Random and heavy stutters / framerate decrease in VR - Reverb G2

[Hiromachi]

Since early December I started having an issue effectively running my flying days in form of randomly occurring framerate drop along with pink stutter festival (pink lines on FPS VR indicate sttuter). This is noticeable furthemore by the number of dropped frames which in a matter of minutes can go up to 10.000+ 

 

Entire situation starts and ends randomly. However my observations lead me to believe that most commonly it happens when I get into close combat with enemy aircraft, but not always. I honestly tried reinstalling steamVR, Mixed Reality Portal, deleting fxo and metashaders, changing ingame settings. Nothing helps. I can fly for 15 minutes in formation with other Mustangs online, than I get into a combat and stutters start and than randomly end. Although I have noticed that sometimes alt+tab and quick window changes seem to bring FPS back and cure stutters. Again, no explanation. 

It happens both online and offline.

I've tried to look for similarities but nothing close to that happens when I turn off VR and fly on monitor. I also did not observe similar behavior in other flight sims.

 

The only changes since early December (i.e. before this happened) would be really a new Nvidia driver for 3080, DCS updates or some Microsoft updates for Windows. On hardware level nothing has changed. 

 

This is how it looks:

https://youtu.be/ZuSgMuMHY8s

 

https://youtu.be/vdZFbndgk_4

 

https://youtu.be/G8Q_HThW0Io

dcs.log DxDiag.txt

I attach ingame settings I use. SteamVR is set to default 100 %, no other changes were made. 

[Flappie]

Hi and thank you for this very detailed first post. Since your rig is a very powerful one and you're using very reasonable DCS settings, I'd say CPU, RAM and GPU are out of the equation. It may be a storage/pagefile issue or an external app messing with DCS.

 

If you haven't already, add exclusions for these two folders in your antivirus:

• C:\Users\your-name\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta
• D:\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World OpenBeta

If you keep having stutters, edit your pagefile settings:

• Uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"
• Select E: \ drive,
• Set an initial size of 32 GB,
• Set a max size of 32 or 64 GB.

 

By the way, you should let your C:\ drive breathe a little, it's almost full (and your pagefile is on it). Same thing for F:\ and G:\.

Edited December 13, 2020 by Flappie
D:\ is almost full,so E:\ instead

[Hiromachi]

I will try those. However as said before, I did not necessarily change anything that should make things different. C and following drives are in the same status they were before. I also check their "health" with CrystalDiskInfo.

As for drive load, well, what can I say. All that is my work files. Hence why I have games on D and E. Other two are for storage only. Guess I will have to buy myself larger storage and ssd soon  

 

 

[Glide]

Try dropping Grass and Clutter to zero, and maxing out the Preload Radius.  Visibility to Medium would give you a big boost too.

[Hiromachi]

That should not be needed. My GPU is rather underutilized and problem is in those random drops rather than permanent lack of boost. Outside of framerate drops I can sit around 50 - 60 FPS which is far above 45 FPS threshold. 

[BIGNEWY]

Try turning off terrain shadows see if you notice a difference. 

 

let me know

[Hiromachi]

So I did all you said guys and no improvement there. But I think I know where the issue may be. If you watch this video (and I tried it in couple other scenarios like this) its rather obvious that stutters correspond with memory usage. In Caucasus situation while VRAM is in 90 % use, RAM is far less than that. Syria or any other heavy scenario (be it multiplayer mission packed with scripts and units or campaign) just maxes both. I cant say honestly whether this is due to VRAM limit or RAM limit, but in my opinion this is not coincidence. 

So question is whether any of the recent updates changed something with memory usage (save for yesterday one, this one might have actually improved situation on some maps) to increase it. As I said, I had no performance issues of this nature EVER before end of Nov / Dec. Perhaps some memory leak appears or something. 

[Hiromachi]

Did some tests. I think it might be VRAM issue there, where its reaching limit. On Caucasus, Nevada and Persian Gulf performance was fine and I saw no stutters. Normandy, Channel and Syria of course were stutter festival. 

Edited December 18, 2020 by Hiromachi

[Flappie]

Still, your card has 10 GB of VRAM, which should suffice.

 

Can you please share your NVIDIA settings?

[Hiromachi]

Sure

[Glide]

Try turning OFF Shader Cache in the NCP.  Also, at high resolutions, I don't think Anisotropic filtering is noticeable at all.  I leave it off.

[Csgo GE oh yeah]

Can't you guys read ? 

 I mean no offense but he's having problems since very recently. 

All you guys are telling him is to 'drop this setting to 0" , and "turn everything off" . 

I mean, look at his system. He can barely turn anything lower because he's already running ridiculously low settings for such a system. 

Yet, you're telling him to turn more to off. 

About Vram, i have a 3090 , it makes no difference except maybe 1 or 2 ms in frametime reduction. 
This game can't deal with newer hardware, i've said it many times. 

CPU isn't utilized, and GPU also isn't utilized. 

 

 

 

Edited December 19, 2020 by Csgo GE oh yeah

[Glide]

I think you are upset and not thinking clearly.  It's rough when you can't get your expensive hardware to perform.  Have you tried disabling Shader Cache?  Does it work for you? 

[Hiromachi]

It's not his hardware but mine and I tried. It doesnt help. 

 

And Csgo is right.

Edited December 19, 2020 by Hiromachi

[Bulldog_1]

3 hours ago, Csgo GE oh yeah said:

Can't you guys read ? 

 I mean no offense but he's having problems since very recently. 

All you guys are telling him is to 'drop this setting to 0" , and "turn everything off" . 

I mean, look at his system. He can barely turn anything lower because he's already running ridiculously low settings for such a system. 

Yet, you're telling him to turn more to off.

 

 

 

 

I concur with what "Hiromachi" and "Csgo" GE have said. I am having the same issues and within the same time frame mentioned. I have rolled back the Nvidia driver, reinstalled Steamvr, countless different combination's of settings (in-game and external), etc..etc. I have searched the forums endlessly for answers. When you ask for help in the forums it is suggested to turn off or reduce settings and maybe a suggestion about upgrading your hardware. How many screen shots, video tracks, dcs logs, and dxdiag.txt do we have to submit? Yes, I know every rig is different and unique, but there needs to be a common starting point so we don't have to spend days tweaking only to have something update and have to start all over again. How much time and money does a DCS pilot need to spend to have a smooth running game with high quality graphics? How much time do you have to spend "tweaking" every time you turn on your rig? Personally, when I finally get a chance to sit down in my cockpit, I just want to fly.

 

I JUST WANT TO FLY.

[Hiromachi]

So, continuing on the topic, I went further tonight and try watching second after second how processes use system resources and what may be observed. And guess what, there is something to it: 
 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

As you can basically see, under normal operation DCS process accounts for over 85 % of compute power of GPU. However, as stutters appear two other processes display unusually high % of resources taken - namely VR Compositor and VR Server. Normally they are using very little of GPU, 2 - 3 % and 5 - 6 %. But for unknown to me reason, when stutters appear they can both account for more than 60 % of resources drawn from GPU, leaving little for DCS. So I would investigate root cause between those two processes.

 

What is also interesting is that sometimes simple alt + tab and back will remove the issue and get FPS back to 70 - 80. 

[nighteyes2017]

Yep, i'm having the same difficulty as OP here. My system is about the same except i have an intel 9900K and an 2080TI RTX. I did nothing to change the settings and experiencing sudden heavy stuttering and lots of ghosting. Using fpsVR i noticed the CPU frametime is now way up. lots of red and orange spiking. (GPU frametime around 9ms).

 

Another thing i noticed is that reprojection mode doesnt seem to work anymore. FPS will no longer locks to 45 even with overhead FPS available. We did have an update from steamWMR, maybe it has something to do with it? Setting Motion Vector mode works partially, but setting reprojection to auto or off doesn't make any difference anymore. Thanks fpsVR otherwise i wouldnt have noticed it.

 

[Taz1004]

10 hours ago, Hiromachi said:

What is also interesting is that sometimes simple alt + tab and back will remove the issue and get FPS back to 70 - 80. 

 

That is usually symptom of Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.  Did you turn that off?

[Hiromachi]

1 hour ago, Taz1004 said:

 

That is usually symptom of Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.  Did you turn that off?

Yes, it's off. 

[PMcG]

Hi,

 

Have you tried using the stable version to see if the problem follows you?

[VirusAM]

I am not at home and cannot try, but i was chasing a similar issue and yesterday I read that those stutters are a known issue with nvidia cards and latest drivers.
A specific version from may seems to be the latest without this issue.
Nvidia aknowledged the issue just few weeks ago

[Hiromachi]

20 hours ago, PMcG said:

Hi,

 

Have you tried using the stable version to see if the problem follows you?

Stable updated to the same status as Open Beta. But I did check that. 

 

18 hours ago, VirusAM said:

I am not at home and cannot try, but i was chasing a similar issue and yesterday I read that those stutters are a known issue with nvidia cards and latest drivers.
A specific version from may seems to be the latest without this issue.
Nvidia aknowledged the issue just few weeks ago

Yes, I follow that thread closely. Unfortunately drivers from May are not a solution for anyone with RTX 30xx series. Plus, this issue started much later than even RTX release as I was flying DCS in VR perfectly fine all the way through October and early to mid November with my G1 and than G2, sporting 3080. 

[PMcG]

Not sure if it's possible, but have you tried reverting back to the OB update before you had these issues and leave the latest steam and windows updates as is. It might help narrow down the problem?

[Flappie]

@HiromachiIt would be interesting to know if the stuttering also appears when you play on a monitor. I'm more and more convinced your issue comes from an external process. Can you please attach your active processes list?

 

1. Launch Powershell window.
2. Run this command:

Get-Process > list.txt

Edited December 26, 2020 by Flappie
fixed command typo

[Hiromachi]

No, it does not occur when playing on monitor.

 

I will get back to you with process list, as soon as I produce it