Performance Expectations

Hi guys,

I'd like to know if this is what I should expect, or if something is wrong here:

Nvideo 960 GTX
Pentium 3Ghz dual core Haswell.

Basically my game is running at around 400fps with non oculus FirstPersonController (in game window - say 1/4 screen)

But swap it for the oculus controller (and camera) prefab, and I'm down to 30-80fps in the same game window.

Now I've been round the houses with vsync on and off, DX9 and dx9 vsync on/off... no difference.

Full screen, just pushing the game window full screen onto oculus I get same results:

- around 300-350 fps with FirstPersonController (obviously rendering regular non oculus video to oculus display)
- 70-80 fps with oculus, but not at all stable - some bits see it dip as low as 30 or 40.

Now - the scene is pretty simple as can be seen from the massive FPS I get with it running as a regular game.

And I expect a performance penalty to run it for oculus - there's some extra rendering for the second view, the generation of the chromatic aberrations,etc - but most of this should be on the GPU... and it should be SOOOO massive a performance hit surely ?

The only explanation I can think of just now, and it bears out with the profiling capture - is that something that the oculus SDK or unity oculus artefacts is doing is a complete CPU hog.

This seems also to be bared out if I play with quality settings:

- for normal first person view, I see FPS going way up into the 1000 at low quality.
- for oculus - only a small jump to around 100 and still very unstable.

If my premise is correct and it's some crappy CPU code in oculus, then none of that code is going to be affects by quality settings - i.e. it has to do exactly the same thing more or less to 'oculusize' the view - whether it's got fancy shadows or not.

Does that summary make sense ?

It seems to leave me 2 options:

1. upgrade CPU to something like a quad core i5 (within budget). And hope that whatever crappy code oculus is trying to run with be multithreaded enough to make use of the extra cores, and let the FPS scale up properly.
2. something else I'm missing ???