Rift S issue - frequent position resetting

[RampantMark]

I'm hoping you guys might be able to help with an issue that is occurring in my Rift S.

I mainly play Elite Dangerous, in a seated position, but this issue isn't restricted to this game, or in seated versus standing games...

As far as I can tell, I have the most up to date MB BIOS and drivers, and most current Windows update.

I have disabled power save to USB and to the Rift S USB hub, and I am using a powered USB hub to connect the Rift S to a USB 3.0 (maybe even 3.1) port.

I'm running a custom OC Vega 56 within Wattman to 950 memory speed/1650 GPU speed, but the issue is also happening in non-OC mode.

I'm guessing there's an occasional glitch in either the USB or DP pipeline, because the way the fault manifests is that the colour in the Rift S display gets "washed out" and "pastel" for a spilt second before the headset repositions itself to one of 2 rough positions, either to the standing default position, (which makes the view originate in the game character's lap, or repositions to a seated level ,but a few inches backwards, so I can see my game character's chest in front of my eyes. It's a bit weird, but I can also say it's annoying as hel to have to keep pressing the key to "reset HMD" on a continual basis. I'm totally in the dark as to what might be glitching out the USB or DP connectivity...

If anyone here has any experience of this particular glitch, or something similar, I'd be grateful for any suggestions.

Thanks

 

[melmac]

When you say USB hub do you mean an actual HUB or a USB 3 expansion card?

If it's a hub, do you have other USB devices plugged in? What make and model is? Hubs won't make a bit of difference if your USB 3 port is incompatible. What motherboard do you have? (exact make and model please)

 

[RampantMark]

MB is Gigabyte AORUS Elite (rev 1.0) running the penultimate BIOS - F41. There is only one newer BIOS is F42.c and that centres on ABBA.

USB port being used is a blue tongued USB 3.0 is on the back panel of the AORUS, intermediate powered USB hub is a TP-Link 7-port powered hub model UH700. The Rift S does work, so USB hub "compatibility" is perhaps not the issue, it's just that when in use the position needs to be reset. Sometimes once or twice per game session, sometimes 20+ times in the first 5 minutes... Although in Beat Sabre I tend to just accept the new perspective so that it doesn't keep jumping and ruining the flow.

 

[melmac]

MB is Gigabyte AORUS Elite (rev 1.0) running the penultimate BIOS - F41. There is only one newer BIOS is F42.c and that centres on ABBA.

USB port being used is a blue tongued USB 3.0 is on the back panel of the AORUS, intermediate powered USB hub is a TP-Link 7-port powered hub model UH700. The Rift S does work, so USB hub "compatibility" is perhaps not the issue, it's just that when in use the position needs to be reset. Sometimes once or twice per game session, sometimes 20+ times in the first 5 minutes... Although in Beat Sabre I tend to just accept the new perspective so that it doesn't keep jumping and ruining the flow.

Sorry, just after reading your signature. The problems you are describing are some of the symptoms of the USB not working correctly. Even when you use incompatible ports, the Rift S does work, but, starts having issues, losing tracking, losing frame of reference, height from the ground etc. What I would do first is plug out everything from the USB ports and only connect the Rift S to one of the USB 3 port on the back panel. The four USB 3 ports are the ones between the HDMI connector and the Lan connector on your motherboard.

Then start the Oculus software and go into settings and reset the floor height.

 

[TheMightyTen]

Use a tool called USBTreeView to see if you can locate the rift into a USB port that is on it's own Root Hub or even better a controller with nothing else plugged in with it.

 

[RampantMark]

Sorry, just after reading your signature. The problems you are describing are some of the symptoms of the USB not working correctly. Even when you use incompatible ports, the Rift S does work, but, starts having issues, losing tracking, losing frame of reference, height from the ground etc. What I would do first is plug out everything from the USB ports and only connect the Rift S to one of the USB 3 port on the back panel. The four USB 3 ports are the ones between the HDMI connector and the Lan connector on your motherboard.

Then start the Oculus software and go into settings and reset the floor height.

I'll do that when I get the time, but I'll also "repair" the Oculus software in between removal and reconnecting.

 

[RampantMark]

Use a tool called USBTreeView to see if you can locate the rift into a USB port that is on it's own Root Hub or even better a controller with nothing else plugged in with it.

Great, thanks for the tip.

 

[RampantMark]

I've had some mixed results.

First I removed the Rift S, and repaired the Oculus software.
At the same time I also opened the case and installed an additional fan, as an exhaust in the roof vent, to hopefully control case temperatures a little bit better. Before this I only had 1 exhaust fan in the rear, and this was on the 120mm AiO CPU cooler. Temp peaks were "OK" at ~70ish CPU, ~80ish Vega56 memory in normal high load Elite 3-D space-based gaming, but peaked higher (and precipitated jerkiness and frame-drops) when on planet surfaces where there were lots and lots of render objects. If you're familiar with Elite, I'm talking about "Crystal Shard Biological sites", which clearly put a great deal of additional stress on the GPU and GPU memory as well as the CPU.... but that's kind of an aside.

After doing those things I hooked up the Rift S, using a different Display Port and different USB 3.0 port, and went in the game, with temperature monitor software displayed on the monitor, which I was checking occasionally, just to make sure the additional fan wasn't stealing all the CPU cooler air and causing the CPU temps to increase.
Sadly, the game and entire system crashed 3 times, going into shut-down. Ouch. Pretty sure it wasn't caused by temperature spikes, but can't be sure because I wasn't looking at the temps when it crashed, so conceivably could've been an uncontrolled, divergent spike.
Weirdly, all 3 shut-downs were when I was docked in a station, so there wasn't a lot of 3-D rendering going on or much load on the GPU/CPU!


I spent a bit of time in the BIOS to make sure the fan profiles were all set "appropriately" and that the fans would ramp up with temps, but that all seemed fine. Made a few subtle tweaks while I was there, however.
I also re-validated Elite Dangerous game files, to be sure the game code wasn't responsible for crashes? Also swapped the Display Port to the one that I hadn't tried before (Vega 56 Pulse has 3 x DP).


This morning, 45 minutes of gaming produced no crashes.
There was also far greater stability of the headset position and orientation. I think 1 or 2 HMD resets in total, at the start of a session and it was pretty solid.

However. There is another annoying fault. The 3-D image colour is permanently washed out and pasty. The same kind of pasty colour that the image would display beforehand just a split second prior to each erroneous HMD position reset that I was experiencing.
Funny thing is that the "in station" text is vivid orange and the colour is well saturated and lovely to look at. However, flying around is pasty and unsaturated. The dashboard colour ought to be the same as the vivid orange docked interface, and, while a few days ago I was looking in awe at the rendering of the Orion Nebula, which was beautiful crimson colours and life-like 3-dimensional in image quality, today the same object is a pasty yellowish smear out of the cockpit window. Real shame that it's come to this. (and perhaps this is the image quality some users were complaining of when they swapped their Rift CV2 for a Rift S - when they complained the "blacks" were no longer "black"...?)


So I'm now a bit stuck where to go from here.

 

[melmac]

One thing you can try.

Have you a friend with a decent PC? Try the headset on his computer. If it works there then you know the issue is with your PC, if it doesn't work on his computer then you know there is an issue with the headset and you should return it.

EDIT: Just want to add, the image quality on the Rift S is really good. The image quality users are complaining about are the black levels comparing LCD to OLED. But, it's not what you are describing. If the image quality on my headset was that bad I wouldn't be happy.

 

[RampantMark]

I don't think the headset is faulty, since it is proven that it can support vivid colours and also able to retain robust orientation and position. So it is most likely something to do with my computer setup, other hardware or software environment issue.

A bit of progress pinpointing the problem...

Of the 3 DP ports on the Vega 56 Pulse graphics card, I was using the outermost, with USB via a powered hub. I changed to other DP ports and also experimented with different USB ports without the powered hub in the loop.

The upshot now is that, to play Elite Dangerous:

1. on one DP port, the visuals in the Rift S in 3D gameplay are permanently washed out. It plays fine and the repositions are almost eliminated.
2. on the other 2 DP ports, the visuals offer much improved richness in colour. However, the game crashes randomly and the entire system powers down ungraciously.

This problem *appears to be* isolated to the game Elite Dangerous. It's perhaps to early to be conclusive, but 30 minutes in Beat Sabre - connected to the same combination of DP and USB that crashed the last session of Elite - there was no problem evident.

Next step is to try some other VR games to see what occurs running those. I have Skyrim and F1 2015 that I can try for that...

If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd be very grateful

 

[RampantMark]

And lo, it came to pass that the problem has been rectified.
Possibly.
Probably.

It appears to be that the Radeon Wattman profile I was running may have been responsible.

Stepping it to "turbo" automatic profile seems to have done the trick.

No more position shifts and no more crashes and I've been enjoying Elite Dangerous in vivid technicolour detail. Lovely job.

 

[melmac]

And lo, it came to pass that the problem has been rectified.
Possibly.
Probably.

It appears to be that the Radeon Wattman profile I was running may have been responsible.

Stepping it to "turbo" automatic profile seems to have done the trick.

No more position shifts and no more crashes and I've been enjoying Elite Dangerous in vivid technicolour detail. Lovely job.

Glad you got it sorted!!

 

[RampantMark]

Glad you got it sorted!!

Thanks dude.

I was running a mild WattMan overclock profile that a friend who also has a Vega 56 Pulse sent me. Simple memory speed increase to 950MHz. It was actually running really well with everything else including benchmarks and stress testing. Turns out that Elite is just a finickity game.
I'll experiment with WattMan again some time, only next time it'll be with the power turned up a bit and probably with a mild undervolt on the GPU itself.

 

[melmac]

Thanks dude.

I was running a mild WattMan overclock profile that a friend who also has a Vega 56 Pulse sent me. Simple memory speed increase to 950MHz. It was actually running really well with everything else including benchmarks and stress testing. Turns out that Elite is just a finickity game.
I'll experiment with WattMan again some time, only next time it'll be with the power turned up a bit and probably with a mild undervolt on the GPU itself.

I am kicking myself here!! It's one of the first things I normally recommend, remove any overclocks.

 

[RampantMark]

I am kicking myself here!! It's one of the first things I normally recommend, remove any overclocks.

The weird thing is that the Vega 56 manual settings I was using are "modest". Not only that - they worked previously with Elite Dangerous in VR on Rift S, although sometimes with the associated VR HMD position shifting and resetting that precipitated this post... while also working absolutely spot on with everything else I use the system for, either in VR or in 2-D gaming. In fact, the overclocks actually improved the performance of Shadow of War significantly, to the point where the system ran cooler with the overclock than without at the same game settings!

Now I have a quandary. Is it my system at fault here? (Have I damaged my Vega 56? (unlikely)) Is the game code in Elite Dangerous somehow bugging my hardware out and shutting my system down? It is a strange place in the game that the recent shutdowns are occurring - whilst docked in a station - which ought to be a lower graphics load than flying around inside the station and while flying over and docking at planetary bases... This morning I watched the VDDR temperature rise to above 80degC whilst sat stationary in dock, despite having a reasonably high manual Vega 56 fan curve set and only a very small increase of memory freq to 800.

It is just odd.

I'm waiting for Black Friday/Cyber Monday to upgrade to a 5700 XT Nitro+, but still not sure what to do in the meantime. Perhaps I ought to lodge a support ticket with Frontier

 

[melmac]

In the custom settings of your Vega card, try the setting the power limit to max but leave the rest at stock and see if that sorts your issue. If that seems to solve the issue, we can try undervolting your card then. I know it sounds counter productive, but, underclocking Vega actually gets more performance with less noise, heat and general problems. (for most owners!!)

I would leave the memory clock at defaults for the moment.

 

[RampantMark]

In the custom settings of your Vega card, try the setting the power limit to max but leave the rest at stock and see if that sorts your issue. If that seems to solve the issue, we can try undervolting your card then. I know it sounds counter productive, but, underclocking Vega actually gets more performance with less noise, heat and general problems. (for most owners!!)

I would leave the memory clock at defaults for the moment.

I've done this and with the power slider max'ed out, it has survived the space station interface without shutdown, although it is very clear to see (using CPUID HWMonitor) that VDDC VR temps in particular climb very quickly whilst idling, and docked in a station. Most concerning, so it might actually have been VDDC VR or MVDD VR temperature spikes that caused system shutdown. Even during combat with multiple NPC opponents doesn't create as much temperature, or flying around a rotating station - which relate to much higher graphics rendering loads going through the GPU. It's weird behaviour.

I wonder what these component names actually refer to, and what their safe/rated operating temperatures might be?

 

[melmac]

I've done this and with the power slider max'ed out, it has survived the space station interface without shutdown, although it is very clear to see (using CPUID HWMonitor) that VDDC VR temps in particular climb very quickly whilst idling, and docked in a station. Most concerning, so it might actually have been VDDC VR or MVDD VR temperature spikes that caused system shutdown. Even during combat with multiple NPC opponents doesn't create as much temperature, or flying around a rotating station - which relate to much higher graphics rendering loads going through the GPU. It's weird behaviour.

I wonder what these component names actually refer to, and what their safe/rated operating temperatures might be?

So, it works properly now after setting the power limit to max?

The VDDC VR and MVDD VR are rated to 125 degrees. I think temps are around 80 degrees are perfectly normal for those sensors under load.

 

[RampantMark]

So, it works properly now after setting the power limit to max?

The VDDC VR and MVDD VR are rated to 125 degrees. I think temps are around 80 degrees are perfectly normal for those sensors under load.

It's early days, yet - but I *may* have found a solution...

In the carbuncle of Windows 10 OS , I've switched GAME MODE off in its entirety, and this simple switching has enabled me to run a short, preliminary run of docking at a station and making a few in-game station-menu selections without the VDDC rising above 63degC (GPU and memory temps stable around the low-mid-50's), *with memory freq set at 850 in Wattman.*

I sincerely hope that his is the switch that disables what appears to be a bug with this game in particular...


Further test and checking later today/tomorrow. Wish me luck

 

[melmac]

Further test and checking later today/tomorrow. Wish me luck

Game mode causes people problems in normal games too, so switching it off is definitely worth a try.

Good luck!!