Screen tearing / microstutter

[FUBAR]

I'm using Rift S with a 4090 / 13700K, it took me a while to isolate the issue. I get this weird screen tearing every several seconds especially at the edges when I use OVR Toolkit. It last for like a second or two. Everything is fine without it. It happens with every game regardless of the resolution or settings or frametimes.

[CurtisVL]

Hi there,

Screen tearing as in your VR view? Or the view being captured by OVR Toolkit?

Assuming you mean the game view, this sounds like the motion smoothing featured in SteamVR? (On Index)
I believe Oculus has an equivalent but I'm unsure of the name.

[FUBAR]

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Hi there,

Screen tearing as in your VR view? Or the view being captured by OVR Toolkit?

Assuming you mean the game view, this sounds like the motion smoothing featured in SteamVR? (On Index)
I believe Oculus has an equivalent but I'm unsure of the name.

Hi, this is in the game view in the headset. Any kind of motion smoothing is disabled and it looks different to it. I hate motion smoothing and know exactly how it looks. Like I said this happens exclusively with OVR Toolkit enabled and has nothing to do with performance.

[CurtisVL]

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Hi there,

Screen tearing as in your VR view? Or the view being captured by OVR Toolkit?

Assuming you mean the game view, this sounds like the motion smoothing featured in SteamVR? (On Index)
I believe Oculus has an equivalent but I'm unsure of the name.

Hi, this is in the game view in the headset. Any kind of motion smoothing is disabled and it looks different to it. I hate motion smoothing and know exactly how it looks. Like I said this happens exclusively with OVR Toolkit enabled and has nothing to do with performance.

Sorry, I'm not sure what this could be as we haven't had this reported by anyone before.

All drivers are up to date, right? Primarily GPU drivers.
Does the issue also happen in SteamVR Home?

[FUBAR]

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Hi, this is in the game view in the headset. Any kind of motion smoothing is disabled and it looks different to it. I hate motion smoothing and know exactly how it looks. Like I said this happens exclusively with OVR Toolkit enabled and has nothing to do with performance.

Sorry, I'm not sure what this could be as we haven't had this reported by anyone before.

All drivers are up to date, right? Primarily GPU drivers.
Does the issue also happen in SteamVR Home?

Actually I forgot to mention it but the problem only occurs with the newer nvidia drivers. The drivers from around September and older work fine with the toolkit, I checked multiple drivers when I was trying to figure out the issue. I also reinstalled steamVR multiple times, tried different versions, deleted Steam/config folder and a bunch of other things and the only thing that made a difference was disabling OVR Toolkit.

Now I am on the new drivers.

I have steam home disabled so can't say but if it's very important I could check.
I know it's a super weird issue, lol.

[CurtisVL]

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Sorry, I'm not sure what this could be as we haven't had this reported by anyone before.

All drivers are up to date, right? Primarily GPU drivers.
Does the issue also happen in SteamVR Home?

Actually I forgot to mention it but the problem only occurs with the newer nvidia drivers. The drivers from around September and older work fine with the toolkit, I checked multiple drivers when I was trying to figure out the issue. I also reinstalled steamVR multiple times, tried different versions, deleted Steam/config folder and a bunch of other things and the only thing that made a difference was disabling OVR Toolkit.

Now I am on the new drivers.

I have steam home disabled so can't say but if it's very important I could check.
I know it's a super weird issue, lol.

You're not wrong, it is a super weird issue. :)

And yeah, if you could, check with SteamVR Home, or with it disabled, check if it happens in the SteamVR 'void', the scene you see with no games open.

[FUBAR]

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Actually I forgot to mention it but the problem only occurs with the newer nvidia drivers. The drivers from around September and older work fine with the toolkit, I checked multiple drivers when I was trying to figure out the issue. I also reinstalled steamVR multiple times, tried different versions, deleted Steam/config folder and a bunch of other things and the only thing that made a difference was disabling OVR Toolkit.

Now I am on the new drivers.

I have steam home disabled so can't say but if it's very important I could check.
I know it's a super weird issue, lol.

You're not wrong, it is a super weird issue. :)

And yeah, if you could, check with SteamVR Home, or with it disabled, check if it happens in the SteamVR 'void', the scene you see with no games open.

Oh yes, it did happen in the void.

[CurtisVL]

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

You're not wrong, it is a super weird issue. :)

And yeah, if you could, check with SteamVR Home, or with it disabled, check if it happens in the SteamVR 'void', the scene you see with no games open.

Oh yes, it did happen in the void.

Yeahhhh, that's a really strange one then!

Honestly I'm a bit stumped on this issue, your hardware is easily capable. I'm using a similar system (4090 with a 7900X3D) with a PiMax Crystal, which should be drastically more demanding than a Quest.

The only thing I can speculate is there's some issue with the encoding? The Quest headsets have to perform encoding as the data is sent over USB-C instead of directly by DisplayPort or similar.

Though right now at least I'm not sure why this would be a problem? You have a beefy CPU, maybe check if one core is being pinned at 100% when this issue happens?

Try asking about this in #support in our Discord server too, there's some folks in there who might have some more knowledge on an issue like this than I do. I don't actively use any Quest headsets so my experience with them is very limited. :)

[FUBAR]

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Oh yes, it did happen in the void.

Yeahhhh, that's a really strange one then!

Honestly I'm a bit stumped on this issue, your hardware is easily capable. I'm using a similar system (4090 with a 7900X3D) with a PiMax Crystal, which should be drastically more demanding than a Quest.

The only thing I can speculate is there's some issue with the encoding? The Quest headsets have to perform encoding as the data is sent over USB-C instead of directly by DisplayPort or similar.

Though right now at least I'm not sure why this would be a problem? You have a beefy CPU, maybe check if one core is being pinned at 100% when this issue happens?

Try asking about this in #support in our Discord server too, there's some folks in there who might have some more knowledge on an issue like this than I do. I don't actively use any Quest headsets so my experience with them is very limited. :)

No, no. I have a Rift S, not quest :D I'll check the cores but I never noticed any changes with fpsVR when the issue happened.

[CurtisVL]

Ahhhhh, yikes.

I was reading up on this last night and with the Quest headsets it seems there's a rather common tearing issue, but this was related to the device not software on the PC.

I don't think this same issue would apply to the Rift S? It's a shame Oculus abandoned that headset so fast, it's actually a pretty neat device. Also I believe you don't have that crazy encoding overhead with that headset as it's not using USB-C. :o

[FUBAR]

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Ahhhhh, yikes.

I was reading up on this last night and with the Quest headsets it seems there's a rather common tearing issue, but this was related to the device not software on the PC.

I don't think this same issue would apply to the Rift S? It's a shame Oculus abandoned that headset so fast, it's actually a pretty neat device. Also I believe you don't have that crazy encoding overhead with that headset as it's not using USB-C. :o

Yeah it uses display port, that's why I'm still using it. If you supersample it very high the image is actually sharper than quest 2 which has a much higer panel res. Compression does terrible things to image quality.

[CurtisVL]

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Ahhhhh, yikes.

I was reading up on this last night and with the Quest headsets it seems there's a rather common tearing issue, but this was related to the device not software on the PC.

I don't think this same issue would apply to the Rift S? It's a shame Oculus abandoned that headset so fast, it's actually a pretty neat device. Also I believe you don't have that crazy encoding overhead with that headset as it's not using USB-C. :o

Yeah it uses display port, that's why I'm still using it. If you supersample it very high the image is actually sharper than quest 2 which has a much higer panel res. Compression does terrible things to image quality.

The colour banding is the worst offender IMO, it's extremely noticeable on Quest 2. :)

Apologies for the late response, I just got back from vacation today, is this issue still ongoing for you?

[FUBAR]

Originally posted by CurtisVL:

Originally posted by FUBAR:

Yeah it uses display port, that's why I'm still using it. If you supersample it very high the image is actually sharper than quest 2 which has a much higer panel res. Compression does terrible things to image quality.

The colour banding is the worst offender IMO, it's extremely noticeable on Quest 2. :)

Apologies for the late response, I just got back from vacation today, is this issue still ongoing for you?

Yeah, I had a terrible flu so couldn't really do much but I'll try to figure it out.