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Re: VR STILL NOT FIXED

I'm not finding performance issues for any other VR game I still play with my 3080, I should mention I run a Virtual Reality Arcade so I'm well aware of how they work, it's not repo or motion smoothing. The problem lies in how they deal with Frame Rate, they've clearly made massive assumptions based on 60hz which is fine for your PSVR and works well on the Valve Index which can do 120hz and is why you need to turn down to 60hz to get anything decent but somehow they didn't seem to realise that the majority of VR HMDs run at 90hz. Honestly they've tried to squeeze VR out of an engine that was never designed with it in mind and it really shows.

13 Replies

  • I should also mention I get the same issues on the 1080TIs I have at my Arcade running either the HTC Vive Pro or Quest 2 with them as well so this is not just a 3XXX problem.

  • From what Nvidia says, it's supposedly a problem with Nvidia drivers newer than some from last May (I think 446.14 worked best when I tested with a 2080 Ti when I still had it, but I didn't test many drivers and some versions from later in the summer may also work well). Why the problem is worse on 3XXX Series cards is that these cards don't support any drivers older than 456.38 so you can't roll back to improve VR performance like you can with older cards until a new driver that fixes VR performance is available. Going by that, one should also see performance difference with newer drivers compared to older drivers in VR with a 1080Ti as well.
    Here is more information:

    Manuel@NVIDIA has confirmed the long standing VR stutter issue will be fixed in the next driver update : virtualreality (reddit.com)

    But yes, this doesn't seem to be the only problem with Squadrons VR as it performs worse than it should. I indeed find that 60Hz runs way better than 90Hz on my Reverb G2 as well, so you could be right about that, especially since the game used to even have problems at anything above 60Hz in non-VR mode before. Then again, I thought that being able to run at a constant 90FPS on a HP Reverb G2 at 100% Supersampling/Resolution Scale (3172x3096 Resolution per eye) is a tall order even for the most powerful graphics cards (which I also observed with other demanding games like MS Flight Simulator and Assetto Corsa Competizione, although those games arguably suffer from a CPU bottleneck more than anything even on the most modern CPUs), but if an expert like you experiences similar issues with lower resolution headsets (which I sadly can't test), there's definitely something wrong.
    On a side note, what's also very odd is that if I minimize the game and task out of it while I'm in VR, the game will run way smoother in VR than it does when the game is the active window, too.
    I've also seen people say that the game ran better in VR before one of the last patches, but I can't confirm that, as I didn't have a VR headset back then.

  • JettStiles's avatar
    JettStiles
    5 years ago

    Every game has its problems and sometimes it won't work for everyone. This game however has gotten worse from the start - the performance dropped immensly after one of the first updates. Wouldn't be so bad if there was a sign or an acknowledgement that they are still working on patches for VR...but so far..zip, nada, nilch

    What pisses me off the most is the lack of customer support - you can't open a normal ticket, the only option at this point is to go through a chat with 1st-Level-Support who copies and pastes answers from a sheet. No help from EA whatsoever. This was one of the games that I was really looking forward to and with all the VR-hype they started before release I'd have expected a more finished product.


  • @JettStiles wrote:

    Every game has its problems and sometimes it won't work for everyone. This game however has gotten worse from the start - the performance dropped immensly after one of the first updates. Wouldn't be so bad if there was a sign or an acknowledgement that they are still working on patches for VR...but so far..zip, nada, nilch

    What pisses me off the most is the lack of customer support - you can't open a normal ticket, the only option at this point is to go through a chat with 1st-Level-Support who copies and pastes answers from a sheet. No help from EA whatsoever. This was one of the games that I was really looking forward to and with all the VR-hype they started before release I'd have expected a more finished product.


    Hello there ! 

    Desperately looking for help too... 

    For now... 

    Patience and hopes ! 

    I was able to run the game in VR with 100% resolution on oculus quest 2 via link, with all graphics settings at ultra. It was smooth and gorgeous ! 

    A game update + Nvidia drivers broke everything... Now i have an unstable experience at 80% res and low graphics settings... 

    Performance issues you said ? 

    Sure devs are aware of it and Hopefully planned to fix it !

    EA, MOTIVE, Criterion, Nvidia, you are our Last hope... 

    May The Force Be With You, Always... 

    My specs are i7-8th gen rtx 2070 8gb vram, 16gb ram, SSD, Windows 10 64bit blablabla... 

  • Ixixly's avatar
    Ixixly
    5 years ago

    This is exactly the problem!! Even more frustrating is that now I just want a refund, they're beyond useless. We stuck around giving them the benefit of the doubt because they acknowledged the issue and said they'd fix it, now it's months later, they still haven't followed through and if you request a refund it's "Too bad, too sad" despite being fundamentally broken!! To make matters worse we should be covered under Australian Consumer Law, they acknowledge it in their own policy and when you talk to support they still say they won't give a refund, it's beyond ridiculous and is quite frankly illegal, Steam has already had their * handed to them for these dodgy tactics and I hope EA gets the same treatment very shortly.

    Also it's NOT a driver issue or a 3XXX issue, I've tried on the GTX1060, GTX1080ti and RTX3080 with the OQ2, Vive, Vive Pro and HP Reverb G2 and it has not worked properly on ANY of them, the closest was the G2 on 60hz which is just a mess itself.

    I hope anyone else with the same issue finds this post and replies to it, I'm not sure if we can get an acknowledgement but I'm hopeful we can and I'll be taking this up with the Fair Trading group in my state to have this sorted which I hope opens the flood gates for others to get a refund too. The agents are BEYOND useless, I get that YOU might not be able to give a refund but claiming you can't elevate it to someone else that can is an outright lie and anyone who has worked in Customer Service and in particular Online Customer Service knows this is a lie.

  • Cave_Waverider's avatar
    Cave_Waverider
    5 years ago

    @ChadSquadron88 Try to install the 446.14 drivers from May 2020 for your Nvidia card. These didn't suffer from the Nvidia VR Performance bug. New drivers that are finally supposed to fix the issue after all these months should hopefully be coming in one of the upcoming drivers, though so GeForce RTX 3xxx series users will be able to enjoy full performance VR as well (see https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/kzwtia/manuelnvidia_has_confirmed_the_long_standing_vr/).

    It should help a little bit with performance, although it might not fix any issues introduced by the recent game updates, though. For that, EA/Motive will have to provide a fix.

    Curious, did any of guys try to change the skybox to lower resolution (Should be GstRender.SkyCelestialQuality_VR in \Documents\STAR WARS Squadrons\settings\ProfileOptions_profile)? I read that one of the patches changed it to higher resolution, I wonder if that could be one of the culprits. Also, I read the default Render Scale VR option (GstRender.ResolutionScaleVR 0.800000) previously was 80% (I assume before there was a slider for it). Does setting it back to 80% in the game together with the lower quality Skybox bring the VR performance back to previous levels for anyone that had VR in squadron working better or does it still perform worse than before?

  • ChadSquadron88's avatar
    ChadSquadron88
    5 years ago
    @Cave_Waverider Hey, even if not a fan of this method, I've tryied Rolling back Nvidia drivers already, but not so far, as the game worked pretty well on my setup somewhere between October and November...
    Also, I'm not enough used to modify settings (not in game modifiers) and i don't want to break something...

    I'm aware about Nvidia's drivers fix, should be released through 2 upcoming updates. Fingers crossed ! 🤞

    Considering the game works pefectly in VR on ps4 pro, I'm sure they can fix the pc VR optimisation and stability !

    Hope Motive will investigate all this (including shields effects, skybox resolution, vram usage, everything that could cause all those performance problems and issues, stuttering etc) to provide us an update too !

    May be a direct skybox res ingame modifier/slider could help in a way ?

    May The Force Be With Us, Always !

    For now, I can't play fleet battles anymore because of game stability...
    I love this game, please help us.

  • ChadSquadron88's avatar
    ChadSquadron88
    5 years ago
    @Cave_Waverider After few tests with Last hotfix Nvidia driver, I'm still definitely in need of a game update...
    Maybe someone could help me with Nvidia's control panel settings ?
    Not able to find a solution by myself...
  • Cave_Waverider's avatar
    Cave_Waverider
    5 years ago

    @ChadSquadron88 The 461.33 Nvidia Hotfix drivers helped a little bit for me, they got rid of some intermittent stutters and I can play smoothly with maxed out settings (except Volumetrics which need to be on Medium or lower for the game not to crash upon loading the Yavin map in VR) and 100% Supersampling/Resolution Scale at 60Hz on my HP Reverb G2 and RTX 3090/Core i7 9900K/64GB DDR4-3600 RAM and NVMe SSD now. 90Hz above 60% Supersampling is still a stutter fest, though. So yeah, hopefully a Squadrons Patch can fix performance in the future.

    As for Nvidia Control Panel settings, you can try setting the following for Squadrons:
    Texture Filtering - Quality: High Performance
    Anti-Aliasing: Application Controlled
    AntiAliasing-Transparency: Off
    Vertical Snyc Off
    Threaded Optimization: Off
    Power Management Mode: Prefer Maximum Performance
    Virtual Reality Pre-Rendered Frames: 1
    Virtual Reality - Variable Rate Super Sampling: Adaptive
    or Always On

    Some general tweaks you can try to improve performance:

    1. Right-click on starwarssquadrons.exe, Compatibility, then tick Disable Fullscreen Optimizations.

    2. Open your shortcut or launcher options and add  -USEALLAVAILABLECORES -high to the end of the shortcut and/or launch options.
    3. Disable Game Mode in Windows 10.
    4. Right-click on the Desktop, click Display Settings, click on Graphics Settings and under Graphics Performance Preference select Desktop App, click Browse and select starwarssquadrons.exe. Then set it to High Performance. While there, you can also try turning Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling to Off if it's on (requires you to restart Windows).

    5. Disable any overlays you may be using (Origin, Steam, RTSS, Xbox Game Bar, etc.).
    6. Make sure you aren't running any monitoring Software (MSI Afterburner, RTSS, ASUS GPU Tweak, EVGA Precision, fpsVR, FRAPS, etc.), since that still causes issues with Nvidia Drivers and can decrease performance overall.

    7. Minimize Squadrons, Mixed Reality Portal, SteamVR, Oculus or any other software you have to be running for the game (close any not-needed software) and click on the desktop while you're playing Squadrons in VR as that seems to improve performance.

    8. Disable or Enable Motion Smoothing/Reprojection and Advanced Supersampling and see if one or the other works better for you.
    9. Run your HMD with a lower refresh rate.

    10. Set your Windows Power Plan to High Performance or even Ultimate Peformance (if available on your PC).

  • Ixixly's avatar
    Ixixly
    5 years ago

    This is the problem though, why should we be expected to make all these massive changes to get THEIR game to work?! It's an absolute disgrace they can't just admit they've screwed up and offer refunds.

    And even with these tweaks it can't be gotten to run properly at 90hz on a damned 3090 which has about 1.8x the performance of the recommended GTX1070. I feel like we've given them more than enough time and leeway on this but enough is enough. It shouldn't take me 10+ hrs each time there is an update to go through and figure out if it's working or how to get it to work and as far as they're concerned VR is working and they don't give a damn anymore.

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