Terrible performance on all Steam VR titles (SOLVED)

[Wilky926]

Hi all.  As the title states I'm having an absolute nightmare getting any Steam VR game to work well.
Any game I play from the Oculus store such as Robo Recall I can play on max settings with silky smooth framerate an no issues but any game I run from Steam is an absolute mess and borderline unplayable.
I have spent the last few hours googling this issue and have tried allsorts of different things and nothing has changed.
At the moment I have opted out of the steam VR beta, tried manual override of the resolution, unticked both asynchronous and interleaved reprojection and a bunch of other things I cant even remember now.
It doesn't matter how much I lower the graphic settings in any game as it doesn't seem to make much, if any difference.
My PC specs are 8700k, 1080Ti, 32gb Vengeance ram, no overclocking.  All drivers up to date.
I must add ive only been into PC gaming for a few weeks after leaving the console only gaming idea behind so use small words and speak slowly and just treat me like the console pleb I am 😉
Thanks for any help!  I'm tearing my hair out here.

[Anonymous]

Hey there. You won't like what I'll say, so be prepared 😞 .
Whenever you want to play a Steam VR game, your computer must run : 
- the Oculus software,
- the SteamVR software,
- the actual game you want to play.

That's what causes us trouble: all these apps together is too much. Not too long ago, there was something we call "the admin trick", which would prevent the oculus software from launching whenever you would run any VR app. Sadly, it has been erased for no apparent reason... Many people tried to talk to Oculus about that but we never had a proper answer.
Then there is a major performance issue from the Oculus side with the latest updates (1.27 and 1.28).

As a result, SteamVR games are now barely playable with a Rift.
So... yep. There's really nothing to do, except harass Oculus for making the "admin trick" return and for improving performance (which they've been actively destroying these past weeks...).

With all that said, I would still suggest a few things:
- close as much background apps as possible ; even though they're in the background, they're still bringing performance down. Anything useless should be closed.
- triple-check that you've got everything up to date. The drivers, the games, the OS, anything.
- check if someone else got this problem with a similar configuration.

Right now that's all I can think of, sorry ^^'.

[Wilky926]

Thankyou for the reply!  I'm actually pleased that this seems to be the issue and not just me being a ham fisted mong that has done something wrong :smiley:

[Techy111]

Just a silly thought. With the TI's just make sure any afterburner software is NOT running in the background 😉

[Wilky926]

Techy111 said:

Just a silly thought. With the TI's just make sure any afterburner software is NOT running in the background 😉

Wow really?  Ok ill give that a try thankyou!

[falken76]

I would seek tech support from Steam.  You have a beast of a machine with server level ram.  I imagine someone going into a high tech store and saying "I need a computer, before you answer, I have no idea what is good and what is not.  But all I have to do is check email and look at web pages"  Then they gave you that machine while biting their fist like David spade while saying in a high pitch voice "He's signing it!!!"

Seriously though, they should hopefully be able to help you.  I have an I7 7700k w/ a 1060 6gb and 16 gb ram and steam games don't have any issues for me whatsoever.  Welcome to the PC world where this kind of stuff is common place.  My machine plays all steam games flawlessly but I can't use Home 2.0 beta because it won't work with my monitors, others with near identical setups don't have the same issue.  There's a conflict somewhere and considering these machines can have a million and one different configurations, it's not that surprising in the end.  I hope steam can get to the bottom of it though because your machine is top of the line and could run circles around many of the machines people are using right now.

[BeastyBaiter]

I have an 8700k, GTX 1080 Ti and 16GB DDR4 and have no issues with steamVR games. I suspect you have the super-sampling/pixel density setting screwed up. Recently, steamVR started auto-adjusting super sampling in games. I believe it targets 45 fps instead of 90. That's a bit of a problem. To solve this issue, there are two areas in steamVR settings you must adjust:

First, go to the Video tab and check manual override. Once done, set the slider to 100%. This is a global setting. Second, go to the Applications tab and select 100% for each of the programs/games listed. Once done, you are effectively using the same resolution you would be in Oculus Home games.

If this solves the problem, you can up the super sampling in individual games in the Application tab. Just be aware that super-sampling is a massive performance drain.

As a final consideration, what games are you actually playing? Steam does not make any attempt at curation and so some games have far higher system requirements than others. Some of these are unreasonably high as not even absolute top of the line systems like ours are fully up to the task without dropping detail settings significantly.

[RattyUK]

I have no issues with performance in SteamVR games either, but had video settings on 100% (global) as @BeastyBaiter  has suggested you do.

You should not really have any problems with the performance of your setup, very high end hardware 🙂

If you are on Windows 10 1803 you may also like to consider reverting to 1709 - but that may take a reinstall of Windows if your starting point was in the last month or so, 1803 has a myriad of issues which are yet to be addressed outside of the enterprise sector...

Welcome and enjoy 😄

[Wilky926]

Guys your all amazing thankyou!
I set Oculus to run as admin so it doesn't auto start when I launch a Steam VR game, I did what BeastyBaiter said and set manual override to 100% (was set to 200% automatically) and I closed down MSI afterburner as Techy111 said.
One or all of these have resulted in silky smooth 90fps on all game :smiley: 
Thankyou so much!  I can now properly enjoy my new toy!

[Danzig8]

BeastyBaiter said:

I have an 8700k, GTX 1080 Ti and 16GB DDR4 and have no issues with steamVR games. I suspect you have the super-sampling/pixel density setting screwed up. Recently, steamVR started auto-adjusting super sampling in games. I believe it targets 45 fps instead of 90. That's a bit of a problem. To solve this issue, there are two areas in steamVR settings you must adjust:

First, go to the Video tab and check manual override. Once done, set the slider to 100%. This is a global setting. Second, go to the Applications tab and select 100% for each of the programs/games listed. Once done, you are effectively using the same resolution you would be in Oculus Home games.

If this solves the problem, you can up the super sampling in individual games in the Application tab. Just be aware that super-sampling is a massive performance drain.

As a final consideration, what games are you actually playing? Steam does not make any attempt at curation and so some games have far higher system requirements than others. Some of these are unreasonably high as not even absolute top of the line systems like ours are fully up to the task without dropping detail settings significantly.

@BeastyBaiter I would like to follow your instructions above, but am getting stuck. Forgive my ignorance, but how do I find the SteamVR settings? I can't find the Video Tab you mention.

BTW, great community spirit in this place.