WipeUout

Dear @lefuneste01, the cockpit ghost seems to be back both in Maverick and TGP screens in the F-16: I tried to adjust MFD settings (sharpen and luma) but without any success. If you have some spare time this coming weekend... This does not impair playability though, I am still able to search and lock targets.

Thanks @lefuneste01 for the 16.0b1 update, the cockpit mask/ghost is not showing anymore. I just started using 3Dmigoto a few days ago and the features are really nice but I have a hard time understanding how FXAA works in relation to the variables we can play with. I understand that you can't achieve as good a result as using MSAA but if you have any hint on which setting will get maximum anti-aliasing this would help.

DCS uses DX11, not DX12.

This is one factor, and there are many more such as single core utilization. Hardware Unboxed made a very interesting comparison between the 5800X3D and the i9-12900k, see it here`: If you look at performance at 4k, there are a lot of instance where the games are GPU bound. For DCS in VR, it is even more demanding than 4k. The 5800X3D is definitely very impressive but will probably not have a big impact if your GPU is the bottleneck. Interesting also are some titles benchmarked are single core, just like DCS. The 5800X3D is a good solution if you already have a AM4 based system, as long as you can find the chip and buy it...

Very important factor to take into consideration before changing your CPU. You have to understand where you are and what can improve your system performance. Consider the following diagram which I call the DCS VR Settings Game: Analyzing your frame times for both CPU and GPU for a specific level of details/quality will help you see what kind of benefit you can gain from upgrading the CPU. When setting our 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 is 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 GPUs are 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 upgrade but It will not increase your GPU`s performance. 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 invest next and it might be a better GPU that is needed.

I would be very careful and wait further reviews, specifically with DCS. The single core performance of the 5800X3D is not so good, it is actually less that the 5800X. How much a big cache will impact in DCS is not known now but could be negligible. DCS graphic engine requires fast single core performance the way it works now, and there is not official timeline when the graphic engine will be upgraded to multi-core like in most modern games.

This can also be done if you have a spare computer/laptop to use as the "DCS server". You don't need to have a beefy one and not even a good GPU. Just install the server version, hook it up on you local network and there you go. The server version has all the maps, no extra cost. You can setup a network drive on you "play" computer pointing to the mission folder on the server and do your ME work without having to jump from one pc to the other. I also setup a teamviewer session from my "play" PC to the server, this way I can pause the mission remotely without having to get up to go the server. Squeezing every bit of performance possible.

If you use fpsVR, what is happening with your CPU and GPU frametimes when you see a drop in FPS? This might help rule out (or pinpoint) CPU or GPU for issues.

DCS uses about 10-20% of your CPU power. This is because only two cores are being used instead of taking advantage of the multi-core capability of modern processors. There is a plan to modernize the graphic engine of DCS to take advantage of this technology but we have no idea when this will come. As of now I would say go for the CPU that has the highest single core performance to ensure you can generate all those pixels to your VR headset. The Single core speed champion now is intel's Alder Lake, or the 12th generation. I just upgraded to a i7-12700KF and it significantly improved my experience. It did not made the GPU go faster but gave it some extra breathing room, especially in MP.

What are you running DCS from? SSD or M.2? and what is the size of your page file also? It sounds like you are getting out of memory or you have a bottleneck in your storage system. Might want to check the health/performance of your drive or how much space is left on it. Having a dedicated M.2 drive for DCS only helps a lot. Tried all possible resolutions and no luck. I can't get RSR to activate. Seems that DCS is not running in a full screen mode to allow RSR to activate.

Yes and FPSVR is a good tool for this. I went from a 9900K to a 12700KF and definitely saw an FPS improvement in scenarios where my GPU was held back by high CPU frametimes. If you GPU is already taxed 100% (or close), a new CPU will not help much. In general, if you see CPU frametime same or higher than GPU frametime in FPSVR, then consider upgrading your CPU. Just make sure that the new CPU has high single thread performance which is the critical factor for DCS. Alder lake CPUs have the highest single thread performance.

I am no expert on G2 but as for your DCS settings, some changes could improve your FPS. Lowering the clouds will not change much the visuals in VR. You may also put terrain object shadows to off, this will give you a good increase in FPS. Anisotropic Filtering does not improve much the image quality but could give you more FPS at lower setting. Civilian traffic also impact your FPS, consider turning it off. You may also get more performance by using a shader. I use "DCS VR Shaders mod for 2.7.11.21408.1" which improves a bit the performance. A lot of factor will cause a drop in FPS such as background scripts and smoke/explosions, flying over/towards dense sceneries. Reducing your scenery details factor might help too.

So I finally pulled the trigger on an i7-12700KF. Very good match for the 6900XT. The first few benchmarks I did showed a decrease of 2.5 milliseconds in CPU frametime. The improvement is most noticeable in multiplayer, not needing anymore to decrease my settings. Overall stability also much better in busy scenario with lots of smoke, AI around and scripts running in background. Having a 12th gen CPU gave breathing room to the AMD card and a pleasing stable 90 FPS in my Pimax 5ks HMD. I have to update my hardware description bellow now...

Is there any way to activate/toggle reshade in VR without a controller?

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.