RX 6800 POOR PERFORMANCE AND DROPPED FRAME RATES?

[Trouble]

Thought I got lucky and scored a new RX 6800. Seems to not play well with just VR
won't run my index, at times it barely can run 80fps, and times drop to below 40fps. spent 3 days tweaking, updating software, turning things on and off to no avail. Runs benchmark software well, very well. but the moment I fire up Steam VR, and I mean just the home screen, not an actual game performance just tanks. Have calls out to graphics card company and a inquire into Steam VR support, but dam they are slow to respond. any help would be appreciated.

[Trouble]

Zarlock, your answer seems to hit the nail on the head of my exact thinking.
Assuming everything your saying is correct and by my experience it's turning into it, question is how long will it take. to get fixed? I know you don't know that answer just asking out loud. My decision is starting to be, Do I go out and buy a used 2080ti, because I know it will work, and I'm tired of spending now over $2,000 on a machine that do'sent even do what it's supposed to do. This is my first experience into PC gaming and VR. and well this VR thing will NEVER grow if this is the normal experience, to say the least it's been a F***ING nightmarish joke of an experience to just play some video games. So I'm ranting now, but appreciate everyone that has chimed in with ideas and suggestions, maybe together we can get Steam off there ass and work with the GPU companies to solve the issues at hand. because I haven't seen anything of that idea, on forums, or youtube, or news releases. Guess we wait until then. best of luck to you all.

[Lumion]

I unpacked and hooked up my Index yesterday. Simple games like Beat Saber seem fine on the 5700XT except for the chaperone boundary, which causes dropped frames when approached, same as the Vive. However, it seems like the dropped frames are less distracting on the Index due to the higher refresh rate.

I then fired up Alyx, and played for about an hour. As others have reported, I noticed the dropped frames throughout the game without approaching the boundary, and at one time the game even crashed, Very frustrating. I have not opened a ticket on the matter, but I am considering it.

[Zarlock]

I think our best bet is to be patient. It is after all the Holydays and people are resting some weeks after this very difficult year. The fact this problem seems to interest both users of AMD and NVIDIA cards, while presenting with very similar, if not identical characteristics, makes me think the solution will have to come from Steam itself and you know what? I'm starting to think it might eventually be included within an actual VR Headset firmware update.

Also worth noting: there is a very active user with a 3000 series card, affected like us, on the NVIDIA forums who has currently pointed at new features of their drivers like WDDM 2.7 and Hardware GPU Scheduling which might be the culprit, that (if present for AMD too, as I very much suspect) we just cannot disable on our side. Check out his post history for more information on this theory: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/user/613013/

Let me state clearly, in addition, how this situation is absolutely out of the norm for VR. SteamVR has been a very stable platform for me over the entire last two years, during which I experienced absolutely zero problems with my 1080ti.

[Lumion]

Update: I have a configuration that seems to be working for me. Alyx is super smooth with basically no frame drops.

Here's what I did:
- Using AMD driver 20.11.2 (latest stable WHQL)
- Radeon Software -> Performance -> Tuning -> Overclock GPU (improved frame render time)
- In SteamVR set frame rate to 120 (was getting a lot of orange/red at 144, even with OC GPU)
- In SteamVR, draw a Play Area that is about an arms length LARGER than your actual play area (careful!), and set the chaperone activation distance to as small as possible, so it basically never activates. (huge impact on reducing frame drops)
Note: I tried setting it to standing room only, and that was still causing frame drops.

I played Alyx for a good hour with this config and had no noticeable frame drops during gameplay.. There is a frame drop when opening/closing the game menu, or teleporting, but that doesn't really matter.

HW specs of my setup:
- Valve Index
- Radeon 5700XT
- AMD Ryzen 3 3100 CPU
- 16 GB DDR4
- 512GB Samsung EVO SSD

[Lumion]

Found another workaround for the chaperone frame dropping issue.. Install OpenVR Advanced Settings, then disable chaperone, and replace it with a vibration or audio indicator.
https://github.com/OpenVR-Advanced-Settings/OpenVR-AdvancedSettings/
After installing, you will find the OVR settings button in the SteamVR overlay menu.

[cloud1900]

Thanks for all this discussion. I've had the identical issue with the chaperone since I got my Index a bit over a month ago. As you all concluded, on my RX 480 and RX 5700 XT, the steam overlay was causing frame drops and none of the software changes I made seemed to address the issue. As some others found, unplugging the monitor HDMI cable from the card itself seems to alleviate the issue for me, but isn't ideal. It would be great if this could get addressed by an AMD / SteamVR update. Thanks for the suggestions about using OVR to replace the visual chaperone, I'll have to try that out!

[DmAnd]

Wow, Thanks everyone!. I have been banging my head against the wall for at least a month now trying to get a new card for VR.

After reading through this stuff, i don't mind waiting till they go down to MSRP. Maybe by then this stuff will be sorted out.

[Zarlock]

Guys, I think I discovered something very important.

Today I had the opportunity to test my system with an Oculus CV1 HMD (the first one) that I used extensively both in Oculus VR and SteamVR mode. And well, you know what? The stutter was completely absent, I didn't experience it even once. What are the possible implications of this? Could it be that the entire problem, at least in my case, is caused from a specific HARDWARE incompatibility of the Valve Index with the 6800 xt?

And about the chaperone: thanks for the advice but mine has always been disabled via both FPSVr and Ovr Settings even before I got the new card.

[Otávio]

Motion reprojection is completely broken with AMD's new cards

[dudemack]

Zarlock původně napsal:

Guys, I think I discovered something very important.

Today I had the opportunity to test my system with an Oculus CV1 HMD (the first one) that I used extensively both in Oculus VR and SteamVR mode. And well, you know what? The stutter was completely absent, I didn't experience it even once. What are the possible implications of this? Could it be that the entire problem, at least in my case, is caused from a specific HARDWARE incompatibility of the Valve Index with the 6800 xt?

And about the chaperone: thanks for the advice but mine has always been disabled via both FPSVr and Ovr Settings even before I got the new card.

That's very interesting. My experience has been very mixed. I first played Half Life Alyx in April/May on a borrowed HTC Vive on an 8 Gb RX-580, 16 GB of ram, and Ryzen 7 2700X and windows 7. At first I had trouble just getting the game to run but figured out a way to do it and had no problems. It ran very smooth. I gave the HTC Vive back to my friend and ordered the Valve Index because I wanted to be able to play games in Linux. I also added an additional 16 Gb of ram so that I now had 32 Gb. A few months later the Index arrived and I got it all setup and it ran terrible, both in SteamVR Home and Half Life Alyx. There was all kinds of framedrops every time I moved my head. If I didn't move my head the game ran fine. So I tried many things and nothing seemed to really make it really better, only worse or very slightly better. I bought an 8Gb RX5700XT and had even worse performance.

So far the only thing that has really made a huge difference is by pressing the Application Throttling Toggle button in SteamVR Developer Tools once SteamVR is opened. Then I run Half Life Alyx and it runs great (other than immediately after a level is loaded), very smooth. I have the barebones AMD drivers installed (all drivers removed using DDU, and manually install the drivers in the device manager by selecting the AMD folder). I can vouch that the Radeon Anti-lag was terrible before but now the Radeon software is not installed anyways so I don't have any of those options anymore.

Others have told me that this halves the framerate so that might be why it seems to run well. I don't have any software measuring FPS so I don't know what it is on my display but it feels plenty smooth. You can select 144 hz and if it is halving it then the display should actually be 72 hz. At least this is what I've been able to use for the last couple months and have played through the whole game twice with only a couple random crashes near the beginning of the game (unknown cause).

On Linux, using the Linux SteamVR beta also seems to work OK.

Anyhow, it would be nice if you guys could try that Application Throttling Toggle button just to see if it works for you. I was having trouble in SteamVR home too and this solved both there and Half Life Alyx. It's just so weird that I didn't have any issues like this on the HTC Vive with a less powerful card.

[Trouble]

I can't find that toggle under developer. name does not match any buttons
Where is it exactly?

[dudemack]

TroubleShoesPony původně napsal:

I can't find that toggle under developer. name does not match any buttons
Where is it exactly?

Here's some screenshots (I'm using SteamVR Beta):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2281623001

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2281623465

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2281623944

There's no obvious sign that the button was pressed so I just open it and click it once and then close the debug tools window.

[Lumion]

Has anyone tried the AMD Pro drivers? I tried them today (on Windows), and it seems like it helps a lot. The SteamVR overlay and Chaperone no longer cause any frame drops, and Alyx seems really smooth without any tweaking of settings. I get a little bit of jitter for a few seconds when the level is first loaded up, but after that it's super smooth.

Give the pro drivers a try and let me know if it helps. You can find them on the driver download page for your video card, under "AMD Pro Software for Enterprise.

Edit: The Pro drivers aren't supported on the 6000-series cards at this time. Others have confirmed that installing the Pro drivers seems to resolve the issue on the 5000-series cards. Pro drivers (20.Q4) download link: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-pro-win-20-q4

[Otávio]

Can you use those drivers with an RX 6800?

[Lumion]

Otávio původně napsal:

Can you use those drivers with an RX 6800?

I don't see the Pro drivers listed for the 6800, but they are for the 5700. Try installing the one from the 5700 driver download page. It'll probably work the same.