.com/forums/topic/video-games-with-vorpx-and-dk2-french/

[Ralf]

If you are using Windows 8 or 10, you might try the new vorpX desktop app, and see whether it works with that. Otherwise you are probably out of luck in this specific case, I’m afraid.

[Author]

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