2.7 Unplayable on Oculus Link

[Nealius]

I can't play on low settings for more than 20~25 minutes without Link causing white band artifacting and frames plumetting from stable 30s to a PowerPoint presentation. Oculus Tray Tool settings don't appear to do anything, especially the ASW off setting. Oculus still runs with ASW on by default. Pressing CTRL+num1/2/3 does not work at all. No change in framerates, frametimes, and I still get ASW artifacting. Disconnecting/reconnecting Link will solve the framerate issue, but when I try to jump back into DCS I get a black screen in the headset. 

 

With VR shaders on 2.5.6, I eliminated the issue with the above steps. In 2.7 it comes back every single flight.

 

i5-9600k at 5.0Ghz, RTX2070, 32GB RAM, all SSDs, Link cable through powered USB 3.0 hub. Switching ports front/back doesn't matter.

Edited April 17, 2021 by Nealius

[ShaunOfTheFuzz]

Hey Nealius, from what you're describing, I think this is what happens on link when you run out of VRAM and windows has to used shared system memory (you should be able to see this happening in task manager). My 3070 has 8GB and I've experienced this exact behavior before and I had to tune my settings a bit to get rid of it. 

There are a range of factors that affect VRAM, and you can choose where to make concessions based on what's most important to you. 

 

Things that might be at issue:

 

1) Too much supersampling/PD, more pixels = more vram. I have in-game PD at 1.0 at the moment and oculus res is at 4864x2448 (1.2x)

2) OTT encode resolution too high; this relates to the amount of compression the image goes through and has a direct impact on VRAM. I went from, 3648 to 3100 here (2912 was a little too blurry for me)

3) Running oculus under openvr for the reshade; the new render mask only works for quest if you run under oculus, so you'll be rendering more pixels there. For me, the reshade is worth it.

4) In game textures at high (always leave ground textures to low for the moment). This can be an easy way to diagnose the issue, dropping textures down immediately frees up VRAM so the issue show go away. Personally I've kept the textures high and adjusted points 1 and 2. 

 

I was able to notice the massive framerate drops happening at a specific place in Syria, on the blackshark Megiddo to Haifa mission, I would point my Shkval at a certain place and every single time I would get single digit fps which wouldn't ever really recover and Oculus logs showed the encoder backing up. Dropping textures from high to medium immediately fixed it, so I new it was VRAM.

Edited April 17, 2021 by ShaunOfTheFuzz
Expanding point

[Nealius]

I'm running PD 1.2 with oculus res 1.0x. Encode 2912. I'll try swapping the PD and res values, and lower encode to 2352 and see what happens.

 

Another oddity is that the ASW hotkeys work while in the main menu, but don't work while in-game. I sometimes also get the artifacting and ~17fps in the menu after a flight, when the flight itself ran okay. 

[KoN]

1 hour ago, Nealius said:

I'm running PD 1.2 with oculus res 1.0x. Encode 2912. I'll try swapping the PD and res values, and lower encode to 2352 and see what happens.

 

Another oddity is that the ASW hotkeys work while in the main menu, but don't work while in-game. I sometimes also get the artifacting and ~17fps in the menu after a flight, when the flight itself ran okay. 

This is happening to me .

Was getting 30fps as it was locked by OTT . 30Hz . 

Now im at 17fps with artifacts . Are you on beta 27.0 Oculus . Or 25.0.

Going to test more today and yes its vram is all used up . 

 

 

Edited April 17, 2021 by Con

[Nealius]

Beta v27.  I have lowered everything from PD to resolution to encode to bitrate and nothing works. I've had the transluscent white bar from mission start, worse when I'm on the ground, less severe when in the air, then back to very severe when I come in for landing. Sometimes worse in the right eye than the left. Framerates smooth and steady at 36~45. Frametimes in the 20s. 

 

Checking my hardware monitor, I am:

1. Not overheating (average 50s)

2. Not CPU bottlenecking (max single-core usage in the 80s)

3. Not running out of VRAM (max usage 90s)

 

I don't know what else to do at this point.

Edited April 17, 2021 by Nealius

[KoN]

Ok i did a test last night and on my stable DCS and  I'm getting my normal FPS locked at 30fps with 30Hz in OTT  .

Nothing has changed in Stable but when I fire up 2.7 I'm down to 6FPS and it unplayable . 

Some thing not right in VR with 2.7 . 

Going to lower settings in game . See if i can hit my stable 30fps .  

Test your stable version of DCS . see if that runs well for you . 

 

Edit ...

Ok i rolled back drivers to 446.14 and I'm back up to 20fps with high settings in DCS . Quest2 @  72hz - 5408 x 2736 . PD 1.0 in dcs .

Edited April 20, 2021 by Con

[Nealius]

I moved over to virtual desktop for wireless streaming. Smooth, no dropouts. However, my framerates are stuck at 22~36, compared to the 36~45 I was getting on Link. I am also frequently getting sudden framerate drops that are resolved by clicking outside of the DCS window, then back into the DCS window. 

 

Additionally, I found that Link has better performance when the headset's battery is low. The problem is that the charge can not compete with the power draw and the headset will go dead quite quickly.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Nealius

[Nealius]

After more testing I have found that Oculus Tray Tool is causing issues. If I disable it I can use Link fairly reliably, but still with a few more transfer stutters than over Virtual Desktop. 

[dimitriov]

Just FYI : https://forums.oculusvr.com/t5/Oculus-Quest-2-and-Quest/White-horizontal-stripe-across-screen-while-using-link/td-p/848398

 

I have the same issue too... But not only on DCS, even in oculus home, since last v28.

[Nealius]

And after a week of no issues, I had the white bar artifacting again on my first flight today. .

[Max Thunder]

Since V25 I also have the white stripe and audio problem. So since V25 I am on V24. This works fine, at least with my system. PS: Quest is on V28.
 

Edited April 25, 2021 by Max Thunder

[Nealius]

On 4/26/2021 at 2:06 AM, Max Thunder said:

Since V25 I also have the white stripe and audio problem. So since V25 I am on V24. This works fine, at least with my system. PS: Quest is on V28.
 

 

How do you roll back to previous versions?

[Max Thunder]

I used this solution:

 

https://forums.oculusvr.com/t5/Oculus-Rift-S-and-Rift/v25-PTC-PC-Software-Release-Notes/m-p/848375

 

 

[Viciam1]

On 4/17/2021 at 10:07 AM, Nealius said:

I'm running PD 1.2 with oculus res 1.0x. Encode 2912. I'll try swapping the PD and res values, and lower encode to 2352 and see what happens.

 

Another oddity is that the ASW hotkeys work while in the main menu, but don't work while in-game. I sometimes also get the artifacting and ~17fps in the menu after a flight, when the flight itself ran okay. 

Do you mean the hotkeys to disable ASW work on the home scren of DCS only and not in flight?

[Nealius]

I'm not sure. The framerates don't indicate any ASW on/off change through the hotkeys in-game, but they do in the menu. The ASW artifacting does properly turn on/off in-game.

 

On that note, the white bar came back once out of my last 10 flights. My VRAM was not maxed....only 7.5GB out of 8GB....