The Wait is Over

Or so I thought…

Last week, I had received a shipping notification for my Rift DK2, indicating a delivery for this Monday. So I spent a bit of the week-end preparing a PC to use with it. It’s a powerful desktop system that I built a bit less than 2 years ago, to work on GWT projects (because building GWT projects can take a long time). When I started with that idea, the goal was to have a fast machine for that task, while keeping the budget low. So I would spend the bulk of the budget on the components that matter, mainly the CPU (6-Core i7), motherboard and RAM (16 GB) and re-use components that I had lying around. The later included an old graphics card.

This worked but I was not too happy working under CentOS, and being an OS X user, I wondered if there was any way to run OS X on this. Looking a bit at the Hackintosh community, it turned out it was not that difficult, more so if you picked your components from a list of well supported ones. So I “invested” in a new graphics card, picking one based on my requirements : Hackintosh friendly, powerful enough to run an IDE and a web browser (which means anything sold at that time would do) and cheap. And I ended up with a Sapphire Radeon HD5450 card that perfectly fit the job.

As last week-end, the Oculus SDK was still Windows only (and anyway a lot of demos are still Windows only), I decided to put a new disk in that machine, install a brand new Windows 8.1, the DK2 run-time and the SDK. Everything was now ready, one more time to sleep.

I carefully unpack, follow the Quick Start Guide to connect all the components, launch the Oculus Config Util, go through the required steps, click “Show Demo Scene” and … judder, lag, choppiness, in a word: unusable.

Going through the forums, I see people reporting similar issues and problems with AMD based graphics cards. After some reading and tweaking, which took me quite a bit of time as I mostly stopped using Windows about 8 years ago, I could improve the situation a bit but not really fix the issue. I might be able to improve the situation even more but anyway, I’m only getting about 25 fps with the SDK demo.

Having watched Cymatic Bruce' stream last Sunday, where he tested “Miku Beach Concert” and reported it as a solid experience, I decided to give that demo a spin. On the forums, people are reporting performances of above 200fps. I’m getting about 50 fps. The verdict is clear, that HD5450 card is really slow, way too slow for this kind of rendering. Upgrading to the new SDK 0.4.1 release did not help.

Turns out I have a new Retina Mac Book Pro on its way, sporting an Nvidia GT750M chipset, that should perform way better than this desktop machine.

Given that situation, I will not provide any comment on my experience with the Rift until I’ve had a chance to test it on a decent setup.

A so the wait continues…