Unstable Framerate on Lone Echo 1; New Desktop; SteamVR games all work well

[peter.a.krause]

I recently purchased a new desktop. Core i7-12700, RTX 4070 ti, 16 Gb RAM. Windows 11.

I've been gaming with my Quest 2 over a physical link cable (Insignia with USB-c connection to computer).

I'm able to get all my SteamVR games running smoothly so far, often at quite high settings (even MS Flight Sim 2020 runs cleanly with several settings at Ultra).

So far, the original Lone Echo is the only VR game I've purchased and run through the Oculus PC app. Even when I set all its graphical settings to "low," it is essentially unplayable, hitching constantly even during the basic movement tutorials, and occasionally losing track of my right-hand Quest controller even under good lighting.

I've tried shutting down all background apps. I'm not using any boosted render scaling or changing the headset's refresh rate. The OpenXR runtime is set to "Oculus." I updated the nVidia drivers for my GPU. I can't think of anything else to try.

The constant stutters are distracting and make it unreasonably difficult to "grab on" to the scenery the way the game requires. This is a 2017 VR game running on a recently released GPU, and it's stuttering like I'm trying to play the Witcher 3 on integrated graphics. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[MetaQuestSupport]

Good day, @peter.a.krause! We fully realize that you're having some issues when running the Oculus app on your PC, so we'd want to step in and assist you in getting this resolved as quickly as possible. Since we understand how this could affect your VR experience. We'd like to start with a fantastic suggestion for you to try, if you haven't already, which is repairing the app. The steps will be listed below.
 

To repair the Oculus PC app:

1. Go to www.oculus.com/setup scroll down to Oculus Rift S and click Download software.
2. Select Repair.
3. Allow the repair process to run, download and install.
4. Launch the Oculus PC app.
   • If Windows asks you if you’re sure you want to open this file, click Yes.
   • If Windows Defender prompts Windows protected your PC, click More info and then click Run anyway.
   • If your antivirus software restricts the file from opening, temporarily disable your AV and continue.
   • Please remember to re-enable your antivirus software once you've completed the repair.

Please let us know how it goes so we can determine if any additional steps are required!

[peter.a.krause · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply! At your suggestion, I tried repairing the Oculus PC app. I didn't see any appreciable change in performance, however.

I should say for the record, that I did stumble into a fix that has resolved the problem for me, although I don't totally understand it, as it seems to suggest kind of an odd root cause. I saw in posts related to Lone Echo 2 (again, I'm playing the original) that minimizing the mirrored screen boosted performance for some people. I saw this tactic improve performance for my copy of Lone Echo 1. I actually find it difficult to get the mirrored screen to stay consistently minimized, so I've taken to turning off my desktop monitor while I play. Since trying this, the game runs like butter, even if I use the Oculus App to scale up headset resolution and refresh.

So, a happy ending, but one that suggests that something is broken in screen mirroring (doesn't cause issues in my other games). Whether this is idiosyncratic to my monitor, my cable, or what, I don't know. Is the game engine re-rendering the whole scene for screen mirroring? From what I've read that shouldn't happen, but it would explain the performance hit.