realvr
patreon
Version 1.4.2 EARLY ACCESS (release candidate)
🕑 Added 2021-08-02 14:54:04 +0000 UTCThank you for responding to my hardware poll. Although many people haven't voted yet, it looks like Team red is stabilizing around 8-9%.
I have been trying my best to understand and solve the freezing issues that have been ruining the game experience in VR for some of you. For those who are interested, I'll give more in-depth details in the "Technical discussion" section below, but let's start with the short version. The freezes come from a problem with the game itself, which I'm 100% certain is related to asset loading/streaming. There was some suspicion initially that it could be caused by the Autosave function, but it was a red herring. RDR2 just often happens to autosave when leaving an area and entering a different one, which is the moment when new geometry and textures need to be loaded, hence the confusion. But Autosave is not the culprit, as disabling it from the Settings menu has no effect on the freeze frequency.
Update: there is some evidence that the freezing issues might be much worse if you are running the game from an HDD. If you can manage to free enough space on an SSD, it's worth trying. If you do move the game, remember to run "RealCleanRunAsAdmin.bat" as administrator (I'm attaching it here again for convenience) and then to run "RealConfig.bat" as usual, from the new folder where you put the game.
Unfortunately, since the problem is with RDR2 itself and I don't have the source code to the game, I'm unable to fix it for good. I did try to understand what was going on to see whether I could patch the code, but no luck. Only Rockstar can actually solve the problem, and since they haven't done it in the almost two years the game has been out for PC, despite many protests by players all around the world, they probably never will. However, for some of you, using my VR mod makes the issue much more likely to occur during normal gameplay (I'd estimate around 10x more frequent wrt playing in 2D), so I did what I could to analyze and mitigate the effect.
This 1.4.2 version of R.E.A.L. VR adds new controls to the mod overlay: in the "RDR2" tab, under "Antifreeze" you will find a combo box (drop-down list) and a checkbox. The combo allows you to choose a freeze-mitigation preset among "None", "Light", "Medium", "Strong", "Extra". "None" as you can guess is for those of you who never had trouble with the previous 1.4.1 release (if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it!). "Light" is the default preset: it will apply a workaround that leads to no visible disturbances in VR, and yet on my system allows me to play for hours without the game ever freezing. The "Medium" to "Extra" presets apply more and more aggressive techniques to try and prevent the hangs, at the cost of some visible stuttering in VR when the game loads new assets. Especially "Strong" and "Extra" will have an annoying jump in the VR view as the mod all but disconnects to allow the game to do its streaming thing as undisturbed as possible, so beware.
My advice is to select "None" if you had no problems with 1.4.1; otherwise start with the default "Light" preset, and if you still experience very frequent freezes (or the same mission keeps freezing at the same moment) move up gradually until you find the preset that works for you. The choice is applied dynamically, so you could also do something like leaving the preset on "Light" and only switch to higher antifreeze measures during critical mission segments where you know that the game has got stuck before.
I also added a watchdog to the mod, which will automatically turn off VR after 1 second if it detects that the game has hung, to avoid making people sick with the spinning screen view. The "Autokill on freeze" checkbox extends this behavior to automatically terminate the process when 5 seconds have gone by without the game responding; this is just a small quality of life improvement to avoid bringing up Task Manager each time to force-kill the game. Sadly for the moment there is no known way to get the game "unstuck" when its asset loading/streaming mechanism has failed, so I made Autokill the default.
With this release I also made the Resolution Scale indicator more consistent (it will always say "Off" when DLSS is in use, no matter what RS was previously set to), and I fixed a problem that was preventing some Patrons with AMD cards from entering VR after the Jul 13 update. The reason this is a "release candidate" is precisely that I still need to get more feedback from the (few but important) AMD users. Also, I want to see how the different antifreeze presets work on your systems.
Enjoy!
Technical discussion: Thanks for joining me in this rant ;-) At first, I was having a really hard time reproducing the hangs (even on 1.4.1 I got no more than one every about 2 hours of gameplay), so it was incredibly slow-going and frustrating. Fortunately, after a few days of snail's pace progress, it occurred to me to try using the teleport function that comes with Alexander Blade's trainer. Phew! With teleportation, I could force the game to reload almost all of its assets, and to do it every two seconds or so, which triggered the bug much more often. Suddenly, instead of 4-5 experiments per day, I could do one every few minutes! I was finally able to collect some useful data.
Once I could reproduce the problem (almost) at will, I studied the post-freeze status of the game in the debugger, both after teleportation hangs and after "normal" hangs. I was also able to quickly repro the issue without the mod attached (100% untouched game, playing in 2D) to completely exclude the mod from being part of the problem. In each case the situation of the game threads upon freezing was exactly the same, with the main thread (on which the scripts are run) stuck waiting forever on a semaphore that will never get signaled, most other threads idle, and one thread burning up CPU cycles without ever doing anything useful.
The game is heavily multithreaded. On the contrary, the VR mod uses very few threads, so when the freezes occur, I can easily track what each of my threads is doing (and was doing during the seconds leading to the freeze). That way, I was able to rule out that my mod could be causing the problem, although it was definitely making it more frequent. My guess is that during texture/geometry streaming RDR2 keeps a close watch on frame timing, and modulates how much of the world gets streamed in for each frame according to the impact it's having on frame rate. Due to the above-mentioned very heavy multithreading, this mechanism is very hard to get right (Rockstar almost did, but not quite, as proven by the complaints of normal 2D users) and it's very likely that the interaction with VR is violating some assumptions on GPU timing that Rockstar's developers made while designing/testing the system.
So, the only thing I could do was basically get the mod out of the way in time to avoid messing up the timing too much during streaming. To that end, I instrumented the code to gather a few indicators that asset loading is being triggered, and added the capability to disable/pause some components of the mod dynamically. The preset you can choose in the overlay dictates which components get disabled as soon as asset loading is detected, and how long it takes for the mod to decide that it's safe to enable them again after the streaming hiccup has passed. It's not a perfect solution, and it never can be, since the game still crashes sometimes during area loading even without any mods; but it's the best we have for now :-)
Hopefully some Rockstar lead is reading these posts and they will soon come out with an update to fix the issue for good! I mean, a man can dream...
Comments
stylesi
This was with VP2 with cable. Resetting all rdr2 settings and reboot luckily fixed it, still weird (my earlier reply msg disappeared).
Have you considered other methods for squeezing performance out of the game? - WMR/Set HZ of Headset to 60hz/fps if you can - Nvidia Control Panel - 3D Setting Adjust for Best Performance vs Visual Quality - Turn off Windows game mode - Turn off Windows GPU Scheduling - Verify Steam Cache - Turn off Geforce Experience & Overlay - Download game to SSD if possible - Add High Performance under Windows Settings>Display>Graphics Settings>Add - Set Windows Power Plan to Highest Performance - Try turning off HPET (high performance event timer) in your UEFI (bios) which can help cpu bound applications. - Download Process Lasso and set the Power Plan to Bitsum Highest Performance (optional) Open Process Lasso after you've started the game. - Priority class>Always>High - I/O priority> Always>High - More>Memory priority> Always> 5 - Normal - FidelityFX SuperResolution - A user has pointed out some software that takes AMD's Version of DLSS and applies it to VR Games that have an OpenVRApi. Works with DX11 and Vulkan - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/116 D3D Version - https://github.com/fholger/openvr_fsr Would it be possible to incorporate this? I feel like it would help with performance possibly. Hope this helps!
The Merote
Yes the 1070 is weak but managed pretty welly on medium before RS update with a few ini tweaks but now its all over the place and yes I get latency bursts when moving to a new area on the map or coming and going from a town but it will run smooth as anything and then all of a sudden go crazy all over the place. I wouldn't say the GC is the issue, I might try reinstalling the game or trying another graphic driver, have a similar issue a while back when using vorpx, the game ran like butter then Rockstar updated it and it was pretty much unplayable. I might try removing your mod and see if the game still runs bad. It doesn't really matter which settings I use I get the same issue. Might also try coming out of developer mode in Oculus app that sometimes fixes these kind of issues. A shame coz previous update it ran great but this update looks 10 times better.
Solomon Ginsberg
Which gfx card are u using?
The Merote
Yeah I did in the end, it looks amazing, possibly the best looking game in VR ever, just doesn't run well for me no matter what setting I set it to. I tried tweaking the ini in my Documents Rockstar Games folder but it just keeps crashing. If this could run smooth eventually on most graphic cards this would be a winner for VR. Fingers Crossed. GTV mod is the best VR mod of all time and I still play it all the time but Wow this looks amazing when I'm not moving around.
Solomon Ginsberg
You can update the game and use 1.4.2 mod version.
The Merote
Hi Luke I've been away for a few weeks and and was wandering regarding updating Red RDR2 can we now update the game to using with your latest update or do we still need to do the work around of not letting RDR2 update. Sorry to bother you but I couldn't see it in the posts, maybe I missed it.
The Merote
Hi Stylesi I was just wandering are you using Quest 2 with Airlink? coz I had a similar issue to what you described but not just for this game. Audio was fine with Link cable.
LukeRoss
Please use the "Reply to comment" button to continue the thread. The README is attached to the post I linked. Sorry but I never heard of issues with audio (my mod doesn't touch it at all) so it must be something else on your system.
stylesi
Thanks, but where the heck is the readme? v1.4.2. zip does not seem to have one :) One hella weird thing is that my RDR2 voice audio has changed after installing your mod: everyones pitch is basically different (Arthur + all npc:s alike), which is very annoyingh. Music and other voices do sound ok. What could make it so? I do have VoiceMod installed (for mic stuff) but it is not even enabled by any means.
LukeRoss
Hi stylesi, welcome and thanks for the support! So many questions ;-) With my RDR2 mod you can use either DLSS or Resolution Scale and push it up to crazy resolutions. Please see https://www.patreon.com/posts/version-1-4-0-54090413 for detailed instructions, it's too long to put in a comment. There are also some notes regarding the Vive Pro 2. Do not use the retrolux mod or any other mods based on ReShade as they are not compatible at the moment. Please refer to the README that comes with my mod for further advice like how to use the recenter gesture, turn down headbobbing, and so on!
stylesi
Hello Luke, just pledged mod for the 1st time and have couple of questions in mind: Are there any instructions on how-to optimize visual quality vs. fps? Game is very blurry with my headset if I put DLSS on from RDR2 graphics settings. This is with mod's Ultra or optimized settings. It looks like a 720p in-game to be honest, something must be wrong.. Should I enable dlss somewhere else or change the resolution in-game (now it's 1024x1024 for desktop there). I am using Vive Pro 2 with 3090 myself, so if anyone wants to share their optimized settings with the same combo, I would be all ears! How do you change display resolution or resolution scaling like GTA V mod? Perhaps change this to something else: kSettingScale_Mode5o2 or? For other VR games I use this mod to sharpen them (it is also Reshade-based), it works wonders: https://vrtoolkit.retrolux.de/. Any chance for supporting this mod as well? Also, can you turn of the head bob somewhere in RDR2? It is not very comfy in VR :) What is the controller shortcut to center VR body/head to your headset? I need to use now Vive menu (wands) to do that, which is not very convenient. Great mod and thanks in advance for any answers and tips!
LukeRoss
You have two separate issues: for image clarity, you need to set Resolution Scale to 5/2. Due to a game bug since build 1.0.1436.25, the setting is forgotten every time you restart the game, so for the moment you need to re-apply it manually. The second issue is that you don't need SteamVR to play with Oculus (Air) Link, you only need Steam (which is not the same thing) if that's where you bought the game. SteamVR will only introduce additional problems when you're playing with Oculus headsets.
I played version 1.3 with Quest 2 via the OculusApp with SteamVR with cable and it worked. Now in Version 1.4.2 the picture is completely out of focus (AMD 6900XT + AMD Ryzen 5800X). If I want to play via Oculus AirLink or Oculus Link without SteamVR, Rockstar Games will tell me that I have the wrong account or I don't have Red Dead Online. Can you help?
LukeRoss
At the moment no, as it wasn't designed to allow that. Perhaps in the (far) future, if I decide to port it to the new framework :-)
Derrick taylor
Hey Luke, is it possible to make a stop vr feature for GTA V vr mod?
LukeRoss
Lowering the texture quality has a huge impact on visuals and offers basically no frame rate gains, so I advise against it. If you download the OpenXR Developer Tools for Windows Mixed Reality from the Microsoft Store, you can go to the developer settings page of the tools and double-check that Custom render scale is set to 100% and that Motion reprojection is Disabled.
LukeRoss
I wonder the same thing, that running from HDD might exacerbate the freezing problem. Do you have enough space on an SSD to try and reinstall the game? (If you do move the game, please remember to run "RealCleanRunAsAdmin.bat" to avoid getting the Vulkan loader confused!)
LukeRoss
What does the mod overlay report in the "VR resolution" line?
If I change the Texture Quality to anything but Ultra the Visual Quality goes down dramatically and everything starts ghosting. This happens after restart and before. However, if I run the .bat file again it changes it back to normal and everything is okay. OpenXR allows me to actually play the game since I don't have to go through SteamVR and WMR it just has to handle OpenXR. Great mod! Ryzen 2600 - RTX 2060 - 16GB Ram. Runs ok.. 40ish FPS. DLSS Quality, Res Override helps give me some headroom. Low Preset.
I'm still getting locks ups with 1.4.2. I'm wondering if the locks up are related to either the game being stored on an old harddrive that is NOT SSD. Or the fact that I'm running an older CPU (I7 7700k) My GPU (rtx 3070) seems to render the game beautifully.
Unfortunately still getting lock ups on light antifreeze mode with my 6700XT with HP reverb G2 but will try the higher settings. The game also seemed to shift to a more blurred visual state with this update.
Momentum
Hey Luke, I’ve been playing for about 2 hours and so far, so good. I haven’t gone back and tested the Hosea hunting mission, I’ve just been playing through chapter 3 and it has yet to freeze or have any hiccups running with antifreeze on light. Overall it seems to feel a bit smoother than it did with 1.31 and the previous RDR2 build I downgraded to. I’ll report back if anything else comes up. Thanks for the great work as always
LukeRoss
Yes, that's probably it. Which headset are you using?
it keeps glitching idk how to explain it, i also cant find the Motion Smoothing option so that might be the problem
LukeRoss
Could you be any more vague? :-D
Toshie27
I only have a very bad picture?
LukeRoss
What could be the factors that make the game freeze every few minutes on some systems and never on others, I wonder... Cercata, do you have the game on HDD or SSD?
Cercata
OMG, debugging RDR2 without source code, symbols, etc, must be a R.E.A.L. nightmare ... but the satisfaction once you understand what's going on must be huge XD For me it doesn't freeze so I can't test this version
LukeRoss
Yes, if Rockstar can keep still for a moment and stop improving their games left and right, I will finally be able to get around to what I was mentioning in the "Final notes" to my post from a month ago: https://www.patreon.com/posts/53295355
Nicky Butler
This update fixed the freezing on the valentine bank robbery. I had it on medium anti freeze :)
Any thoughts about what you'll work on next?
LukeRoss
Yes, unfortunately RDR2 is not as rock-solid as GTA V was, at least for me. During the months when I was developing my VR mod for GTA V, the game never crashed once. RDR2 also suffers from needing to support two very complex APIs. My mod only works with Vulkan, as I needed all the performance I could squeeze out of the game, and DX12 is slower for most users (usually just by 1-2%, but for some users an unacceptable 20% slower)
CozyViera
Haven’t used the VR mod in a while but I do recall my game would crash regularly when using the Vulkan API. DX12 seemed to be more stable though iirc there was some other issues with it too I can’t recall atm. Game in general isn’t too stable on PC
LukeRoss
Sorry Solomon, I forgot to tell you: I tried that mission (The Course of True Love V) when I saw your comment the other day, but it was fine for me. No problem when pressing Y to start the train, or at any other moment during the mission.
Nicky Butler
Love your tech discussions, they put digital foundary to shame lol. Gonna try this out on sodom back to gomorah mission as thats been giving me problems with freezing 👍
Solomon Ginsberg
Great news Luke, well done yet again! I hope the new anti-freeze feature will get rid of the freezes at certain stages of missions too. It doesn’t sound like the scenario you’re describing with saving and loading. Starting the train by pushing Y after helping Bo and Penelope crashes the game 100% of the time so that mission must be avoided at any rate. Not part of the main story as far as I can tell (~65% completed).
