MoleUK

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.

Already tried it. Unfortunately, it doesn't really help with the shadows problem as far as I can see. Shadows off gives you a lot of overhead to turn other stuff up though.

A comparison in the Huey.

Shadows flat, exact same effect. Something has to be wrong.

Terrain object shadows already off. On busy MP servers like ECW with lots of ground forces, even having shadows on flat or low will cause the same FPS drop. Something additional seems to be being loaded onto the CPU when looking towards ground forces when shadows are anything but off. Even if those ground forces are dozens of miles away and not even close to being visible. At least that's my best guess so far as to what's going on. But to be clear, at no point have I enabled terrain object shadows in my testing. Always been off. If you could do me a favour and double-check it yourself it'd be appreciated. Just log into Enigmas cold war in VR with shadows on, hop in a helicopter that's close to the frontline, and look towards and away from the frontline while checking the in-game FPS breakdown. Look at your "update" and "parseobj" values, see if they spike. Then quit out, turn shadows off, hop back in the server and check again.

That would be ideal, don't think it's an option currently. It does feel like something is being loaded onto the CPU when looking towards ground forces with shadows on, from waaaaaaaay too far away. You can see the "update" and "parseobj" numbers start to spike. I still wonder if there is a similar bug going on to the initial flat shadows bug when 2.8 launched.

Something still feels "off" with shadows since 2.8. Performance takes a big hit when looking towards multiple ground-units with shadows on in 2.8, up to about a 60-70 mile distance. After that it doesn't seem to have the same impact. Can anyone else confirm the same hit on busy MP servers? Particularly ECW? Cheers.

Apologies for the poor quality, don't know how to adjust the inbuilt headsets record functionality yet so it'll be hard to make out. This is a recording from Enigmas Cold War, shadows set to medium. With shadows off I can maintain 70+ FPS in the hind with all other settings at the same value. With shadows medium, this happens when I look anywhere near the frontline: There is effectively a breaking point where FPS will suddenly tank, just when I start turning towards frontline ground units that are over 10km away. The moment my view gets anywere near them (they're actually on my 3'oclock), "parseobj" goes way up and "update" skyrockets. Don't know if it's useful info for the devs or not, but there it is.

Per someone elses suggestion, turning shadows from off to low does fix this issue. Which might suggest that with shadows off, the helicopter is treated as transparent so the sun passes right through it to project onto the glass. Two pics, with shadows low. First facing west, second east. The massive FPS drop is due to facing the frontline ground units, though they are dozens of km away. Shadows off is the only way to avoid this massive FPS drop in busy MP servers currently.

It's particularly bad in the hip, as you're dealing with a lot of flat glass. The effect when the sun is behind you makes the glass go a somewhat milky-yellow, it doesn't look good or seem particularly realistic either. I believe this started happening after the lighting update, can't remember offhand.

Worth asking on the VD discord as they're very responsive. Might be another step you have to go through with the steam version. https://discord.gg/wmFKjXXv You're launching from the games tab inside VD right? Think that's the process you're meant to do for the steam install version, not the right click launch that you do with standalone.

Just updated now with DCS support. Introduced in the last patch due to people pirating VD iirc. Think they're discussing some alternative methods.

Might be worth playing around with the sharpening slider to see if you can clear it up any. It might end up being the case that VD (post performance patch) works as an ok alternative for those running the resolution completely maxed out, but a very good alternative for those running in lower resolutions looking to get more frames. Especially in MP. VRAM might also be another consideration, i'm limited to 8 (3070) and VD definitely uses up less of it. So that might be less of a bottleneck for me on VD than it was on link.

Ah! I was wondering what was doing that. When the sun is behind me it can look terrible atm.

Possible, but i'm now running at a higher resolution on VD than I was on link and still getting vastly more frames.

Was originall on wired link but switched to air link a long time back. I was using opencomposite and later openxr. VD Settings attached in SS, though I only bumped the bitrate from 100 to 125 recently. You do want a router that plays nice with VD, one that's not being used by any other device, and one that's using a channel that isn't at all congested.

The VD devs appear to be working on getting the DCS steam install to launch in VD rather than steamVR, it should now be included in the next VD patch so you may want to wait for that rather than switch to the standalone install.

Standalone, i'm guessing trying to do it on the steam install would require another workaround to get it to not launch steamVR.

VD has always had pretty poor performance with DCS, it wouldn't fully utilize the GPU for whatever reason. A few days ago an update for VD dropped claiming to increase some PCVR performance that was left on the table, up to 20%. In DCS however my performance has skyrocketed. In MP I can hit up to just under 100 FPS without reprojection, depending on the resolution and airframe selected. This is on a 5800X and 3070. You want/need to launch DCS in VD directly to get the most benefit, not via Oculus or SteamVR. To do this, create a new shortcut to the DCS.exe. Bring up it's properties, and add -force_oculus to the end of the "Target" line, with a space after the DCS.exe. Connect to your PC via VD as usual, then right click virtual desktop (in the extended task bar) and select launch game and point it towards the new DCS shortcut. DCS should launch without triggering either steamVR or Oculus software. Once in game, if you bring up the VD performance overlay you should see that you're running the Oculus API. With the new update i'm getting the GPU to peg at 98%-ish usage and stay there, so it should scale up fine for higher GPU's. 100FPS seems to be about the limit of my 5800X on the lowest resolution setting, anything above that and my GPU starts to bottleneck. Only server that I found to be the exception was Enigmas cold war where I had to turn shadows from medium to off or the CPU would bottleneck again regardless of other settings. It's worth noting that VD's reprojection technique is performed on the Q2 itself not your CPU/GPU, so it is essentially "free" if you need the extra performance. Not a huge fan of some of the artifacting vs Oculus' ASW, but free is free and it's a fluid reprojection not locked so it literally just doubles whatever frame-rate you can hit.

Unfortunately i'm not getting anything relevant showing in the log, it's a very hard lock. Can't even bring up task manager etc when it occurs. Even resulted in disk errors on reboot twice now, not happening in any other program. Might switch to track-IR and see if it stops.