MoleUK

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.

Any suggestions for fixes? Started happening here since I did a cleanup and repair of DCS. Didn't touch anything else, other than DCS graphics settings. Tried a windows and nvidia update since then, but no luck. It's a hard crash too, locks up the PC completely.

There's no way to get this to pass IC in 2.8 is there? Shame if so.

Yeah mine have been mute for a while.

Could definitely give it a shot. Reducing antisotropic filtering to 0x and clouds to high has let me hit 60 FPS again in some instances at least, but busy servers like ECW and Blue Flash seem to be harder to run in 2.8 than 2.7 atm regardless. Hopefully they find out what the conflict is, if it's more than just the shadows issue.

Hit ctrl + pause a couple times. On some keyboards it will be scroll lock instead of pause. Oof, hope that's not the case. I'm stuck with 8 gigs of vram on my 3070 for the forseeable future.

Other alterations/minutiae: Nvidia control panel: Pre-rendered frames 1, Vsync fast, texture filtering trilinear optimisation on, texture filtering quality high performance, negative LOD bias clamp, anisotropic sample optimisation on, power management prefer max performance, low latency ultra. Windows gaming mode off, HAGS off, re-sizeable BAR on, full screen optimisations on DCS.exe disabled. I lock all the oculus software from using the same CPU cores as DCS. All relevant processes set to high priority.