Flickering in Games

[SpoonSauce]

Using a Vive on Win10 with a 970 GTX.

I'm getting pretty bad flickering in games. DOOM in particular is really bad. I've seen posts about this suggesting messing around with vsync and refresh rate but that didn't help. Borderless window, fullscreen, windowed etc. - nothing helps. The game also seems hard locked at 72 FPS for some reason when it runs well over 100 normally.

I've also seen mentioned that one should start VD independant of SteamVR, which I have tried, but it just tells me "Virtual Desktop does not support your currently active headset." and the Vive only shows grey.

Any ideas? I'm running out of time on my 2 hour refund window troubleshooting this thing.

[ggodin]

Run Virtual Desktop directly from the executable, without Steam open at all.

[SpoonSauce]

Alright, so no Steam or SteamVR at all and I ran VD, but Steam needs to start afterwards to launch the game.

Unfortunately I've still got flickering in-game... it seems less severe using this method, but it's still there.

[Orfevs]

Flickers on my gtx 970 too.
I updated to win10 from my perfect Win7 just for the virtual desktop and HW accellerated 360 vids. Something I keep regretting, but I guess it's needed for optimal gaming too.

That aside, SteamVR doesn't run.
The Witcher 3 flickers. Dragon Age: Inquisition flickers, except in the menu. The Sims 3 doesn't start at all. Only a black screen with audio until it stops completely. It wouldn't even be possible to stop the process without the extra desktop feature from win10(WinKey-Tab) at times.
Alien Isolation works on and off..
Basically it's a gamble whether other games even start at all with VD, let alone being flicker-free.

Floating off
Transparent off
Voice commands and feedback off
MSAA x4
Force OpenVR ON (unsure if this has any impact, since games sometimes start without.)

My Specs:
Intel i7 Haswell @4GHz
16GB DDR3
NVidia GTX 970 4GB
Hybrid SSD Boot, SSD Game disk.
Windoze Ten.

[Capybarhigh]

I think the flickering comes from the HUGE performances hit the game takes when VD tries to capture it and play in VR (it does the same with the theater coming with Steam). I played a lot of Dark Souls 3 on my Vive with my 970 but it would flicker and would be totally unplayable at high or max settings (which runs smoothly at 60fps on a standard monitor). It would be in the 20s in VR. Setting low quality would make the game runs at 60FPS in VR, and the flicker never came back. It's tied to your game performances. Lower the setting until you hit 60fps in VR, and you'll be fine.

It does suck though, I don't get why the capture is SO taxing. That is the only reason it doesn't work well.

[ggodin]

Turn off MSAA and Mip Mapping, this will help with performance on the Virtual Desktop side

[Capybarhigh]

Are you talking of settings in game? Or something more general like Nvidia settings? Can you give us insight on why the video capture in VR is so taxing and takes so much juice from the computer?

Thanks for the first answer, I didn't hope for the developer himself to reply!

[SpoonSauce]

It absolutely seems to be tied to game performance and VD being really taxing on said performance, yes. Mine seems unusually sensitive though, I get flickering at almost literally anything below 90 FPS. Turning off MSAA in VD has helped somewhat.

I'd be curious to hear what ggodin has to say about real word performance vs. VD performance, NVIDIA settings etc. though.

[ggodin]

The performance overhead with Virtual Desktop is minimal: it simply copies a texture in GPU memory. What is expensive is the distortion performed by the VR compositor or Oculus runtime to render it in VR. The issue is mostly that games assume they have the GPU for themselves. When you play a game in VR, Virtual Desktop uses it and so does SteamVR's compositor.

I've heard that launching Virtual Desktop from the executable without SteamVR helps a ton, disabling MSAA in Virtual Desktop also helps.

[SpoonSauce]

Thanks! I'm really happy with Virtual Desktop otherwise. I'll just wait it out for a 1080 to game with it.

Keep up the great work!