captainHelmet

I have noticed eye strain when looking at overlays over DCS, for example when looking at the steamVR loading dialogue box. I wonder if this has to do with the crosseye correction that DCS requires that other apps don't need.

Disabling HPET and overclocking my cpu are the two things I have yet to test. I don't think I will overclock the 3900x as there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to gain from it. I just used processLasso to manage my cpu affinity and make sure that my dcs and steamVR processes are assigned to the fastest physical cores and don't interfere with one another.

I'm glad that sharing my experiences were helpful to someone else! There is a lot of trial and test involved. I run a stock 3900x as well with a rtx2070, and while I can't remember the frame times off the top of my head my cpu time stays in the green on lighter single player missions. I wouldn't be surprised if 16GB of ram is one of your limiting factors here. Those spikes could possibly be page file reads and writes. Also make sure you have XMP mode enabled so your ram is running at proper speed. Ram may not be the main cause of your issues, but increasing your ram should make things more stable. The magnitude of the penalty for using MSAA depends on what you are looking at; jumping from 2x to 4x definitely hits my gpu frame times, but if you can get away with it good for you! I try to balance resolution vs MSAA. Resolution makes your cockpit more readable and helps with spotting distant planes, MSAA helps with shimmer of high contrast edges like thin wires, bright sun on the tops of buildings, and especially runway lights. Flying into Nellis at dusk with Vegas in the distance looks great with some MSAA. Make sure all of your Microsoft "game mode" and "game dvr" options are disabled in your Windows settings (this is different than your bios game mode). Also hardware accelerated gpu scheduling causes a lot of issues for me so make sure that is disabled as well. In the nvidia control panel if you set "Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames" above 1 that can also hurt your cpu frame times, so I would keep that at 1 if you haven't.

I cant run sslr in vr, way too much of a frametime hit. I do prioritize running msaa at least at 2x over max resolution with the g2. It’s way to shimmery without some aa. Things like runway lights at dusk just swim all over the place without aa regardless of resolution.

I have to keep water at "High" in vr, the artifacts are too distracting at other quality settings. If you are using SSLR there is usually a bit of a matte line around the edges of the canopy and other objects that occlude the water. I believe those reflections are calculated at a very low resolution so the artifact is exaggerated.

I have this as well and have just had to learn to live with it. I have not found a setting that has an impact on it regardless of fps or reprojection settings. 3900x, rtx 2070, 64 Gigs.

I messed up installing a mod with ovgme by extracting the archive incorrectly. I accidentally extracted it to /nameofmod/nameofmod/bazar instead of nameofmod/bazar. This extra directory will copy the mod to the wrong locations when ovgme installs it. Easy to do depending on how the archive was created and the option you choose when extracting it.

I'll have to try the empty house and see what happens. You can make things easier on yourself by setting your pixel density to 1.0, and then just adjusting the resolution in steamVR in a single place.

I used the default .575 with the stock gasket. When I switched to the 3dWard gasket that gets my eyes closer to the lenses I had to increase it to .625. I'm not sure how much efficiency benefit you get from this. As a test I lowered it to .3 so I was looking through a telescope, so to speak, and didn't see an fps improvement over the defaults.

I just got this in the mail and had a chance to try it out. It gets you very close to the lenses, almost too close. Im using it with the thicker 12mm vive pro pad. It’s nice that it doesn’t pinch the sides of my face and because my eyes are already closer to the lenses I don’t have to clamp it down as tightly making it much more comfortable than the stock gasket. The headset no longer feels like a snorkel mask, it makes a huge difference in this regard. The view seems more expansive just subjectively even towards the inside of your view. I haven’t measured the fov change but I had to increase the hmd_mask size because I could actually see the mask at the defaults. Being so close to the lenses has its advantages and disadvantages. It does increase the sweet spot, which I never really had a problem with, but since you are seeing more of the screens through the outer extremes of the lenses there is more chromatic aberration. You can really see it when you try to look dead ahead and then glance down at the stick without moving your head. Being closer to the lenses also makes you more aware of changes in resolution and super sampling. I would definitely call the trade offs worth it.

I use taz's better smoke and better trees dark/low with the CGTC v2 textures. The CGTC textures have a lot of great detail and Taz's trees fix the cartoony look of the trees. For shaders I use speed of heat's version of the vr shaders, disable the simplified cockpit glass, and then mustang's on top of that to knock down the excessive haze. I still like to use a gamma of 1.5 to get some contrast in shadows and keep things from looking too blown out.

Well I learned something new today. That was really interesting.

I have reprojection forced off and still see objects ghosting when looking out the side of the plane. Ill see double of Things like power lines or other planes. Even with one eye closed it looks like the same object is rendered twice in one frame slightly offset. I have cockpit shadows on high, and ground shadows set flat with the flat shadow removal mod.

Yeah thats it. You can leave that window up as you load a mission. So open a mission where you have to spot something far away and make sure the settings are comfortable for viewing things at a distance and in the cockpit.

In steamVR I set the global resolution to 100% and then I set the per ap resolution, I think right now I am at 60% for DCS. RTX 2070. Anything above 60% really degrades performance for me, especially with MSAA on.

Getting DCS running well in VR is a lot of work, some of that is DCS and some of it isn't. For Windows settings make sure Game Mode, Game DVR, and Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) are turned off. You can google these, it's easy. In the nvidia control panel choose "Prefer Maximum Performance" and set latency to "Ultra" for good luck. In windows WMR settings set Headset Display -> Experience Options -> Best Visual Quality. Install speed-of-heat updated VR shader mods and delete the contents of the fxo and metashaders2 dir in your user/Saved Games/Dcs. folder for superstition. This is optional but it really does buy you a chunk of fps. (If you delete the contents of this directory when you start dcs and load either a new plane or map it will take a few minutes to recompile shaders (this is what pooled tasks are)) Launch SteamVR. In the bottom left corner of the SteamVr window there is a button for WMR for SteamVr Settings. In graphics set it to SteamVR Per Ap Setting. This lets different games use different graphics settings. In the bottom right corner of SteamVr hit the gear icon to adjust graphics settings for steamVr and aps like DCS that use it to run in VR. Set steamVR resolution to 100%. Set DCS resolution to 54% as a starting point and I like to force reprojection off when I'm testing so I know what my true fps is. *Note it is possible that if you launch DCS out of the SteamVr window, or launch it from the desktop it may launch with a different internal name in steamVr and use different settings. In DCS I enable the shared parser and disable hotplugging in my autoexec file. The parser buys you some fps, but some things only render in one eye like flood lights in cockpits. Make sure to use the experimental cross eye fix tool. There is something wrong with the way the G2 displays are calibrated with DCS. DCS settings: After changing settings I like to restart DCS to make sure that they take effect. Visibility Range: Has a big impact on performance. I try to keep it on High so trees popping in at low level are less distracting. Medium will buy you a few fps. I can't go above High in VR. Shadows: These are your cockpit shadows and they are big for immersion. I don't see a big fps difference with quality settings. It's just turning them on at all that is expensive. Ground Shadows: I leave this on flat and use the flat shadow remove mod. This gives me terrain shadows without building and individual tree shadows. Wish I could have tree shadows but alas. MSAA: Try to have this on at least 2x. 4x even better. MSAA looks better than increased res, so I would prioritize it over pushing up the resolution percentage. Heat Blur: Doesn't work with the shared parser auto exec setting so I leave it off. Water: High I like to keep water on high, otherwise it is really noisy and distracting. Anisotropic Filtering: Texture filtering to improve textures seen at a distance, like runway lines. Supposedly on later cards 16x is basically free, haven't tested this. I use 4x. Global Illumination: Secondary bounces of light in the cockpit. Looks really pretty but subtle when you see it. Best to leave it off in VR. Looks nice but not worth the fps. SSAA: I don't THINK this does anything in VR. If you want to super sample, increase your resolution percentage. SSLR: Screen Space local reflection. Gives you rough reflections of terrain and things in water. Noisy but looks pretty. This was a real fps killer in VR for me but I could keep it on in 2d. Preload Distance: I have 64 gigs of ram so I max this out. In the VR panel i would keep pixel density at 1.0 and just adjust resolution in a single place in the SteamVR settings menu. If you are using MSAA, you can adjust the MSAA mask live while playing the game and it has a visual impact. Sadly, I notice no performance benefit from it. Nevertheless I think I have it set around .4 I hope someone finds this rambling helpful.

I run an overclocked 2070 with an amd 3900x at stock speeds. Lately I have been running my G2 at 54% resolution and an MSAA of 2x. This doesn't fix all of the shimmers but it helps tremendously. 4x is even better but it affected performance enough that I switched back to 2x. Before making this change trying to fly into Nellis at sunset the runway lighting sizzled all over the place and was really distracting. Now flying over the city at night looks pretty smooth. Also setting your water quality below "high" results in lots of aliasing artifacts around water. My goal is to optimize as much as I can so that I can run 70% resolution and at least MSAA of 2x. That seems to really be the sweet spot of performance and quality. Unfortunately I also like having shadows on and there seems to be a real inefficiency with the way shadow maps are handled. It probably has to do with some sort of complex timing of the shadow map being computed on the cpu and then handed off to the gpu. It seems to be resolution independent, there is just a large shadow penalty. I also think some of the shimmering issues are exacerbated by the ghosting that occurs between the left and right eye and as far as I can tell no setting tweaks will fix that. In my experience 54% resolution with MSAA looks better and is more performant that 100% and no MSAA. So my recommendation: Resolution: 54-70%. MSAA: 2x. Water: High.

I just checked that scaling setting and it was on by default for me as well.

An issue that I noticed the other day while obsessively adjusting settings: I use DCS standalone, but I have added standalone to my Steam library so that I can launch it from Steam. This lets me adjust DCS per app steam vr settings without dcs having to be open. When I launch dcs using the controller and the steamVR interface it uses my per app settings that are listed under "DCS World" in the steamVR preferences. If I launch DCS with my mouse from the start menu, or by right clicking steamVR in the taskbar and launching it from there, it launches as "DCS" and ignores my "DCS World" settings. I found this out by accidentally clicking the little wavy lines button on the controller to bring up the steamVR menu while I had DCS launched. This could be why some people don't see the results of their steamVR adjustments in game. SteamVR can have the game under different names depending on how you launch it.

At the risk of getting into a “have you tried this?” Marathon: make sure you turn off hardware accelerated gpu scheduling, or hags. I did a test this week where i reenabled it using a working, prexisting setup and it causes all sort of swimming and weird stuttery issues like you describe. It causes this trippy, swirly stuttering than what you normally see.

Fortunately, I had an idea of what I was getting into. The G2 is clearly at the cutting edge of what is possible for consumer vr. The headset itself could have used another iteration to fix some of its weaknesses. But really we are running an old game engine designed before vr was popular, it’s a miracle ed have gotten it to run as well as it does considering it was never written with vr in mind in the first place. The engine then goes through steamvr, then windows mixed reality, and then of course your graphics drivers. Im hoping for a firmware update for the device and more improvements to wmr and steamvr that improve their compatibility now that they have sold so many of these things. Nvidia still hasnt released a driver that works well with the headset. So I’m hoping all of those moving parts can catch up to the capabilities of the headset. It would have been nice if there had been a more coordinated rollout, but there we are in the midst of a pandemic after all. As far as the lenses and sweet spot I have found the headset to be very sensitive to positioning. It’ really important to get the top strap adjusted so it hangs the headset off of your face at the right angle. Im pretty happy with the clarity and ive experimented with removing the gasket and getting my eyes closer to the lenses which gave me a much wider fov. Ill probably get a new wider gasket with thinner padding at some point. But for now im pretty happy. Back to tinkering.

I did another round of settings adjustments today. I was surprised to find that i got better frame rates AND better image quality with 54% steamVR resolution and msaa at 4x than 100% and no Msaa. It doesn’t fix all of the super carrier aliasing but a lot shimmering while flying is greatly reduced. It looks great. After changing the msaa setting you have to restart dcs for the change to take effect. You can see the effect of the msaa by pausing the game and adjusting the msaa mask in the vr settings tab. Its a shame that there is no performance benefit with the mask. Even a low value of .23 is enough to look great. That said, I set the hmd mask to .2 which makes the fov like a spy glass and saw no performance improvement either. So it seems like there is some optimization room. Judging by the way the reflections and effects show up outside the mask I dont think its culling geometry outside of the mask.

I see ghosting as well, or at least some sort of offset between the eyes even with reproduction disabled.

Do you have an AMD Cpu? HP and AMD are working on a bios fix for their usb chipsets to solve some compatibility issues that they have been having. Intel chipsets can be problematic as well, but not as bad as AMD.

I like to use a trackball that sits right next to my stick. It never moves, so I don't have to hunt for it and it is a lot easier to control in vr than a mouse. You can also use the big scroll wheel around the trackball to turn knobs.