MoleUK

Might just need to change the mic input on VA, as VD creates a virtual one iirc.

I'm talking about the Petro sight. Not the gun sight, the actual AI Petro sight overlay. The petro sight and the target unit list be brings up isn't intended to be affected by the NVG looks like, always has been for me tho.

Ah. This is the way the petro sight has always worked for me in the hind with NVG. Didn't realise it was a bug. On a Quest 2, with and without mods. Makes trying to use him at night almost impossible with the NVG.

Been using VA with VD for months, no issues. I did set VA to specifically send the commands to DCS iirc tho.

Excellent, will give that extra tweak a try as well.

Objects is the one that's really having a huge load on the CPU atm with shadows enabled. You could try the others, some of them are self explanatory.

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3328443/ Delete lines 87 and 88 as described. All those reflections will be gone. This is universal, so effects every module to some extent. Fixes the shadows off lighting issues in the mi-8 as well. Doesn't break IC or pure textures, so no conflict with MP.

I can only continue to recommend VD for any Q2 or Pico 4 users that haven't tried it with DCS yet. You no longer need to tweak the shortcut, just right click VD and point to DCS shortcut on standalone, or with a steam install just start DCS from within the games tab in VD. New GPU, current performance on a fairly busy MP server (though just after reset) with shadows and reprojection off. In-game settings in video, "medium" on VD is roughly 2000x2100, "high" is roughly 2500x2600 per eye. On link that is 4000x2100 or 5000x2600. If you're on DCS standalone, you need to right click VD in the task bar and point it towards DCS shortcut to launch. If on steam install, you need to launch DCS from within the games tab inside VD. The Q2 isn't perfect, but the current tradeoffs make it worth considering. Though the Pico 4 frankly has it beat on all fronts atm.

Yep, doesn't break IC or pure textures.

Yeah i'm just constantly tinkering with stuff atm so sticking to manually doing it for now lol. Crossing all my fingers in hope that tomorrows patch makes some of these kinds of tricks unnecessary. Just fixing the object buildup problem would be a biggie for me, let alone MT etc. As that object buildup seems to be slowly stealing all my CPU time on my favorite server, and reducing the object draw distance unfortunately can't fix all of that.

Good to know. I like to do it manually for whatever reason. Not currently using a reduced range as the server im mostly playing on atm performs bizarrely well in VR (like, really shockingly well. Shadows high 120 FPS with repro), but may go back down to 60k when playing elsewhere so may set that up cheers. I'll keep looking for any way to tweak the shadows for better performance, but I suspect any changes would be at the shader level which might break IC. A seperate draw distance slider for both objects and shadows would be tremenously useful, particularly if you could alter them while playing in-game as with tree distance etc.

If anyone does find a way to alter the draw distance for shadows, please let me know. I've been tinkering around in the lua and shader files but have yet to find anything. Only found one old line that says it no longer does anything.

Yup, it's effectively the universal draw distance for objects. So if you fly modern modules more regularly at the limits of the tpod etc, you may not want to reduce it. Or you may want to reduce it less agressively, say to 60km. If you're flying cold war modules or helo's you've got a lot more room to be agressive in reducing the distance overall. Because it's the draw distance for the entire direction you're facing, even reducing it by 10km might still free up some CPU overhead, as it's quite a wide arc. Don't know if it's the full 180 degrees, haven't done enough testing there to say for certain. As an aside, I don't know whether the shadows are still being drawn for these objects even after reducing the object draw distance. I've seen one user report they're still being drawn, even before the objects pop in, which is really unfortunate if accurate. Having a seperate draw distance setting we could alter for shadows could be a huge performance increase tool if that is the case.

One user set it to 30000 for helo gameplay and said he didn't notice any negatives, so maybe start there and work your way up if there are problems.

Works fine with pure textures and IC. Ideally ED would put a slider in for this one imo.

I posted this up on hoggit a few days back, figured I'd slap it up here for anyone fortunate enough to not use social media. This is a bruteforce method that will reduce the draw distance of all planes / ground vehicles etc, so keep that trade-off in mind. Open your graphics.lua file in the DCS config folder, find the line with all the values for your current view distance setting (low, medium, high etc), these values start on line 177. Find the "objects = {3000, 80000}" line for your current view distance setting, and alter the second value down from 80000 to your desired distance. I'd suggest starting at 60000 and see how it goes. This sets the distance in metres at which all ground/air vehicles start getting calculcations done for them, in the direction you're facing in a wide arc. Hence why looking in certain directions on busy servers can tank your frames despite nothing apparant being visible, as the CPU is choking on all those distant objects. Changing in-game settings never alters this value, so you have to do it in the .lua and probably re-apply it after each patch. You can drop it a lot more aggressively if you're doing rotor gameplay or you have a particularly old CPU, drop it far enough and spotting can become a problem however. If you're on VR or generally struggle with shadows performance currently, you may see a greater improvement.

Good to hear, from what I understand it fixes similar problems in other cockpits with shadows off. The hip is just a particularly egregious example of it. Glad not to have to look at those very, very low res baked in reflections in the huey as well now.

It's audible, just very quiet. Ideally it'd be incredibly loud and play the Mexican hat dance song though.

It's due to current DCS lighting problems with shadows off. Use this mod to fix it: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3328443/ It's a universal mod so will affect all modules. Delete lines 87 and 88 as described. This also gets rid of the terrible looking baked in reflections in the huey, and will semi delete the dogtags hanging over the windows in the hip.

This has been a problem since I first started playing DCS in VR over a year ago. You can mostly alleviate this by ticking the "favourite" box when refreshing the server list, and just make sure to favourite the servers you're interested in. But yeah, this is just what the game does in my experience. You can get some similar stuff going on during loading as well, it's a minor inconvenience.

Off. Only shadows I ever turn on for testing are the main one, not secondary or terrain.

The LODmult can help in other ways, if you want to reduce the draw distance for objects you have to change this line in the graphics lua. Search for "camera" line, you will see different values for all the different draw distance settings. Alter the second value of the "objects" line that you have your view distance set to. So if you're on medium view distance, change it from 3000, 80000 to say 3000, 50000. If you're on high view distance change it from 5000, 80000 to 5000, 50000. etc etc. This is a very bruteforce method and reduces the distance all those planes/vehicles render in, so keep that in mind. It does help reduce the parseobj spike significantly, but shadows completely off is just easier. Eliminates the problem entirely without having to reduce visibility. There might well be some other stuff going on as well in 2.8, but shadows has had by far the biggest impact for me.

Been doing lots of before/after comparisons lately. I would like to add that the shadows on/off performance hit has something else going on as well I think. It gets progressively worse the longer a server is running, independant of how many other players are currently connected. After the server resets, it goes back to baseline performance again. You can bruteforce a reduction in the parseobj spikes by reducing the object draw distance in the lua settings, but this simply reduces the range that all ground forces / planes etc are drawn at, which is far from ideal. But dropping it from 80km to 50km or so can make a big difference. Some quick before/after reset comparisons, with shadows on flat and all other shadows (including terrain object) off: I'm at the point where I just disable shadows and enjoy the frames. Having to constantly work around the progressive performance degradation with shadows on is too much of a headache, and reducing the object draw distance is harmful to spotting. But as far as I can tell, having shadows flat or above results in DCS trying to run extra calculcations on EVERY ground and plane unit in an 80km range in the direction you're looking.

If any VR bros are running with shadows enabled, and want to test something for me it'd be appreciated. Currently shadows tanks performance in VR on ECW, it seems to get consistently worse the longer the server is running, then goes back to baseline after reset. If you still want to play with shadows on, feel free to try this workaround: Goto your graphics.lua file in the DCS config folder. Find the "camera" section, and go to the setting you are currently using (low, medium, high, ultra, extreme). Find the "objects" line, it has two values following it. For low it's 3000, 80000. High is 5000, 80000. etc etc. Lower the 2nd value to say 30000 or 20000 or maybe even less. See what your experience is. It will lower the range that ground forces and probably planes appear. I went as low as 3000, 3000 and ground forces wouldn't appear till very close. I think it also affects plane viewing range as well. So I don't know how low till be too low for you. Trying 20k in a helo in a moment and will see how it goes. This fix will actually work for flatscreen players as well, but they're not quite as badly affected by the shadows problem. At best guess the 80000 is 80km, I think with shadows on it's running calculations for everything up to 80km the way you're facing, causing the drop.

Yep, though now it appears shadows can have a much, much larger impact on FPS once you hit a certain threshhold. MSAA I can't do without.