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NVIDIA’s Pascal cards don’t play that well with VR games (Updated: Driver fix released)

By Koh Wanzi - on 15 Jul 2016, 2:58pm

NVIDIA’s Pascal cards don’t play that well with VR games, fixes on the way

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

Updated on 15 July 2016: NVIDIA's new driver, version 368.81, addresses both issues. It is now available to download.

Originally published on 12 July 2016:

With VR shaping up to be the next frontier in gaming, it’s no surprise that VR performance formed a big part of the marketing pitch for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080. With that said, things haven’t been as smooth-sailing as NVIDIA may have liked.

In the past week, reports have surfaced of compatibility issues between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and HTC Vive, where headsets plugged into the card’s DisplayPort connector couldn’t be detected properly, triggering the HMD display not found (208) error.

NVIDIA has since acknowledged the issue on the GeForce forums, and says that a driver update will be rolled out this week to fix the problem. In the meantime, the company recommended that Vive owners connect the headset to the HDMI port on their GeForce GTX 1070 or 1080 instead.

More recently, it was found that the latest 368.69 driver – ironically enough an update for Dirt Rally VR – prevented the GeForce GTX 1080 from taking advantage of its boost clocks in VR games, with numerous reports appearing on the GeForce support forums, Oculus community support forums, and even the r/Oculus sub-Reddit. When both SteamVR and the Oculus Rift display are activated, the GeForce GTX 1080 reportedly just runs the GPU at a constant base clock.

The problem doesn’t apply to Maxwell cards like the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and the boost clock functions as it should in regular non-VR applications. It is also limited to just driver version 368.69, and version 368.39 is not affected.

It’s unclear if NVIDIA will include a fix in the impending driver update for the HTC Vive compatibility issues, but owners of VR headsets should probably either close SteamVR when they aren’t using the Vive, or just roll back to the older driver.

Source: GeForce Forums via Tom's Hardware (1), (2)

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