First, to those celebrating in the States (but really to everyone), happy Thanksgiving and thanks for your support through the past three years.
Those watching my recent VR streams know that I have struggled with performance issues. This goes back quite a time
, actually — ever since I got the 1080ti, although they have been worse since I replaced the Rift with the Rift S.
The problem: after loading with great performance, as high as 50-60 FPS in VR, the graphics card after a few minutes goes to 100% load on 3D processing and the frames crater. Even more interesting is that the situation is persistent — once it begins nothing seems to fix it, including turning down sliders.
Today after some significant testing I think I’ve found the source of the problem: hyperthreading. I turned hyperthreading on my PC off
, running on the four physical cores rather than eight virtual. (Yes, I already had threading support off in the GPU). While I was at it I also upped my CPU overclock to 4.8 from 4.6, without any real negative effect. And almost instantly the GPU performance improved and stayed rock-solid
, as did temps on the GPU core. This is all good news as the situation has been driving me nuts. We will see if it lasts, but so far, it seems that for whatever reason X-Plane, the Rift S, the 1080ti, and hyperthreading were not playing well together.