Low FPS despite low GPU & CPU utilization

[jster409]

I've just gotten into VR with IL-2 (using on Oculus Rift), and am having a perplexing issue. My FPS are locked at 44 (with occasional drops below), despite my CPU utilization never going above 50% and my GPU utlization never above 60% (according to fpsVR). My average FPS are usually in the 50-65 range, and I've read elsewhere here that being locked at 44 is a function of reprojection. fpsVR says my reprojection ratio is around 20-25%. My GPU and CPU frametimes are usually in the red. 

 

One possible culprit: My SteamVR Supersampling shows at 150%. And -- embarrassing confession of techno-stupidity -- I can't figure out how to change it, because every description I can find online of changing SS in SteamVR seems to refer to prior versions of SteamVR.

 

I'm assuming in-game graphics settings are not the issue,  because neither my GPU nor CPU are anywhere near maxed out. I have power settings in Windows, NVIDIA Contorl Panel and even Oculus Tray Tool set to prefer max performance, btw. Any insights? Thank you in advance for saving my sanity.

Edited July 6, 2020 by jster409
Fixing auto-correct of reprojection to “reproduction”

[chiliwili69]

3 hours ago, jster409 said:

my CPU utilization never going above 50%

CPU utilization is telling you nothing in IL-2 VR. That % is just an average utilization of your cores but since IL-2 is very much single-threaded dependent, your PC can be actually  bottlenecked by your CPU and the % can be very low.

 

3 hours ago, jster409 said:

My GPU and CPU frametimes are usually in the red.

As you did, best thing is to chek fps with fpsVR. If both are in red then both CPU and GPU are bottlenecking your CPU.

For CPU: You can overclock you CPU or decrease some game settings

For GPU: You can decrease SS in SteamVR (put it in manual mode) or just bypass SteamVR using OpenComposite. You can also reduce clouds settings and avoid MSAA filter.

[Dutch2]

To be sure inhere set your il2.exe (and not the Il2 Launcher) in Nvidia game profile, all the settings to “application controlled” and do not use the Nvidia Vsync, frame limitations and Supersample tricks, let the game arrange that. 

[jster409]

Thanks all! I’ll try to log CPU utilization by core while IL-2 is running, to see if fpsVR is indeed showing the average across cores and a single core is maxed out. (I think Windows Performance Monitor will do that, but other utility suggestions are welcome).

 

If, after tweaking, I’m still seeing an average of around 60 FPS, am I better off being locked at a steady 44, or letting the game run at the fluctuating, but higher, FPS? And if the latter, how do I get it to “unlock” from the 44 FPS? 

[coconut]

It’s not the cores you have to look at, as windows moves threads from core to core. Better to look at individual threads in process explorer and see if any threads is at 100% / (# logical cores). But from my experience, 40-50% overall cpu utilization is all I’ll get on my 4-core i5 (idk if that’s what you got too). 

[jster409]

1 hour ago, coconut said:

It’s not the cores you have to look at, as windows moves threads from core to core. Better to look at individual threads in process explorer and see if any threads is at 100% / (# logical cores). But from my experience, 40-50% overall cpu utilization is all I’ll get on my 4-core i5 (idk if that’s what you got too). 

Thanks, I’ll look at that! And yes, my CPU is four cores too (i7 6700K at 4.2 GHz; GPU is a 1080; memory is 32GB DDR4 3000 Mhz).