eaglecash867

I have an oscillating, squirrel cage fan in my gaming/workshop area. Pumps out lots of air while still being very quiet.

Interesting. Wonder what the difference is. Maybe its the low light conditions observation you made, Zildac. My gaming area is also my workshop, so I have some REALLY bright lights in there that I have to shut off when using the G2 because it really freaks out with those. Once I do the up-down-left-right thing though, it works great, even in the lower light.

Do you guys keep your headset plugged into your computer all the time and turn it on and off with the power cord for the power brick?

Most of the time when I plug my G2 in and put it on, I have a message telling me to look up and down, and side-to-side. Doesn't matter if you're sitting or standing when you do this, but I'm usually standing. After I do that, its ready to go with 6DOF. Does yours ever ask you to do that, Lurker? Also, if you have Steam VR and Steam VR for WMR installed on your machine, there's no reason to manually enter SteamVR. Once you plug your headset in and look up-down-left-right to get it calibrated, you'll be in the WMR environment in VR. After that, what I do, is to sit down in my "pit", lift the headset enough to see my monitor and double-click on my DCS icon like I normally do. Pull the headset back down and get into your flying position, and SteamVR will automatically start as DCS starts. You'll see an orb of exploding triangles in VR as SteamVR starts on its own, and shortly thereafter, you'll be in the DCS hangar. I have also found that the G2 doesn't need as much light to operate properly as the G1 did. The only time I have completely lost 6DOF due to lighting in the room was when all of the lights, and the monitor were turned off. Too much light can also lead to strange behavior, so its all about experimenting and finding what works best for you in your gaming environment.

Do any of the home screen mods have a perceptible effect on DCS performance? I definitely saw the difference in the numbers being displayed in the video, but can you actually see the difference with your eyes?

Have you looked at the VR tab in DCS to see what your Pixel Density is set to? I think your SteamVR resolution is fine, but your DCS pixel density might be higher than it should be. Any chance you could post screenshots of your graphics settings page in DCS and the VR page? I agree with Baldrick on the refresh rate. Check your refresh rate in your WMR settings to make sure its set at 90. I'm thinking that updates to Windows, WMR, and SteamVR in the past 6 months since you played last may have changed some of your settings.

I don't think the DCS hangar is the same as SteamVR Home or Windows Mixed Reality Home where the graphical environment is being run in the background all the time. But, I don't know that for sure. Not sure 1 or 2 FPS of performance gain would be worth messing with anything over. You wouldn't be able to see that with your eyes.

Why?

When I had the 2080ti in my machine, it had a USB C connector right on the card which worked great. The new 3090 I installed didn't have that, so I tried plugging my G2 into the motherboard USB-C 3.1 and had all kinds of issues. Many times the G2 wouldn't power up at all and I would get an error message on WMR. Other times it would power up, and then randomly crash after a few minutes. I used the USB-C adapter that was in the G2 box and plugged it into my powered USB 3.0 card (which is plugged into a PCIe slot and directly powered by my 1200W PSU) and that fixed those issues. I think its more about bus power than it is about speed. AFAIK, the separate power box for the G2 only supplies power to the display backlighting...with everything else (non-video-wise) being done over USB.

First rule of troubleshooting is to start with the simplest things first. You don't want to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

1. Did you navigate down into all of the subfolders, in the sequence I listed? Its buried pretty deep in there. Not sure there's any other way to do this. 3 and 4. Before I started doing my reading on why SteamVR chooses the default resolution that it does (barrel distortion), I had SteamVR resolution set to 70% (which, IIRC, gave me pretty close to 2160 X 2160) and DCS PD was set to 1.0). I have since experimented with going with the default resolution in SteamVR (150% in my case, as indicated by SteamVR), and setting DCS PD to a factor lower than 1.0. Did my same "looking for ghosting to the sides" testing and found that with my current rig, I could get DCS PD to about 0.7. This combination gave me good performance and also seemed to increase depth perception and target spotting ability. As far as Forest Visibility goes, just bump that up gradually until the visual anomalies are less objectionable to you than the performance impact. Its all a pretty inefficient system right now, so its all about trade-offs. That makes sense. You're not flying as fast in a helicopter, so you don't have to worry about the ground objects materializing annoyance.

That hasn't been my experience, at least in combination with all of my other settings anyway. My testing was done with the Las Vegas Tour (I think that was what it was called) mission on the NTTR map, and I was just looking for ghosting to the sides while at low altitude and maneuvering aggressively in the A-10C. Don't really get into testing with FPS counters though, I just look for the ghosting to the sides. Once I have that pretty much eliminated, everything else is a moot point IMHO.

The first thing to check is whether or not Motion Reprojection is turned on: 1. Go to your Steam folder>steamapps>common>MixedRealityDriver>bin>win64 and double-click on OpenVRSettingsUX.exe 2. Click the "Graphics" button on the left side of that window, and then click on the "Motion Vector" button. This will force reprojection on. Setting it to Auto will also work, but I have found that to cause a little bit of hitching as Motion Reprojection is automatically turned on and off. 3. For my SteamVR Resolution Per Eye, I have that set to 150% because it is the default that SteamVR wants to use on my rig. This I have read is to correct for barrel distortion. 4. In DCS, on the VR tab, I have the PD set to 0.7 with my 3090. You may have to lower yours to 0.6. 5. For the DCS graphics settings, make the following changes: 1) Terrain textures can be set to high. It doesn't seem to have much effect on performance. 2) Water should be set to medium or lower. 3) Visibility range can be set to high. Not much performance impact here either, and ground objects won't appear to suddenly materialize. 4) Heat blur should be off. 5) Shadows have a major impact on performance, so these should be shut off. Terrain object shadows should be shut off as well. 6) Res. of Cockpit Displays also has a major impact on performance. This can be set to 256 with no noticeable loss of clarity on MFDs, it mostly affects your mirrors. 7) Lens Effects I have turned off, but I'm not sure what effect this has on performance. You may be able to leave this on and be fine. 8 ) Forest Visibility is another thing that has a major impact on performance. I have found that you can set it to 40% and not have trees and bushes seem to grow out of the ground as you approach them. 9) Preload Radius I have set for maximum (I think the number is 150,000) 10) Chimney Smoke Density I have set to its lowest possible value. 11) Rain Droplets I have turned off, but not sure its necessary. I haven't done any experimentation with it to see what performance impact it has. Your MSAA and AF settings look good, but after making the above changes, you may actually be able to run at least AF higher.

+1. Ghosting is mostly caused by having your settings too high. Tundra, can you post a screenshot of your graphics and VR settings in DCS? Helicopters, for me at least, have no ghosting of things passing on the sides, whereas a faster, fixed-wing jet like the A-10 has occasional ghosting to the sides (rare, and depends on scenery density. Usually happens when maneuvering aggressively.) Its all about staying within the limits of your rig in DCS. I agree with how much better helicopters are to fly in VR. For helicopters you really need a sense of motion, and having depth perception is a decent (not perfect) substitute for that.

Vulkan implementation has been talked about on these forums for years like its the cure for cancer or something. There's a possibility that ED may be finding that, at least for DCS, it isn't the magic pill some have been hanging their hopes on. If they were seeing encouraging results, they would probably tell us. On the other hand, I think we've all seen examples of how ED being transparent with "we're looking into it" statements have often been taken as promises by some who are then very vocal about "YOU PROMISED!". So, its easy to understand why they might not want to say anything until they're sure they can deliver. I'm running 4X MSAA on mine, and although its not perfect, its MUCH better than running none.

Yup. It only takes a few minutes to play around with the DCS and SteamVR settings to figure out what has an effect on performance and what doesn't. I haven't had to make any other changes on my rig to get it performing well in DCS. Just have to shut the bloody FPS counter off to avoid the reverse placebo effect of going into it determined that you're not going to have a good time unless the counter hits some magical number you have in mind. That also saves you from hours of messing with other settings to gain a few FPS on the counter that your eyes will never notice. Sure DCS lags behind newer VR titles for performance and graphics, but that's the reality of the situation. I just deal with reality and leave the dragon chasing to somebody else.

Not true. I actually got better performance on my G1 and now my G2 than I ever had with my Rift CV1. The reason for that is the headsets with higher native resolution don't require all the extra processing overhead taken by supersampling and/or higher DCS PD. On top of the performance boost, it looks better than my old Rift ever could have.

Yup. Chasing the FPS dragon is a pointless endeavor that just sets you up to be disappointed. Its easy to write it off based on the FPS counter without ever having looked out the window. Its also easy to think that the tweaking you're spending hours doing is having an appreciable effect, when the counters show an improvement of a few FPS, even though your eyes can't really see it. If I can fly at rooftop level, looking at the buildings to the sides as I pass them at 300 knots and only see an occasional smear or ghosting of the image, I'm good. Its being in an urban area with both video feeds being displayed on the MFCDs in the A-10C that slows things down, so I just keep those MFCDs on non-video-feed pages until I get out of the city. I have Motion Reprojection forced on for my G2 (which I'm running at 150% SS, 0.7 DCS PD, and 4X MSAA), so 45 FPS (on the counter, which can't read the interpolated frames produced by reprojection), in general, looks just fine. This is all on an 8th Generation i7. There is still lots of room for improvement, of course, but I wouldn't call it terrible. The eye candy I have sacrificed, I found that I really never spent much time marveling at that stuff anyway. We just have to deal with reality as it is at the moment and not how we would like it to be.

Very true. It was a long time ago, and a lot of people may have forgotten, but DCS and its predecessor were difficult to get good performance on, even in 2D, until our hardware got fast enough to run it well.

"This, sir, is the megadaddy of computers! Guaranteed to be on the cutting edge until Wednesday!"

I've said it many times, but for me this is a non-issue. I just treat it like I'm in a real cockpit, where I can honestly say I've never had the desire to press my head against a canopy or window in flight. It hurts and leaves a smudge.

That screen usually only comes up when the windows button on a controller has been pressed. I know that you had said you don't use your controllers, but pressing the windows button on one of them is the only way I know of to get that popup panel to go away. Pressing the windows key on the keyboard doesn't do the same thing, so it won't make it go away.

I recently read something similar about the G2 and SteamVR as to why SteamVR usually defaults to a higher than native resolution with supersampling at a higher percentage than 100%. What I read also said that it was to compensate for barrel distortion. With the 3090, SteamVR currently defaults to 150% for supersampling for me, so I have left it set to that. For DCS PD, I'm actually undersampling a little bit there, having that set to 0.7. It looks great and is smooth. Previously, with my 2080ti and SteamVR defaulting to 128%, I experimented with my settings. I originally had SteamVR supersampling set for 70% (I think), with a DCS PD of 1.0. After reading about the barrel distortion thing, I tried letting SteamVR default to 128% and set DCS PD to 0.6. I found that the image quality actually improved a little bit, and the performance stayed the same, with only occasional ghosting when looking at things I was flying past. It doesn't hurt to experiment with it and see what it looks like for you. The changes only take a few minutes and are in no way permanent. I wouldn't worry too much about dogmatic statements as to what the "right way" is to accomplish good image quality and performance. Play around with it and see what works best for you.

It has always been this way, ever since DCS started getting more and more VR components added to it. The biggest performance issues are caused by running super-sampling too high in whatever VR software you use, running DCS PD too high, shadows too high, cockpit displays resolution too high, trees too high, and MSAA too high. Pretty much everything else, settings-wise, has a noticeable effect on visuals, with very little negative impact on performance. Its all a matter of balancing those critical items in a way that gives you, as an individual, the best possible experience. Motion reprojection/ASW are also critical components that determine how good your experience is, and that too depends on individual preferences. I started in VR on this sim with a 980ti, then went to a 1080ti (that was where I noticed the biggest improvement in performance). After that came the 2080ti, which gave a barely-noticeable performance boost, with noticeably better visual quality at the same settings. The 3090 I now have was another bump in quality and performance, and now I'm able to run slightly higher DCS PD and SteamVR SS. The biggest boost I ever saw in performance though was when I went from a Rift CV1 to an HP Reverb G1. The higher native resolution allowed me to use significantly less supersampling, and supersampling/DCS PD are probably the biggest performance impactors.

Not a problem at all. Its just the SteamVR application and the SteamVR for WMR application that you need installed. I have the standalone version of DCS and it works just fine.