ShaunOfTheFuzz

A few things that don't come through in your review: The $990 USD price is excl tax and only applies to the US and EU, and the base stations *are not included*. In Australia, this "half price" Aero will run someone $1900 AUD ($1500 USD) for the headset alone and $700 AUD for 2 base stations, I know this is a hobby where an inexplicably large (or at least very visible) portion of the player base have more money than sense and buy the latest 90 series GPU from Nvidia every release cycle to claw back some performance in an engine limited game, but I am baffled that anyone would consider the Aero affordable, never mind good-value. You could justify it over a Quest Pro if you already owned the base stations, but other wise it's too rich for my blood. Anyway, glad you enjoy it, maybe I'll take another look when it costs less than 6 weeks rent.

Enigma's Cold War server has always let me play with these mods before but it seems to be an issue suddenly. Texture mods are fine but ECW requires Pure Models, does anyone know which of the mods might be causing the problem? I want to retain as many of them as possilble because they've made DCS playable

The training missions desperately need to have at the very least a "Up-to-date"/"Working as intended" or "Out-of-date"/"Not working" mark beside them. I, and I would assume many others, don't have the time to sink into trying to learn systems on broken training missions. The harrier missions are completely out of date whilst also requiring large time investments given how verbose they are, many other modules run the gamut of having mostly working to hardly working training missions, and the consistency of how much of the material is covered is maddening too, with some modules having very few updates to their training missions as new features are added. As things stand you never know if you're the problem or the mission is the problem and the amount of negative training is really a road block to investing time in a module.

Have you been using airlink wirelessly previously or wired PCVR on Q2? Have you used openXR, open-composite, etc? What kind of bandwidth and VD quality settings are you using, because going from 500Mb bandwidth, 1:1 encode resolution wired PCVR to VD in the past has looked pretty terrible in my experience. There's a lot of detail required here to make this post useful more broadly for those of us who have optimised our setups to within an inch of their lives.

VRAM limitations in VR have pretty much put my playing of DCS on indefinite hold over the last year. I just check in every month or so to see if any big improvements have happened and sadly the last big performance boon was OpenXR toolkit and open composite, both of which came from outside ED. Hopefully VRAM management is higher on the agenda than it seems to be. I love buying modules for this sim, (I keep looking at the mirage lately) but I was badly burned by the performance of the Apache and I won't be buying any more modules until I can be sure these issue have been addressed to work for the 8GB cards that most people actually use.

DLSS has no direct impact on AMD users as can be seen in titles like Cyberpunk and Metro Exodus. DLSS is an upscaling algorithm that runs on Nvidia hardware, it has to be actively switched on in the game menu and is not passive. The only potential impact is the side effect of a game developer neglecting one GPU manufacturer for another on the basis of assuming people will buy the most suitable hardware for the tech they've implemented, but that's on the developer.

Correct, DLSS 2.0 does not require you to send code to Nvidia. Implementation is far easier than 1.0.

DLSS 2.0 would be a complete game changer for Nvidia 20XX+ series owners, including future cards as this is a core Nvidia technology. Currently 74% of the gaming market is on Nvidia, and my experience in the DCS community bares that out, DCS players are overwhelming Nvidia. There is only upside to using DLSS 2.0, to the tune of 50%+ performance gain. The gains should be especially drastic in VR, where resolution is such a limiting factor. IMO, ED's stance on proprietary tech is cutting their nose off to spite their face. If the tech can help a large number of your community (and more since the quest 2 is driving VR adoption) and the barrier to implementation is relatively low, then at least look at it. DLSS 2.0 has to potential to be more transformative for VR users than the core engine rework as the vast majority of VR users will be resolution limited.

Hey that's great! Glad to hear it helped. There are going to be some circumstances on the supercarrier and extremely busy situations where you might get drops, but that's just DCS for now

Back in 2.5.6 I was playing on my vive comsos with a 5700XT, I used to be able to get 45 fps solid without motion smoothing (ASW equivalent but much worse artefacting). I can't remember my exact settings but a 5700XT is somewhere between a 2070 and a 2070 super in terms of performance. I'm playing on higher res at the moment and ASW needs a bit more headroom so I lock at 36 rather than bounce around at higher frames. Maybe your cpu is the issue, but I'm not sure. Have you ever tried using FPSVR to see your real time performance and where it's going wrong? I'd love to know what your cpu and gpu frametimes are. Hopefully we can fix your issues!

Typo there, should have said ovrserver_64.exe, it's the oculus runtime executable. Not sure how relevant that part is, but I don't see why it would default to vsync on for a VR service. The maxfps thing has solved all of my DCS problems though. Just played for an hour on Syria at War MP server without any performance problem, locked at 36 reprojected the full time. I have no idea frankly, I don't see why it would be, I just put that in the title in case it's relevant, but ultimately why the maxfps = 180 line capped my cpu frametime is a mystery to me.

Just in case you've missed the discussion about this in the past, there's no benefit to using PD < 1.0 and compensating with oculus or steamvr and Bignewy also mentioned before 2.7 dropped that PD < 1 affects the rendering of the new clouds (though I can't be certain that he didn't mean an equivalent PD of 1.0). You can see the details in the video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1gcgAXhgtA Basically, you can set either your PD or your oculus res to 1x and tweak the other. This makes it easier and more consistent to tweak as well because you're always talking like for like with other people when you discuss oculus res or PD if you hold the other one constant. When you have one of them at 80%, then you have two different scaling factors at work and people need to get out calculators to compare.

So I've been having the worst time with 2.7 until about an hour ago. My cpu frametime has been at a minimum of 20ms, though it used to be at 9-10ms. If I disabled ASW, my quest wasn't going above 36fps and my GPU was stuck at 50-60%, so CPU bottleneck right? Well, if I paused DCS, my cpu frametime jumped down to 9ms again, so i t was only happening while the sim was running, almost like a half rate vsync or something, except vsync was off in both DCS and globally in the nvidia control panel. So this has been driving me crazy for ages. I haven't been able to use SRS or viacom because any cpu stutter results in dropped frames and activating the export.lua would cause constant stutter. So I booted up fullscreen and noticed that my fps was actually half my monitor's refresh rate in the main menu, weird. After googling this, I found a reddit post from last year where someone said to delete the "maxfps =180" line in the DCS main config folder in the graphics.lua file. So now on flatscreen my fps was over 2000 on the main menu (lol). I also noticed that ovrserver.exe is defaulted to vysnc = on in nvidia control panel which I also changed to off (though I had tried this before with no effect). My cpu frametime is back down to 9ms and my ASW works without any stutter again with my GPU operating at 95%+. So long as my computer isn't gaslighting me until the next shutdown, I could literally not be more relieved.

It can, so for instance, the textures have a fixed value of VRAM right? High textures are a given size and low textures are a given size, the difference can be 800MB of VRAM or so. But resolution can be increased in increments of 5%. You're going to hit a maximum performance cap one way or another, because even with VRAM to spare your card can only push so many pixels, but resolution is king here. In terms of raw performance, textures cost very little on fps *so long as you have the VRAM to spare*, once you exceed your vram they'll destroy your performance. On the flip side, resolution will decrease your performance every single time you increase it, so the goal is to increase it until you reach a point where your framerate is stable in all situations. For quest you're aiming for 36 fps reprojected with a little bit of headroom for dips. When you get to this point, if you see that you have VRAM going unused, then by all means increase your textures. Your card won't be able to push the same resolution as mine, so you might hit the resolution performance limit with enough VRAM to spare for higher textures, but there's no way you can afford high cockpit and ground textures with a decent resolution on 8GB

If you bump terrain textures to low, you can either rule it out or not. As for the cockpit having low readability, that's due to resolution *not* textures. I don't know how much raw performance your 2070 has, but every little bit you can push resolution up by, will improve clarity *far* more than textures so long as they're not at low. If I run my quest at 1x (I assume you're talking about 72Hz) then text can be pretty blurry with high textures, but if I run at 1.2x then text is clear at medium textures. I've added a picture below of medium textures so you can see for yourself *Make sure to click on the picture below to open the original and not the compressed preview!*

It's a small fps loss if you keep all of your settings constant, but it can be an fps gain if it allows you to drop PD and get the same sharpness in your cockpit for example.

Don't use HWinfo or whatever, use task manager > performance > GPU. Windows shows usage rather than allocation and what those other monitors don't show you is the shared video memory being used, which windows does show. Some VRAM is hardware reserved (about 149mb) so when I start dipping into RAM I'm seeing my VRAM at 7.8/8.0GB, but when I look at shared video memory I see it go up to 8.5/40GB. This tells me that windows has apportioned 32GB of my system RAM (I have 64GB) as shareable video ram, the 8.5GB tells me that windows is now using 600-700mb of that RAM. Your sig says you have a 2070; I have a 3070 and I can't run high terrain textures, high cockpit textures, MSAA and a decent resolution without way overdrawing VRAM and tanking my performance. Unless you're running your quest at a low resolution (and no MSAA which costs more VRAM based on resolution) then you're dipping into shared memory, which has garbage performance. Terrain textures to low is a no-brainer, the differences in terrain textures are minimal except in Syria and even then it's mostly just sharpness. Terrain textures cost >700mb of VRAM for a tiny amount of gain in visuals (I've found the VR shader adds more sharpness anyway). The main textures at medium are a mixed bag, and you can get away with high textures if you run lower res or disable MSAA. Personally I run my res at about 4864x2448 with 2x MSAA. You can swap out MSAA for high textures here, but you won't be able to run high terrain textures with high cockpit textures on an 8GB card. At Medium textures, modern modules like in the F-18, A-10Cii and F-16, remain very readable for me especially with the sharpening mod, but some of the older modules can be blurrier. Low textures look terrible IMO and are a different story. The problem with textures is that they don't just apply to your cockpit, but to other jets and external models, etc, so you can get really bad hits in crowded conditions. This is typical of the VRAM issue. It doesn't always happen because sometimes a particular set of circumstances will let you skirt the issue or recover. But if you have the Syria map and the A-10Cii module, then try this: Load into free flight, orbit around the city you start over and then open the F-10 map and quickly zoom out to full zoom. You'll see the map stutter and hitch and then when you close the map you'll see the ground textures have to load back in from low LOD. Check your shared video memory usage in task manager and you should be well over 8GB. Quiet often this will result in a framerate in the single digits very quickly. Once it happens in a mission, it will stay, it's like the oculus encoder never fully recovers, you need to exit the game and restart. If you look at task manager you'll see that DCS often doesn't release VRAM in these circumstances, I've seen VRAM remain at 7.8GB in the main menu after having an overrun.

I've used SRS and viacom for months with zero issues until 2.7, I'm at a complete loss as to what's going on with them now.

If you check the advanced FPS counter in DCS you can see how much lua overhead there is on your CPU. Typically it's down at about 0.1-0.2%, but when I have SRS installed I start seeing spikes up to 2%. Similarly when I press the tx button with viacom I get momentary large spikes in the lua %. The net result is a frame drop of about 3-5fps.

First off, DCS is running poorly on a lot of configurations at the moment, I can't even use SRS at the moment because I get non stop stutters as soon as I install it. On the oculus specific issues: I only get that white translucent bar effect when I run out of VRAM. If you check your oculus log you might see something like "encoder backed up" or something like that. I can replicate this kind of hard performance drop if I do the Syria, A-10C II free flight mission with quest 2 resolution at about 4864x2448 and high textures on a 3070 with 8GB of VRAM. if I keep task manager open I can see VRAM climb to 8.5+ GB (windows dipping into RAM as shared memory) in this scenario. I don't always get the transparent bar, but it's always in this kind of circumstance. Turning the textures down to medium frees up a ton of VRAM in this game at the moment (terrain textures on low all the time obvs). On the encode resolution and bitrate, you have to let oculus manage it automatically over air link, the vast majority of people with airlink issues had set a bitrate and encode res themselves. Besides that, there's obviously the local network factors, line of sight to router, 5GHz, low interference, not too many devices connection to a wifi 5 router, etc. As for link, it's working completely fine for most people at the moment, after the V28 update the measured bandwidths are all back to normal.

Do you have a custom bitrate or encode width set from before? Airlink requires very tight bitrate, it should be automatically managed now. 500 mbps will destroy airlink.

Spoke too soon, the very next boot it came back. I honestly don't know anymore with the game.

I've just managed to fix it (I think). My CPU performance was just awful in FPSVR, I have no idea what exactly the issue was, but I've been noticing some really up and down performance lately in terms of frametimes, but I rolled back my bios to the version just before resizable bar was brought to Zen 2 and my cpu seems to have it's headroom back in the last mission I played. I have SRS and green frametimes! The trick now is to see if it stays this way because I've had false dawns before, but hopefully it's OK.

Interesting! I've been tearing my system apart today because nobody else seemed to be able to replicate the issue. In task manager, if I repeatedly press the ptt button for voiceattack, I can actually run my CPU up to 10-12% usage, i.e.: you can "build up" cpu load by activating voiceattack enough times. An individual activation is about 0.8-1.5% More pressing than the viacom issue though (as you say, it's a single spike when you press the button) is the constant stutter I get when SRS is installed. It seems that I don't have any headroom at all for lua operations any more on my 3900X and I've tried everything I can to tune it.

OK, so I've been using viacompro for a long time without many issues, but I'm noticing some huuuge lua frametime spikes in 2.7. At the moment, when I push the PPT button for voiceattack, my cpu usage (3900X) jumps to about 1.5%, if I rapidly push the ppt button I can push my cpu usage up to 10%. In game, this translates to a large frametime spike and a loss of about 5fps for an instant. SImilarly, if I have SRS running now I get regular frametime stutters that can be eliminated by deleting my export.lua and then my gameplay is smooth. Any idea why my lua performance is so terrible?