GTX 10X0 Performance
As some may know, I'm going to be getting a NVidia 10 series graphics card tomorrow (for my new dedicated Oculus station), and will be investigating performance issues that I think are due to the card conflicting with the game somehow.
I hope to at least report on my findings in tomorrows patch if I don't get any big fixes completed. So in preparation I did some testing today on my current dev machine (i7 6700k+GTX 980).
Just for reference, here's my profiler data for sitting in an empty multiplayer room having not yet started the game which has caused frame drops for some with a 10 series card.
(Profiling the GPU leads to big performance spikes due to profiling itself, so CPU is profiled instead. CPU Profile can only be as low as the GPU and vice versa, so this profiles GPU indirectly)
You can definitely see that there's something going on since I've had reports of 1080s periodically reprojecting while doing the same thing. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some hard numbers.
Canyon Performance Improvements
Because of the way the VR headsets work, performance profiling is a bit tricky when trying to optimize. This is because if you're under 90fps you're at 45fps due to how SteamVR controls the rendering.
That means that if the actual GPU usage is 13ms (just 2ms off the requirement for 90fps of 11ms), then the GPU spends 22ms per frame according to the profiler. If I improve the usage to 12ms (an 8% improvement) the GPU will still take 22ms per frame, so I can't actually tell if I improved the performance or not.
That being said, I was able to do some pretty cool stuff with a new setup for occlusion culling and batching.
Even on my computer the section above used to drop in performance. I set up the scene with 50 enemies (not visible in the shot) and measured performance with the two different systems.
A conservative estimate would be at minimum a 10% improvement, but it could have been up to a 100% improvement if the framerate was actually 45fps instead of SteamVR bringing it down, so it's hard to tell how much it got better. Either way it's an improvement!
I've added a question for this patch asking if performance noticeably improves. This new system should theoretically allow for more enemies on screen at a time before the framerate threshold is hit.