Vivaldi and SteamVR/HTC Vive

GT500

I've been noticing for about the past week or two (not long after SteamVR 1.2.10 was released) some VR performance issues when using my Vive. Games would have low CPU and GPU usage, yet there would be abnormal spikes in the amount of time it took to draw frames, and it appeared to be caused by something slowing down frame processing on the CPU. This caused random framerate drops, which is rather unpleasant.

Tonight I realized that it only happens when Vivaldi is open. With Vivaldi closed I get a nice and smooth 90 FPS. With it open, the FPS will frequently drop below 90 even in SteamVR Home (which doesn't require much CPU/GPU power).

Vivaldi's two release candidates for version 2.3 were released during this time (January 31st and February 4th), and since this wasn't always a problem I assume that one of these builds must have introduced the issue. I could be mistaken about that though, as I had issues with SkyrimVR for roughly two months, and I had taken a break from VR for a couple of months before that.

So, out of curiosity, does anyone else have this issue? It'd be cool if anyone knows of a workaround for it. I had been trying everything I could find to figure out where the performance bottleneck was (overclocking RAM, overclocking CPU cache, further overclocking video card memory, various system/software tweaks, etc) and I really didn't get anywhere until tonight when I fired up SteamVR with Vivaldi closed for the first time since I got the Vive.

GT500

Unfortunately that didn't help. Neither did disabling Hardware Acceleration or disabling OpenVR support in Vivaldi.

GT500

I disabled the WebXR Device API, WebXR Gamepad Support, and WebXR orientation sensor device flags as well. At first that seemed to help reduce the frequency with which the odd FPS drop and frametime spike happened, however after closing a tab in Vivaldi that had a YouTube video open the issue became just as frequent as it was before making changes.

I'll try disabling extensions later, and see what happens.

GT500

Reported as VB-49588.

Here's a 2-minute video demonstration I made since recording the video was easier than screenshots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-O4cl_D2O0

GT500

I've discovered that Vivaldi seems to have a performance impact on non-VR games as well (when SteamVR is not running and my HTC Vive is not powered on). For instance, in Star Trek Online I noticed the framerate was roughly 5-10 FPS higher with Vivaldi closed than with it open.

I also tested in Far Cry New Dawn, which has a benchmark mode that records detailed stats. I took screenshots of the results, and here are links to both of them:

Far Cry New Dawn will also save more detailed benchmark information in an HTML file, which I have uploaded here if anyone wants to see it. The two benchmarks are labeled "Current" (without Vivaldi running) and "Previous" (with Vivaldi running). At the bottom of the benchmark you can see the video options, which has several "tabs" you can switch between to verify that none of the video settings differed between the two benchmarks.

Note that the benchmark details show the default non-turbo clock speed of the CPU. It is currently clocked at 4.0 GHz.

More detailed system specs are available here.

GT500

@Gwen-Dragon Google Chrome 72, or a dev build of Chromium 72? I don't technically have either installed, so I can pick whichever sounds better to you.

Also, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "more information what analyzed". Do you mean more information about the analysis tools, or more detailed information about the odd spikes in the time it takes to process frames when Vivaldi is running? SteamVR does have more advanced tools for debugging framerate issues than what I used in my video, although I would believe that injecting them into a VR scene is technically still a beta.