WipeUout

Already did it and load times were still longer. Yesterday's OB update (DCS 2.7.18.30348) seems to bring back load times to what is was before DCS 2.7.17.29493. I also noticed 0.5 FPS improvement running my test track file (Caucasus with F-18). Not much but it allows to crank a setting up! Increase in performance is always appreciated, thanks!

I do see an increase in load time since the last OB update. At game startup as well as mission loading.

Performance is outstanding with my 8k+. As far as clarity I can read pretty much everything in the modules I own. The 8k+ has a refresh rate of 72hz making it very easy to achieve higher than 72 FPS to have the smoothest experience. I can even supersample to 150% and avoid using MSAA. The 8kX also has the option to use upscale or not in order to provide more performance, I only have the upscale option on the 8k+. The 8kX has also better panels with virtually no SDE. Achieving higher FPS than your HMD's refresh rate coupled with a wide field of view while avoiding motion re-projection makes all the difference in immersion level.

I think you should also consider upgrading your GPU in the near future. I would try to save on the mobo/cpu in order to get a better GPU when they come out in a few months. My i7-12700KF is amazing with a frametime mostly below 9 ms. This gives ample breathing room to the GPU. The graphic engine of DCS needs a fast single core speed. The i7 delivers that at a very good price and it is cheaper than the 5800x3D. For the 12th gen intel, you get a DDR4 mobo and save even more on the RAM. Plus, you will still be able to upgrade once more to 13th gen in a year or two. Getting a better experience in DCS VR requires not only a fast single core CPU speed, it also requires a fast GPU.

Best way I found to test settings is to use a short track file. This way you have the same exact scenario running, you just keep your head straight and watch FPS from the corner of your eye at specific moments in the track. Another good way to correctly evaluate the improvement (or cost) in FPS is to have a standard set of setting that will be overly demanding for your system in order to have your FPS stay below your HMD's refresh rate. This way you will have a more precise idea on the actual gain or loss in FPS when trying to change one setting. If you use fpsVR (requires steamvR), it is even better/easier as you get the average FPS and check it only at the end of the track. When I do test with my ''test settings'', my FPS stays in the low 60 FPS at best since my HMD's refresh rate is set to 72hz. If my FPS would reach 72 FPS during a test, it would stay at 72 FPS with my GPU usage going lower, and I would not have any idea of the actual gain in FPS. But you are right, DCS can cost you many hours of tweeking and testing to find that sweet spot.

No worries, DCS needs a lot of tweaking but keep some time aside to fly! Just another bit on using DCS Pixel Density (PD) to supersample. You will find that DCS may not be the best in the processing chain to do supersampling and also, does not offers the same granularity as steamVR. If you set your PD in DCS at 1.1, you are increasing the pixel count (or resolution) by 21%. If you set the PD to 1.2, it is a 44% increase. This becomes quickly very demanding and if you want to set it to 30% increased resolution for example, no can do with DCS PD. SteamVR offer much more flexibility with a % slider. PiTool also has a supersampling slider but similar to DCS, it is jumping in big increments (25, 50, 75%...). Finding the sweet spot takes time and efforts but it is quicker with more precision. Good luck!

Change FOV to normal, going from 170 degree to 150 is not a big difference visually but performance wise it is. In steamVR (if you use it) do not have the render resolution set to auto, set it to 100% to start with and increase until your system can keep up. Super Sampling will increase clarity but introduce stutters if you don't have the horsepower. You will have to consider lower DCS settings such as clouds to low, Anisotropic filter to off and scenery details factor to lowest. From a hardware perspective, your CPU might be bottlenecked. My previous CPU was a 9900K also and it could not keep up. Your GPU is definitely not powerful enough to spit two 4k frames at 90hz. Some 8kx have lower frequency option, lower it if you have the option. If you use steamVR, consider loading fpsVR to monitor your GPU/CPU frametime while you fly, this will help you a lot to pinpoint issues and see effects of changes you make. Also try compulsive smoothing, this will improve the smoothness quit a bit but will introduce some ghosting which you may find acceptable instead of have stuttering. It will not help with clarity though.

Since we are digressing a bit, my two cents: Porsche uses this scheme to describe their variants of EV cars. The rational is to use the same naming concept as their petrol only version in an effort to classify the car's power output. I have a Panamera e-hybrid and it is labeled as a Panamera S. The petrol only Panamera S had a 420 HP engine, mine has a 330 HP v6 plus a 96 HP electric motor with a combined output of 416 HP, thus earning the label ''S''. This way, the customer can understand quickly to the equivalent EV version. They have used this also with their electric only Tycan with a ''turbo'' version. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, it is a different attempt to explain the product to the customer. That said, I will buy the 12k but only when GPUs can keep up with the huge number of pixels. Hopefully the AMD Radeon 7000 series or the NVIDIA 4000 series will have the HPs to cope with it.

Keyword "experience". I've also tried many and I am now with my second Pimax HMD. There is no substitute for superior immersion with the pimax FOV. Granted their maketing is a bit streaching it and misleading. But once you try it and compare... for me this is the best HMD for DCS.

Back to the discussion about 8k vs 4k. I thnik that the real answer to what is the actual resolution of what you see in an 8k HMD is between 4k and 8k, not 4k and definitely not 8k. If you look in your HMD and roll your eyes from one side to the other, you will notice that part of the image can't be seen by both eyes. Although there are effectively two 4k panels, each eye can see one full panel and a portion of the opposing side panel. When the two images are superimposed in your brain, you get the 3rd dimension as a result of superposition but the resolution does not change. For sake of discussion if there is a 20% portion of the panel that can't be seen by the opposite side eye, then you will not have a 3D image for that portion but it is still visible as at least one of your eyes sees it. Now, figuring out what is the actual resolution of the image seen in your brain is something like 80% of 4K which is the superimposed portion of the image, plus 20% of 4k for the left eye and 20% for the right eye. Doing the math, your actual resolution is 120% of 4k, or 4.8k. This is if the portion of the image not visible to the opposing eye equate 20%. I never actually calculated this precisely but I think I'm not too far off. All this to say that the actual resolution of the 12k, based on 20% non-visible by opposing eye, would be about 7.2k.

Depends on hardware but also on the test scenario. I use the attached track file along with fpsVR and here are my results: Aniso filter OFF : 58.3 FPS Aniso filter 8 x : 52.5 FPS Aniso filter 16 x : 49.5 FPS Image quality is very subjective but on my setup, I don't see any noticeable improvement with Anisotropic filtering on. Only the FPS drop! performance track 277.trk

Another FPS killer is Anisotropic Filtering. 16x vs Off will give you 8-10 FPS more, not to mention it does nothing to improve quality! At least in a pimax. Cloud at ultra will not make any visual difference compared to low but will also cost many FPS if you have lots of clouds.

OpenXR lowers the image quality too much on pimax. Nowadays I supersample SteamVR at 150% and set MSAA to off. I have very clear view with excellent legibility for MFDs. My stated resolution in fpsVR is 3136x2580. My HMD refresh rate is at 72hz and I maintain a pretty solid 72 fps except over very dense cities. My 6900xt is overclocked at 2825 Mhz.

Yes, I think that most of us use different profiles. Maybe that is one area for future improvement: Make the number of profile unlimited, three options is not enough! (For now at least)

My CPU frametime which stay pretty much under 10 ms most of the time, jumps over 13 ms with three catapults running at the same time and I have an i7 12th gen with a very fast single core speed. Enjoying DCS with high FPS is not possible presently in all scenarios or for all modules. The hardware is not there yet, or the graphic engine not enough optimized/up-to-date... Nevertheless it is still way better for me than pancake, from an immersion perspective!

That was my excuse until I realized that my accuracy improved quite a bit with VR Zoom. The low resolution we have in VR makes it difficult sometime to straff or CCIP with precision, VR Zoom is very helpfull for that. I now have one of my HOTAS button exclusively assigned to zoom, applying for all the modules and this is far better.

Well, on a local network it is very easy but if you want to have others join you, it is a little bit more complicated. Check out this guide also: https://www.serveracademy.com/how-to-host-a-dcs-server-full-step-by-step-guide/ Some ISP block traffic unless you establish rules to allow specific ports to be open. The above guide explains how to do this. Another usefull trick is ti install teamviewer and establish a connection with your server from your gaming PC. This way you can control the server from your gaming PC without having to jump in another chair or location. Very usefull if you want to pause the mission for example.

Did you try with different cloud quality setting? I find that clouds in VR are awful not matter what the setting, so I leave it to low and gain some FPS. BTW I did some testing with a very cloudy mission (Overcast 4) and had a difference of 11 FPS between Low and Ultra settings! This setting is very demanding and should be kept at low. At least until we get the next gen GPUs... In November hopefully!

Constant load? I don't understand what point you are trying to make. Constant load will simply result in lower temps and power consumption. With the test I performed, my GPU was at 98-99% load most of the time and this is consistent with the temps/power observed. Scene with lots of details will be more demanding to your GPU, as long as your CPU can feed the data to the GPU which is another important factor here. Complexity also increases your CPU load which can have its frametime value exceed the GPU frametime value and result in decrease load on the GPU. Can you expand more about what you are trying to achieve with those tests? It might help me to understand... ...and motivate me to invest more time into this!

Ok, with clouds and shadows at max, MSAA at 2x, time 16:30 and cloud set at scattered 6: here are my results, but with a new track file since clouds template can't be changed once track is saved. I did not use chill since this is useless in a bechmark. If you limit your FPS then how can you get an accurate FPs reading? Also understand that the limit refresh rate of your HMD will also corrupt your FPS result if your FPS exceed the refresh rate during the bechmark. I think you might use chill because you use reprojection? That's the case for most G2 user as you can't achieve smooth video at native refresh rate. Very similar results but you can't directly compare with the previous results since it is a new track file: Benchmark City Scape - F-18 over Dubai V2.trk Vis Range Extreme : 46.4 Vis Range at High : 49.4 Vis Range at Low: 54.3 My card is an ASUS RX 6900XT TUF Gaming OC Edition air cooled. As for other values from HWinfo: GPU Temp (max) 63 deg C GPU HS Temp (max) 83 Deg C TDP (max) 318 Watts Reliable and repeatable testing with the F-14 is not possible as the track recording is still broken. A very important aspect of testing is repeatability, that's why you have to use a track file and be very rigorous with your testing procedure. If you repeat the same test twice, you should get consistently the same result +/- 0.1 FPS.

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.