WipeUout

I would suggest that 64 GB is a waste since DCS will not use even half of it. I have 32 GB and I never saw more than 12 GB being used by DCS. I recommend you look at other HMD option. If a smooth experience and wide field of view is what you want then the Pimax 5kS would be a good choice. It will not be as clear as a G2 but coming from an Oculus rift, you will be blown away. As far as the CPU, there is no gain in going for the i9 vs i7-12700k, both have almost the same single thread performance, or no significant difference. Single thread performance is, for now, the most critical CPU metric for DCS. For your GPU go for the max you can afford. Even though massively more performing GPU may come this later year, you can always sell a top GPU easily and switch to a new one with less cost impact. Update: tried again in MP with 38 players and used memory reached 7.5 GB with an F-14B. Tried also Liberation campaign, which is the most demanding missions generated I tried so far, and almost reached 11 GB... You do not need more than 32 GB with DCS. Put your money on better HMD or GPU instead.

I suggest you go into the VR section of the forum. You will find that it gets a little more complicated with many additional settings, not to mention many mods to increase FPS and quality. My 6900XT is OC'ed to 2.825 Ghz, my fans run at 100% as soon as I hit 62 deg keeping the GPU under 75 deg all the time, and it is noisy also. Any setting in Radeon software has no effect in VR for now. FYI. If you go VR, its a lot of tweeking but the reward is tremendous immersion... and you will never go back to pancake!

Have you tried the last SteamVR Beta ver 1.21.11? It did solved some issues for me.

Until there are some positive reviews and relevant benchmarks, difficult to assess if this chip will be very good. For now I tend to look at single thread performance for an instant gain but how much can a bigger cache impact it? Time will tell. I will nevertheless wait until the end of March before switching mobo and cpu.

Same here, I used to have to turn MSAA off as soon as things were getting busy but now, I can keep it. I also find myself not using reprojection as often as before, my rig is keeping up with 80+ FPS even in MP most of the time. The pimax 5kS has a minimum 90hz refresh rate and if FPS goes below 80, then it becomes very stuttery. What I see now is my CPU being the bottleneck. I am considering switching to a Rysen 5900X or i7-12700KF. If only I knew when the multi-core engine will be available, that would help in deciding which one to pick. I have the impression that Rysen will still be a better choice for the 6900XT in a multi-core engine compared to an Intel i7 setup.

Anyone tried the new adrenaline 22.2.3 driver? Apparently some FPS gain in 2D games.

My bad, I mixed visibility range and water quality. The bug goes away effectively at medium and high water quality setting. Here are my screenshots at medium, low and high:

Same problem here. Water quality setting has no effect on the bug, still there at low, medium or high.

After a few months trying to research, tweek and test in order to find the perfect setting (for me), I though I could share where I am now and hope this might help someone else. I have now basically two settings like most, one for single-player(sp) and one for multi-player(mp). Since mp is more demanding, I need to scale down settings to stay within the comfort zone but there are situations that causes massive demand on the hardware such as flying over explosions and smoke in a F-16. That will result in stutters and drop beyond the limit for a smooth video. The module you use will impact the framerate, just like in pancake mode. Let's start with my setup which is a bit different and could have very different results for others: CPU. i9-9900KF OC'ed at 5.0 Ghz on all cores. This is an area where I feel I could still improve but not much, and I need a better cooler... I did use the processor in stock mode and overclocking to 5 GHz did not bring much difference in DCS. GPU. ASUS TUF GAMING RX 6900XT OC'ed at 2,825 Mhz. After extensive testing, this is the fastest and very much stable limit for my card. I also tried to increase VRAM speed but did not get any significant improvement, using fast timing is quite enough and most important "stable". The critical thing here is to ensure your minimum frequency is 100 Mhz lower than the max. It will keep the GPU on "high alert" and reduce a lot of lag and stutters. This could be very different on another card, you will have to experiment. Here are my tuning settings: Playing DCS with these settings for me keeps the GPU under 75 degree all the time and under 70 degree most of the time. Another important point is to check regularly that the settings are still applied, especially after a system crash. Save your profile for easy re-load. As far as other settings in Adrenaline, I found they have very little positive effect (if any?) in DCS. This is a bit of a disappointment as there are several interesting features that I would use in DCS. Hopefully when AMD implements FSR at the driver level, this will help. HMD. My choice went for the Pimax Vision 5k Super because I wanted a smooth video, wide field of view and decent level of details. I tried many HMD and for me the immersion experience was the most important factor. with a 150 degree field of view, I really feel I'm in a cockpit. The 5k Super is certainly not generating the most clear, crisp and SDE free image but it can spit frames like crazy and with a great field of view. Here are my settings with the PiTool: As indicated above, I use 150 degree field of view (normal). I could go to large (170 degree) but it becomes very taxing. Not showing above is my rendering frequency which is set at 90hz. No need to go any higher, unless the graphic engine of DCS gets greatly optimized or a new significantly more powerful GPU becomes available, I will stick with 90Hz. Hitting 90 FPS has been the holy grail for me. I can achieve it but to the expense of details and eye candy. In some specific sp mission that are not too demanding, I will disable compulsive smoothing and use my mp settings as I can sustain 90 FPS most of the time with good level of details (see my sp/mp setting for DCS bellow) but this is not achievable online so far. I am bit picky and can't stand stutters. The PiTool smart smoothing is simply awful in DCS, introducing artifacts and weird distortions. Compulsive smoothing is much better but to the expense of ghosting which for me is not a big problem. This feature is motion based re-projection and will substitute every second frame. At 90hz, the GPU generates 45 FPS only and the result is a butter smooth experience. Of course I wish I could avoid using it but the hardware is not there yet. Nevertheless it allows me to bump up significantly the image quality and level of details. SteamVR. Here I tried so many combination and found that 100% is the sweet spot. Supersampling will provide more clarity but cost a lot. Tweeking PD in DCS and supersampling in steam VR will not improve performance whatsoever. Sometime you get the illusion that things are faster but when you start doing the math to determine what is your final rendering resolution, you realize that you just decreased resolution. My advice here is keep everything at 100%. If clarity is something you want to improve, use a universal reshader (https://github.com/fholger/reshade/releases/tag/openvr_alpha2). This had the biggest impact in image quality in VR for me. It is a must (even in pancake mode it is very good) and has no impact of your framerate. Here are my Steam VR settings: As mentioned above, keep resolution at 100%. Using motion smoothing in SteamVR did not have any impact for me, not sure why but might be a pitool vs steamvr thing. DCS. Here is the bulk of the tweeking you can do in order to increase quality or performance. You will find that it is a lot of work to find the sweet spot. I has been many hours for me at least and I'm still testing options. Here are my setting for both sp and mp, followed with some comments: MULTIPLAYER SINGLE PLAYER MSAA will eat a lot of frames. In my case it is a 10% framerate drop from no MSAA to 2X and another 10% framerate drop from 2X to 4X. I must use it as shimmering is an issue without it since my HMD has a low resolution. The best solution I found to counteract this loss is to use a shader. I use SIMPLEX and it still work very well with 2.7.10 with a solid 10% increase in framerate. You can find this mod easily in the forum. As much as this is fantastic with VR, you will find it not so good if you still use pancake mode. Make sure you use OVGME for easy enabling/disabling. SSAA seem to have very little effect and is no substitute for MSAA, not sure why or if it is related to AMD. Full screen on or off may also have an impact but for me it does nothing, disabling windows full screen optimization either. Clouds are simply and unfortunately featureless in VR, leave it to standard. As far as VR settings, here is what I use: Here is also an option that has massive effect on your framerate: The PD. From my testing, I gain about 10% framerate for each 0.1 drop of the PD. This cost a lot though in terms of image quality. I leave it to 1.0. The default setting for IPD is not realistic and probably different depending on the filed of view? After doing a bit of research, I found that an IPD of 0.5 does not make me feel like I am sitting in a baby jet. Might be different for you but recommend you play with this setting a bit. Finally, the MSAA mask can also make a difference on performance, you can scale it down quite a bit if you field of view is lower as you will move your head more. In my case, 60% is ok. In conclusion, I think that the RX 6900XT is a great GPU for DCS VR. Coupled with a Pimax 5kS, it is the most immersive flight experience I had so far.

Tested both and they work in 2.7.9.18080. No appreciable performance difference one over the other except re-compile time seems faster with Simplex. I get about 10% FPS boost on my system with these shaders. Did not check for IC pass though.

Tried many combination and the best visual result is using MSAA with a reshader (https://github.com/fholger/reshade/releases/tag/openvr_alpha2). With the reshader, scaling down a bit my quality setting which do not have a huge impact visually (visibility range, anisotropic filter, cockpit resolution, forest details) and using motion re-projection, I can achieve very good quality and keep a smooth and steady 90 FPS with bit of ghosting when low and looking sideways... I was hoping to avoid using motion re-projection because of ghosting effect but since my HMD minimum refresh rate is 90Hz, it is possible to maintain 90 FPS in single player missions but definitely not in multiplayer.

I have an AMD card, no MFAA available unfortunately and AMD driver options do not seem to affect anything in VR... I will try your suggestion with lowering the PD, and also the steamVR SS back to 100%.

May I ask how do you define (or calculate) the margin of error? When a test is performed several times, the "margin of error" should be the range of results you get for the same conditions, or the difference between the lowest result and the highest result. In my test, I get a range of result of 0.2 between the highest and the lowest result. The FPS is pretty consistent.

I repeated the test several times (6-7) and results for each setting are max 0.2 FPS apart. Here are the averages: MSAA(2x) On: 56.2 SSAA(2x) On: 66.5 MSAA/SSAA Off: 67.3 MSAA alone has a 19.8% impact on my FPS, SSAA alone has a 1.2% impact only. I do see a small change using SSAA, could it be HMD dependent? SSAA does improve slightly the image quality but not much and leaves a lot of shimmering. It is MSAA that makes things more blurry in my VR headset with a high FPS drop. What would you suggest as a good compromise to reduce shimmering? Use a reshader?

After seeing a guy on youtube doing VR with SSAA, I decided to do a bit of testing to see the gain in quality compared with MSAA, which I've been using. I always though that SSAA would have a bigger demand on resources compared to MSAA as mention in the text bubbles in settings. Seems it is not quite the result I expected. Let's start with the settings I used: Then, I re-played @speed-of-heat's track (https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ar2cEt5yMycgm6skZyUPKfQMjm4mKw?e=so7zI5) using fpsVR to check my FPS average. Average FPS with MSAA off and SSAA 2x: 66.5 Average FPS with SSAA off and MSAA 2x: 56.2 Not only is SSAA much more efficient, the quality of the image looks way sharper!!! I am still wondering if this 18% improvement in FPS is real or I am dreaming... and it is such a nicer image! BTW I also supersample by 150% in steam VR, my Pimax 5kS is at standard FOV/90hz/1.0 rendering and PD set to 1.0 in DCS also, no image smoothing whatsoever. Anyone having similar results? Maybe this is very hardware specific.

Dear Flarpt, Men you are bitter. What are your expectations? I do agree that visually, VR is not as crisp and clear as pancake mode but the real culprit here is the hardware. When you look at a monitor, your viewing window is horizontally about 60 degrees with a lot of pixels compared to what you see in you HMD. Last time I made some calculations, it required something like 6.5k panel for each eye for a field of view of 120 degrees ln your HMD to match visual detail of a 4k screen. The day we have HMD with the same amount of pixel density as looking at a 4k monitor 2 feet away, then the quality of the rendering within the HMD will be good. This is, though, half the problem. The second part is the cpu/gpu being able to generate two 6.5k images 60 times a second at least. The hardware is not available yet. VR is for now, a compromise to get more immersion at the expense of frame rates and visual quality. For me, the compromise is acceptable and I will never go back to pancake.

... and 72.7 average FPS in VR (with the dureiken setting as well) at native resolution of my PIMAX 5k super (2560*1440). My 6900XT is a ASUS TUF Gaming. Slightly OC'ed at 2800 MHz. Weird that we get such different results. Seems that depending on the HMD, you can get better performance with the AMD card.

I just tried the track file in 4k in pancake mode with the settings mentioned by dureiken and my results are: Min: 54, Max 117, Avg: 82.7

This sounds very interesting. Do you know if it will work as well for a Steam Install?

I used to sim with a 60' Sony tv before getting into VR. My experience was very good playing 1440p with rock solid 60 FPS. I could spot easily stuff on the ground or in the air. VR can be a huge disappointment. The hardware is simply not powerful enough, it needs to be at least six times faster than what we have now to match the clarity of 2D monitor. Consider that you are using a 16:9 monitor, you have about 60o horizontal viewing angle from where you are sitting and 1440p resolution. To match this resolution with a 180o field of view, you would need three time the amount of pixels to match the resolution with the same vertical field of view. If you double your vertical filed of view as well for VR, then you need 6 time the amount of pixels. if we consider 16:9 1440p as 2.5k, then you need a VR headset that would have 6 x 2.5k, in other words a 15k display. When can we expect GPU to be able to pump 100 FPS at 15k? VR offers greater immersion, a better feeling that you are in a cockpit. There is still a huge tradeoff for resolution and smoothness, the hardware is not there yet. We need to manage our expectations. Nevertheless, I am not going back to 2D. It's blurry but I am flying!!

Personal preferences are very important here. I personally prefer wide field of view and butter smooth video over sharpness, very personal. For that reason I use a Pimax 5K Super although I have an RX6900 XT and i9-9900k. I can achieve easily 90+ FPS. The image sharpness is certainly not as good as a G2 but I feel very much immersed with a smooth image and the wide field of view and this is more important to me. The screen door effect is there also but it kind of goes away after a few minutes playing. All this to say, you need to ask yourself what is important. FPS, view, clarity, etc.?

This happens often to me as well although I have an RT 6900XT GPU. I think it is a bug related to the full screen option. Whenever I have a drop like this, I use the hotkey (ALT-ENTER) to toggle between full screen and windowed and it brings back the FPS rate where it should be. It is also very hard to replicate and seems to happen randomly over dense terrain. I fly over an area with plenty of GPU power left and all of the sudden, my FPS drops like if I had switched to windowed mode. I fly again over the same area a few seconds later and nothing happens.

Final update on this subject: The RX 6900XT card is surely a beast that will provide steady 60 FPS in 4K. The Adrenaline Software from AMD can be used to slightly improve performance by increasing GPU and VRAM clocks but not much to the expense of crashing or corrupting the video with weird artefact but this is very dependent on your own card, or silicone lottery. Other setting on Adrenaline such as Anti-Lag, Image Sharpening or Enhance Synch will not do much and instead decrease your FPS. I found that locking the FPS within DCS provides the smoothest video as opposed to using the Adrenaline software to fix FPS. The RX 6900XT will not solve stuttering generated from DCS such as explosion/smoke, scripts, messages or connection issue. It will make these issue more apparent though.

Do we have any control over TrackIR pull rate? Is this something that can be adjusted? @HansPeter1981 : Thanks for the suggestion about having DCS on a separate SSD. I do have two M.2 SSD but my second is less performing than my first one were DCS and win10 reside. I will give it a try though. Update: No apparent effect from moving DCS to another M.2 SSD.

''TrackIR to look around? Does it drop below that 60 FPS when looking sideways?'' Yes, I use TrackIR. Dip in FPS when looking sideways happens often and is pretty much related to view complexity or what is happening. Smoke and explosions are the worst and really need some optimization. After several tests, I finally got butter smooth result but still seeing some very small stutters which I think are not related to my hardware but more with DCS. I had to a do clean reinstall of the AMD drivers only. I do not have the Radeon software interface anymore but all the different setting were either slowing down FPS, causing more stutter/tearings/artefacts or simply nothing at all. I also messed around with GPU clock, voltage and VRAM speed which gave 2-3 FPS more but crashing the game after 20-30 minutes of play and no improvement on smoothness of the video. Locking my FPS with VSynch within DCS give me the beat results. A butter smooth video is so nice!