Just got a 3060!

The last desktop NVIDIA GPU I had was a 8400 GS, but I've had a few laptops with GTX 1060s. For the most part, I've had AMD GPUs, and for probably the longest time a RX 580.

Ever since getting a Quest 2 VR headset when it launched, I found it lackluster on my RX 580, notably being worse than the Rift CV1 I upgraded from. It turns out AMD doesn't handle H.264 GPU encoding too ideally which then requires the overall resolution to have to be lowered for it to keep up. Overall, this made PCVR not as-enjoyable as I would have liked, as everything was a blurry mess. Forcing the highest encode resolution made everything look amazing (at the cost of it being a frame-dropping mess), so I knew that in order to enjoy the Quest 2 for PCVR I needed a better GPU.

I wanted my next GPU to be NVIDIA largely because of that. Did about a month of trying to keep up with stock Twitter accounts and Newegg Shuffle and gave up, but I did queue up some entries in EVGA's system. Recently got the notification for a 3060, and bought it!

I tossed it in my PC, did some quick tests out on Linux, and the GPU seems to work fine, but I plan on rolling a Windows 11 install in a bit to see how well things really work! I'll use this thread to share my experiences with things.

 

Nice one!
The 3060 got quite a bad reception on launch it's still a great card tho and with dlss the world is your oyster my man!

 

quest 2 is great with half life alyx linked to a pc.

 

Welcome back to the green team, like DannyD said; enjoy DLSS!

 

Nice, very happy with mine

 

Well, so far it’s been an adventure. The GPU itself seems stable, but I’ve been having various issues with both Oculus and Steam.

With Oculus, I ran into it not being able to install once, and then after that, it refuses to update to the latest PTC (fails on step 4 out of 9), but it worked fine on one Windows install (did about 3 of them so far to try to work this out).

With Steam, I’ve ran into issues getting it to install initially (it would download the 200MB+ update, apply it, and either throw an errror about steamui.dll or some filesystemio dll file not being able to load. Seemingly on each start now it’ll try to extract some update and fail on Windows 11, and on 10 (LTSC 2021) the one time Steam did work, it took longer to load, and the Library page rendered black (seems like the web renderer isn’t working).

I’ve never seen either of these issues in the years I’ve used both Steam and Oculus. I’m thinking it could be related to one of the most recent CUs for either 11 and 2021 LTSC or perhaps related to a VC++ redist package. I’ll have to mess around with this more later.

I did manage to try out a bit of D2R and Beat Saber though; D2R plays notably better for me and looks great too with DLSS. Beat Saber and Oculus looks significantly more clear.

Edit: It's likely the issue with Oculus updating is directly related to one or some of these BIOS options, as toggling them (from enabled to disabled/Auto) allowed Oculus to update no problem. Will roll another 10 install to see:

• SR-IOV enabled -> Auto
  
• IOMMU enabled -> Auto
  
• PCI ACS, AER, and something else enabled -> Auto
  
• TPM clear (from BIOS)
  
• Removing "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System" device and rebooting (thread)

 

Great!
Nice to hear that someone actually could buy a GPU.
Out of curiosity, what driver you used in Linux and what tests?

 

Congrats dude!

 

I'm not sure on the driver version, but it was akmods-nvidia from RPM Fusion on Fedora 35. I did a few minutes of Gputest (Furmark) to make sure the GPU didn't kill over at the first sign of load

I'm still working on getting Windows handled, but eventually I'll reinstall F35 for dual-boot and just do the same driver package since it seemingly worked fine. I recall negativo or someone else offering an NV driver for Fedora too.

 

Grats to the new hardware, enjoy!

 

There seems to be something more widespread about this, as there's a few reports about it as of recently:

• https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4739473745776804012/
• https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/3205995441642005609/
• https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/3203745634157154213/
• https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/29/1636418037477869167/#c3203746811795341908

But the range of those dates implies it only happens to a small subset of people (pretty sure it'd be widespread news if Steam was broken for weeks )

As for Oculus, it still consistently breaks even after messing with those BIOS options, but seemingly removing the "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System" device and rebooting allowed Oculus to update on reboot. I'm clueless as to what's going on with this, but Oculus seems to work otherwise well; will have to see if future updates will be an issue.

Might be able to actually try out some games tonight

Edit: Onto something! Although I wonder if it could be a coincidence.

One of the Steam posts about one of the dlls briefly mentioned Vulkan. I installed the latest runtime exe from the Vulkan website, and I noticed in GPU-Z that the Vulkan version there didn't match. I manually removed the 8 files that the runtime installed, and reinstalled the NVIDIA graphics driver (in order to get the older driver-included Vulkan files installed); Steam opened right up no problem.

 

LTSC is not supported by steam

 

Played a bit of City Car Driving and American Truck Simulator in VR, and the performance and clarity are a lot better! I can actually see text in dashboards and road signs now

Project CARS 3's VR performance seems abnormally bad though. It was bad on the RX 580, but its seemingly still pretty bad even at lowest graphics settings at 72Hz; ASW kicks in at the main menu and even on the first career race. Someone mentioned VR performance being bad on the Oculus API but fine on SteamVR, but I have to figure out how to force SteamVR with it when using Link (the SteamVR option still uses Oculus).

Played around with overclocking a little bit with Afterburner. Maxed the power and temp limits, and increased the memory clock +1500 seemingly without issue so far (played a bit of Quake II RTX). Wasn't sure if I'd ever hit a limit, so I took it to +2000 and had a display driver crash after a few minutes.

 

This has been driving me up a wall the past few days as I still can't figure out any consistent reason why this happens. Probably did about a dozen Windows reinstalls so far and both Steam and Oculus consistently give problems. Seemingly the Vulkan thing is either unrelated altogether, or part of a separate issue.

Someone pointed out they were able to solve their Steam issue by switching their drive's sector size from 4K to 512 mode: https://steamcommunity.com/discussi...6804012/?tscn=1641033020#c3203747342915419588

That sounds odd, but I know I went out of my way to switch my drive to native 4K mode, and seemingly this makes some sense since Steam has also thrown some errors about NTFS transactions failing. I'll try switching my drive back to 512e mode to see if it helps.

But interestingly, both Steam and Oculus install and run perfectly fine from LTSC 2019. Both have been broken in varying manners on newer Windows builds (LTSC 2021, 21H2, 11 RTM, 11 Dev). So I guess if the sector size change doesn't help, at least LTSC 2019 is fine.

Edit: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/3203745634155479256

 

Yep that did it! For some reason, both Steam and Oculus were failing file transfers when I had my Hynix P31 in native 4K mode (lbaf mode 1), but this only started being an issue at some point in December. So either a Windows update that was applied on both Windows 10 and 11 around the same time made this an issue (possibly the CU released I think mid-Dec?), or it's related specifically to me using a 3060 and possibly some BIOS resource thing (never saw this happen with a RX 580 previously).

I reverted back to 512e mode (lbaf mode 0), did a clean LTSC 2021 install, and Steam installed and loaded the UI, and Oculus updated to the latest PTC, all without issue.

 

Did a little overclocking and got +150 on core clock, and found +1400 stable on memory (+1500 had random corruption with FFXV). Got a Legendary score on Time Spy: https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/70533223

 

Congrats and it's nice to see a fellow pc gamer getting a card during these times. I hope you're truly enjoying it. Nice overclocks.

What games do you play the most?

 

Mostly some Diablo II Resurrected; it's cool being able to play at 4K with DLSS and not notice a graphical difference! Back with my RX 580, I had to run 50% scaling to do 50-60 FPS.

Ended up picking up a Rift CV1 for VR. The Quest 2 just wasn't cutting it, and I exhausted all the other options I could think to try to make it better. Plugged it in no problem and games run well with it! The SDE will take some getting used to again, but the latency is a lot better.

 

That sounds awesome. As much as I like 3d I've yet to invest in a VR set. I will definitely do that this year. I have Half Life Alex on my radar and want the full experience. I also have Rez and Zone Of The Enders 2. So many titles in the backlog lol.

I'll check out the Rift CV1. It's good to hear you're enjoying it.

 

I have played 3D Polybius, awesome!!!