Anybody with a Rift and GTX Titan or AMD equivalent

I tried the demo with my overclocked GTX 780. There is something weird in the scene. I ran the demo with 3 monitors and a 5760x1080 resolution and fantastic settings. The graphics card only got to a 55 Celsius temperature and the framerate was between 30-40. With 1920x1080 resolution I didn't seem to get any performance boost. The demo is clearly not using all of the graphics horsepower, but the framerate isn't going up either. Looking at the GPU clock speed it's only going up to about half of the maximum.

Even with the lowest settings and 640x480 resolution I only get like 40-50 fps. It's 60fps in the begining, but starts to go down soon.

edit: GTX 780 is very similar to the Titan. Titan is slightly faster and has twice as much memory. However I don't think that memory should be an issue in this case.

Have you used the Unity Profiler to check your demo? http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/Profiler.html

are you doing any occlusion culling?

have you looked at this page? http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/OptimizingGraphicsPerformance.html

It does look more like I need to optimise because if a GTX780 is only getting 40-50 fps then upgrading is not the answer.

I did look at occlusion but being a novice could not get it to work well and even locked up Unity while processing.

Thanks for reports and I will look at this closer.

"vrexperience" wrote:
It does look more like I need to optimise because if a GTX780 is only getting 40-50 fps then upgrading is not the answer.

I did look at occlusion but being a novice could not get it to work well and even locked up Unity while processing.

Thanks for reports and I will look at this closer.

One possibility is that the problem is with CPU optimizing. I noticed that the demo was using 8-12% of my overall CPU power. That doesn't sound alot, but I have a 6 core processor with hyperthreading on. This means that my CPU is split to 12 different threads. One comon problem is that game engines are incapable of using multiple cores or threads efficiently. One of the CPU threads was running around 80-90% with the demo. It might be that 1 core is beign maxed out and the engine is uncabable of giving tasks to other cores. In that case the games framerate is dependend on the speed of a single CPU core.

One thing you could also try is changing the rendering to deferred. The normal forward rending is kinda slow.

Just to close this out, I decided it was daft to get the upgraded GPU until upgrading my motherboard which I have had for over five years and it worked brilliantly. The old motherboard was a 3.1ghz Dual Core AMD board with 4gb ram.

After checking CPU utilisation and using the Unity profile checker that showed this CPU was at most being 80-90% utilised and the GPU was thrashing with my VRTown demo, that the CPU and board were coping and it was the GPU not being good enough and at worst this demo ran at 15fps.

Any way I ordered an AMD Black edition 8 core (No AMD not 8 true cores) and a great Gigabyte SKT-AM3+ 990FXA-UD5 motherboard. I fitted it all together and even Windows 8 just adjusted itself to work on the new system like in the old days, but no drivers needed. Well until it told me I needed a new license :-(

Now to the point, this doubled my frame rate. Where I was dropping to 15fps I never go lower than 30fps now and most of time around 50-60fps even with this complex environment, GTX660ti, awesome.

I guess Unity just adapts to the hardware :-)

Thanks for reading

Steve
Now I am looking

I just want to cut in here and (bump) mention that because of Captaintrips reference to ECC memory (from Nvidia Tesla reference) I have learned that cosmic rays are flipping bits in my damn computer.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory)

NOOOOOO...

Quad Titans rig and tri 290X rig if you or anyone else needs >2 card multi gpu testing.

Nvidia rig on a 4790 & AMD rig on a 9590

Based on people's comments here it seems oculus may be over stating the requirements somewhat unless your demo is just trivial which again, based on comments doesn't seem to be the case.

Out of curiosity - are you self taught or a student in the field or a graduate learning a new engine?

Just curious!

Edit: o m g - epic necro lol. Either Google fails or literally nobody talks about last generations cards when it comes to VR >.<

Nice grave-dig.