What causes periodic-often-small FPS dips?

[conejeitor]

The game has always run fine, and I´m not sure that may be I´m just noticing these FPS dips because I´m playing the campaign for the fourth time.
They go from 80 to 70 (Rift S) for a millisecond, but they are annoying. I haven´t played for a while, so may be it is some update issue, or, as I said, may be I´m only noticing them now.

The fact is, they are meassureable (by MSI) and WEIRDLY, they match dips in GPU and CPU usage. So most of the time CPU and GPU are maxed, except during those FPS dips.
When the problem is hardware, dips usually match GPU and CPU max usage. This is the oposite.

What might be causing them?

[IanL]

Could be disk reads, paging etc. Just a suggestion.

[Alizea]

Probably "Asynchronous Spacewarp" from Oculus.

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-spacewarp/

TLDR from link above : Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) is a frame-rate smoothing technique that almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content. Like Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW), ASW is automatic and enabled without any additional effort from developers.

[conejeitor]

Origineel geplaatst door Alizea:

Probably "Asynchronous Spacewarp" from Oculus.

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-spacewarp/

TLDR from link above : Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) is a frame-rate smoothing technique that almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content. Like Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW), ASW is automatic and enabled without any additional effort from developers.

I think that is really what compensates for the drops, but the drop itself must be caused by something else.
I just checked and the drops are just from 80 to 76, but still very noticeable.

[IvanTheRexouium]

Origineel geplaatst door conejeitor:

Origineel geplaatst door Alizea:

Probably "Asynchronous Spacewarp" from Oculus.

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-spacewarp/

TLDR from link above : Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) is a frame-rate smoothing technique that almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content. Like Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW), ASW is automatic and enabled without any additional effort from developers.

I think that is really what compensates for the drops, but the drop itself must be caused by something else.
I just checked and the drops are just from 80 to 76, but still very noticeable.

Are you running on an SSD? Source (and Source 2) have an issue of stuttering when assets load for the first time on slower storage, asset streaming isn't great in these engines, but having fast storage helps a bit.

I know that on RTX gpus, there's also a bit of an issue with Half-Life Alyx that causes the same issue, if you're on an RTX gpu, I'd suggest either trying to use SteamCMD to downgrade HLA to the release build and playing that, or if you are unable to do that, maybe find another way to play the version 1 build considering you already have the game. yar har fiddle dee dee

I did testing on this last year along with a few other people, and we came to the conclusion that hardware released before Half-Life Alyx did is more likely to perform better than hardware released after the game on the later versions, but newer hardware works best on the old version for some reason.

[conejeitor]

Origineel geplaatst door IvanTheWolf:

Origineel geplaatst door conejeitor:

I think that is really what compensates for the drops, but the drop itself must be caused by something else.
I just checked and the drops are just from 80 to 76, but still very noticeable.

Are you running on an SSD? Source (and Source 2) have an issue of stuttering when assets load for the first time on slower storage, asset streaming isn't great in these engines, but having fast storage helps a bit.

I know that on RTX gpus, there's also a bit of an issue with Half-Life Alyx that causes the same issue, if you're on an RTX gpu, I'd suggest either trying to use SteamCMD to downgrade HLA to the release build and playing that, or if you are unable to do that, maybe find another way to play the version 1 build considering you already have the game. yar har fiddle dee dee

I did testing on this last year along with a few other people, and we came to the conclusion that hardware released before Half-Life Alyx did is more likely to perform better than hardware released after the game on the later versions, but newer hardware works best on the old version for some reason.

Thanks. I am running it from a new SSD which is not the local disk. I wonder if that is an issue.
I have a GTX 1080, which cuts it fairly well, but as I said this drop matches a drop in GPU usage (milliseconds), not a rise.

[YoYoNinjaBoy]

disabling asw does not fix this (however i've found that if the game incorrectly thinks your settings are too high disabling asw does fix that)

OP the game is borked for oculus users. Learn to live with it or refund.

[conejeitor]

Origineel geplaatst door YoYoNinjaBoy:

disabling asw does not fix this (however i've found that if the game incorrectly thinks your settings are too high disabling asw does fix that)

OP the game is borked for oculus users. Learn to live with it or refund.

Ohh, as I said, I´m playing the campaign for the 4th time, so I did learned how to live with it. It wasn´t half bad.

[IvanTheRexouium]

Origineel geplaatst door YoYoNinjaBoy:

disabling asw does not fix this (however i've found that if the game incorrectly thinks your settings are too high disabling asw does fix that)

OP the game is borked for oculus users. Learn to live with it or refund.

It's a conflict with modern hardware (2020+) and drivers and the updated build of the game, the 1.0 build literally doesn't have this microstutter issue for Oculus, Index, or WMR users.

There needs to a push by the community to get Valve to notice this issue, right now it seems to be a very low priority issue to fix for them, considering Half-Life 1 has had more updates in the past year than HLA.