WipeUout

Never did before but thought this could be interesting. So I did a benchmark track file and tested at three visibility range values: Extreme, High and Low. Here are the results: Extreme : 47.6 FPS High: 50.6 FPS Low: 57.3 FPS I was using the settings (bellow) that I use only for becnhmarking in order to push the GPU to max througout the benchmark. And here is the track file: Benchmark City Scape - F-18 over Dubai.trk I use a bit of supersampling (126%) with Steam VR. I also use VR Shader mod 2.7.12.23362 to gain a few FPS and Reshade_VR_Sharpen_color to improve sharpness. My AMD driver is the latest (22.8.1). And finally, my 6900XT is OC'ed at max 2825 Mhz, min 2725 Mhz. In order to have a common reference point to compare results, here is my test procedure: 1. Load track file up to point you are in the cockpit but do not press ready yet. 2. Take off HMD and point mouse to load fpsVR. Be ready to put back HMD quickly in order to start track as soon as fpsVR is started. 3. Once fpvVR is started, the screen brigntness will change and this is your cue to start the replay. 4. Keep your head straight, do not move. The track file is short, the F-18 will do one 360 degree turn only. 5. Once the turn nears the end, the plane will start leveling, at that point check fpsVR average and take not of last value before end of track. 6. Try new setting and restart test procedure. As you can see with my results, there is a significant difference with visibility range values when flying over dense city.

Well there are several different model of Pimax HMD. I had a 5k Super that worked very well at a solid 90 FPS but with medium to low setting and not so good resolution. Never used motion smoothing as it does not look good for me, I was getting 90 FPS anyway and it was so smooth. Then I switched to an 8k+. With a lower minimum refresh rate of 72hz, I was able to pump up details and get a much better quality since my target FPS is now 72. The image processing load is the same as both 5k Super and 8k+ have a 2.5k pixel image per eye input signal. The difference with the 8k+ is that it upscales the image to 4k per eye. The image quality is not as good as a 8kX which is native 4k, but I get much more FPS with a resulting super smooth experience. All this to say it all depends on which Pimax HMD we are talking about. What I read though is that the G2 has a better image quality but much less smooth video, and a lot of frustration and tweeking to do in order to find the sweet spot. For sure the pimax take a lot of work as well but seems that the G2 is even worst.

The valve index has a relative low resolution, you should not have any problem sustaining 80 FPS or more. The latest AMD drivers work very good for me but I am using a pimax 8k. I suggest doing clean install of your AMD driver using DDU (see https://www.wagnardsoft.com/content/ddu-guide-tutorial for more info). After a clean install, make sure you have all the latest driver for your HMD. Next consider installing fpsVR, this will help pinpoint where is the bottleneck and lastly, share your settings so we can see if there is a problem there as well.

VR is all about immersion to the detriment of graphics quality, and it will remain like this forever. 2D takes half the quantity of pixel compared to 3D and it will always mean that VR will never match visual quality of 2D. Right now I would say that VR can be enjoyable and a very smooth experience if you select the right hardware. A top GPU, a lttle less resolution HMD and a powerfull single core performance CPU. The next generation GPU will improve a lot our experience but if your expectations are to match 2D visuals, then you will expect for a long time.

VR is all about immersion to the detriment of graphics quality, and it will remain like this forever. 2D takes half the quantity of pixel compared to 3D and it will always mean that VR will never match visual quality of 2D. Right now I would say that VR can be enjoyable and a very smooth experience if you select the right hardware. A top GPU, a lttle less resolution HMD and a powerfull single core performance CPU. The next generation GPU will improve a lot our experience but if your expectations are to match 2D visuals, then you will expect for a long time. There are tons of missions to fly and airframes to learn. Try flying with a friend cooperatively or join a squadron, this might elevate your enjoyment quite a bit.

Tweeking your system settings to fully use your hardware to its maximum potential is very time consuming and complex. Consider this diagram: Analyzing your frame times for both CPU and GPU for a specific level of details/quality will help you see if the CPU is the bottleneck. When setting graphics quality level, we all try to stay within an acceptable framerate for most of the time. In order to achieve this, we set things up in order to have the CPU frametime average at a certain level that will be equal or bellow what it takes to generate the target FPS. The GPU generate frames from data provided by your CPU. Ideally, you need the CPU frametime to be the same or lower than the GPU frametime in order to fully use the potential of your GPU. In this situation, you are GPU limited and it is what most of us experience in VR as it is very demanding to pump out all those pixels in such large amount. We tweak settings for countless hours in order to be in this situation where our GPU is being used to the maximum. At one point, you may increase the performance of your CPU by overclocking or upgrading but eventually, it is the GPU that will not keep up. At that point, not matter how low your CPU frame time is, the average FPS will not change much. If you experience very high peaks in your CPU frametime, then it might be helpful to consider an upgrade but It will not increase your GPU`s performance. It might give you a more stable framerate though. You have to analyze what is your particular situation by monitoring your CPU and GPU frametime. fpsVR is a great tool for this. Understanding where your bottleneck is, will guide you as to where to tweek or adjust settings. Detailed framerate datad displayed by DCS can also help understand which setting or aspect of a particular mission is consuming too much CPU resources.

Have you checked with fpsVR what is happening to both GPU and CPU frametime when you have those lags? You might be close to the limit of your refreah rate. I get this when too much is going on such as a multiplayer mission with a lot of scripts running. It might be helpful to also check the detailed FPS info provided by DCS, this will help determine if the lag is caused by the mission or something else like specific options turned on.

I would suggest the 5k Super if you want high FPS. Your GPU should be able to pump 90 FPS and not use reprojection which has a lot of ghosting. You may also consider the 8k+ which can run at 72hz and is lot cheaper now. I made the switch from 5k Super to 8k+, this was a major improvement in image quality and still not requiring reprojection. The difference between 72hz and 90hz is not perceptible in most cases, the experience is still buttery smooth. The 8k+ upscales the image from 1440p to 4k and thus is less demanding on the system compared to the 8kX. You don't get an image as nice as an 8kX but the SDE is almost gone and you get a solid framerate with good level of details. If you go for the Crystal Qled, chances are you will not have the hosepower to drive it at a decent framerate, which brings me to the next point I want to make: your CPU. Good thing you are considering the upgrade as well. Increasing the demand on your system to generate more frames is a two fold question, both the GPU and the CPU have to be considered. I used to have a 9900k and was experiencing a lot of CPU bottleneck with my 5k super. The CPU was simply not up to the task and I switched for a 12th gen i7. The improvement was great and gave a lot of breathing room to my GPU. a smooth video makes a lot of difference in immersion quality. If you plan to upgrade your GPU in the future, then I would go for the crystal but next gen GPU might not be readily available before next year. Nevertheless, good thing that you are also upgrading your CPU.

Not exactly, the widest FOV you can get in VR with a pimax is 170 degree but most people with a Pimax use 150 degree because it is less demanding. Human eye FOV is over 180 degrees. Notwithstanding the FOV, you have 4k per eye of pixels, no more (pimax 8k). The pixels are streched quite a bit and you loose a lot of resolution compared to pancake mode. Also, the zoom in VR does not reveal more details because it does not change the resolution of the image, it simply moves the image closer to your eye.

Have you tried VR? The resolution (pixel density) of an 8k VR head set is about 1/4 of a 4k monitor. The zoom function in VR does not come close to what you get in pancake, I would say about 2x zoom. Even with this zoom, it is not that much. The day we get human eye resolution, zoom will be cheating. Until then, it is just a way to compensate the low resolution we are dealing with. And BTW, if you are flying in a Tomcat, the information you mention is easy to get from the nose camera at almost 10 nm if you are flying towards the bandit... No need for any zoom.

https://www.youtube.com/c/GrowlingSidewinder Check this channel, this is were I leaned the most on A2A techniques. You will see practical examples of engagements and also learn basic terminology and concepts that will help you very much. The tricks I leaned from GS improved my kill ratio from a negative one to a positive one. You can't evade all missiles or win all fights but you can improve your results to something very favorable against the AI. Good luck.

Yes, software can be optimized. But hardware also can improve, and is improving again quite a lot with the next generation (both for GPU and CPU). We have been stuck for almost two years with the current generation GPUs with little stock and high prices. This is also very frustrating. I think that ED would like to expand their customer base like any other company and are working towards this. But let's face it, it's been difficult with the GPU crisis we had. I personally have been lucky to get my hands on a top tier GPU lats year and I am enjoying my flight session very much. The hard fact is that even if the graphic engine was improved, that will not increase the resolution of my pimax 8K. It will remain at 4k per eye. And until HMDs match the pixel density of a 4k monitor, no graphic engine improvement will change that. Software and hardware can improve. Let's hope for decent GPU prices and good supply going forward also.

That's quite a CPU/GPU setup you have there. Can you share more details? What kind of FPS you are getting in different scenarios, what is you resolution, any super sampling or upscaling or native res?

Tried it and it does improve a bit but the cost in image quality was too much for me. I did not see any advantage from a same details/quality/clarity stand point. Unless you are not using any other means such as a shader or the latest AMD driver that are now fully D3D11 optimized, you will not see any improvement. You might get different results with hardware from the green team...

Coarse means you increase or decrease values at maximum rate, fine means you increase or decrease values at minimum rate. You star with "coarse" and fine tune with "fine".

A little update. I just upgraded from a Pimax 5k Super to an 8K+ Since the price for the 8K+ dropped to 600 ish USD a few weeks ago, my 5K Super now worth 900 USD for the 12.5K trade-in program, and not being sure the 8KX would even work with my RX 6900XT, I pulled the trigger on a 8k+. The 8K+ does have the same panel resolution of the 8KX but the image is upscaled from 1440 to 2160 pixels. The resulting image is not as nice as native 8k but the frametime is also significantly less. A big advantage is the 72hz refresh rate of the 8k+ which provides a lot of room to get more eye candy. I used to run my 5K Super at 90hz refresh rate and achieving a solid 90 FPS with low settings but with a lot of shimmering, and without any Anti-Aliasing to keep frametime below 11 ms. The experience was nice and very smooth but shimmers were sometime very distracting. Going to the 8K+ solved those issues for me. I run the 8K+ at 72hz refresh rate with good level of details and MSAA at 4x or 2x in MP. The difference between a stable 90 FPS and 72 FPS is very difficult to notice unless you roll the aircraft at very high rate. The improved resolution also made the SDE almost gone, difficult to see most of the time. I am now enjoying a better image quality, (still) butter smooth rendering and much greater level of details. Anyone out there with an 8K+ ?

Does the latest 22.5.2 driver solved stability for you guys? Although i did not have major issues with the preview, the 22.5.2 is definetly more stable to me but a tad slower. The good new is that VR shader does not conflict with it anymore and you can still gain a bit from it.

I just upgraded from a Pimax 5k Super to an 8K+. Since the price for the 8K+ dropped to 600 ish USD a couple weeks ago, my 5K Super now worth 900 USD for the 12.5K trade-in program, and not being sure the 8KX would even work with my RX 6900XT, I pulled the trigger on a 8k+. The 8K+ does have the same panel resolution of the 8KX but the image is upscaled from 1440 to 2160 pixels. The resulting image is not as nice as native 8k but the frametime is also significantly less. I used to run my 5K Super at 90hz refresh rate and achieving a solid 90 FPS with low settings and a lot of shimmering without any Anti-Aliassing possible to keep frametime below 11 ms. The experience was nice and very smooth but shimmers were sometime very distracting. The 5k Super lowest frequency is 90hz. Going to the 8K+ solved those issues for me. I run the 8K+ at 72hz refresh rate with good level of details and MSAA at 4x. The difference between a stable 90 FPS and 72 FPS is very difficult to notice unless you roll the aircraft at very high rate. The improved resolution also made the SDE almost gone, difficult to see most of the time. I am now enjoying a better image quality, (still) butter smooth rendering and much greater level of details. Anyone out there with an 8K+ ?

Though about it but hesitated. I think it would not make any big difference, it has to be re-constructed anyway. This is what I say in some reviews about the new driver as well, people have stutters in first runs and it goes away after.

Ok, here we go. First thanks to @Sr. for the advice about doing a clean driver install, I did that and it worked 100% at start. First run was terrible with a 15 FPS drop, lots of stutters, repeated twice with same results. I was suspecting conflicting problem with reshade or vr shader. Then tried vanilla and saw a 5% gain right there. Re-installed reshade_sharpen_color and FPS gain was up to 6.5%! The conflict was with "VR Shader mod for 2.7.12.23362", the new AMD driver does not play well with it. I have not tried with SIMPLEX as my FPS gain with it is now negative since last OB update. Not using VR Shader ended up by a positive gain nevertheless as I was getting a 4% FPS gain with it. So my net gain with the new AMD driver is about 2 FPS but simplifying things as no need to uninstall/re-install this mod again, and suffer for long waiting time when shaders need to be re-compiled. Positive overall. Not a great gain but will be significant for people not using a shader. More info: As I am trying different modules and terrain, I find that some occasional stutter happens. I think the card's shader cache is being re-populated along the way. If I replay the same mission, the stuttering goes away.

I will be back home in an hour or so and will try then.

Anyone tried the new AMD preview driver? They advertise double digits improvement in DX11 games...

Anyone having low or negative performance with VR Shader SIMPLEX? I used to have a slight gain of 2-3 FPS but as of the last OB and 3dmigoto update, I get a little drop of 0.5 FPS.

I use a 5k Super and get very stable 90 FPS in SP, and also in MP unless flying over dense city but even then, the drop is around 80 FPS which is not bad at all. The 5k Super has 90hz as the lowest refresh rate. When using reprojection, I get ghosting that is not acceptable to me. Fortunately, I can achieve 90 FPS in most of scenarios and it is butter smooth, thanks to my 12th gen i7 and 6900XT. I would like to improve resolution and I am considering going for the 8kX. I am not sure if it can keep up 60 FPS and avoid using reprojection. How is the ghosting when reprojection is enabled?

Many thanks again @lefuneste01! Issue not showing anymore. Tested in F-16, F-18, AV-8B, A-10A,C,C_II. ...and F-14 also.