Tinkickef

Another test. VRAM. With Oculus ASW off. Raises another set of questions. No matter what I do re left ctrl and num, My upper framerate remains capped at 45fps in game, as if Oculus will not allow higher, unless the DCS framecounter is just counting one eye in which case the rates in reality are double what it is showing. ASW is off as now the frames are fluctuating between a low of maybe 28 - 30fps and 45fps. MSAA off, PD 2.0, SSAA off. Otherwise all other settings same as before. MSAA still knocks hell out of framerates. 2x = 5fps or more depending on what your altitude is. 4x = 10 - 15fps. graph is of Hornet cruising through downtown Dubai at around 400kts and a couple of hundred feet maybe. FPS = 30. CPU = 23% GPU = 60% with VRAM at 8GB. I'm thinking this is a memory issue holding things back. Maybe my DDR3 1866 is holding things up a little. Or it may be Rift runtime computations that are slowing things up. Anyone any ideas? Also noticed that DCS hangs onto MSAA settings if you try to change them on the fly. You have to shut the game down and restart before the new setting makes an effect on the framerate. Had enough testing for one day. Its been a rollercoaster of excitement and disappointment, albeit I know I am making the card work hard in the worst of cases; speed, large detailed city, textures on high, low level, high PD, high draw distance, High trees and high ground clutter. The framerates do not match the smoothness I am seeing. If the Dubai graph is true, then my 980TI in the same circumstances was drawing 5 - 10fps and that does not seem true either. Cant make head or tail of it. %5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A//i.imgur.com/QH3hZfI.jpg[/img]

https://i.imgur.com/rKyfdDs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jzuNGy4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pzIdNwM.jpg

Now I have some framerates (thanks knock knock) I have abandoned SSAA. It appears I am immune to shockingly low frames. From what I just witnessed, I must be accustomed to mid 20s with my old 980TI. Albeit with the caveat that I usually do moonlit missions, not daytime. I am doing 12 noon daytime testing because it will be more useful to most users and pushes the card harder. So in the interests of this test I have abandoned SSAA, enabled 2x MSAA and dropped PD to 2.1. I kept trees full, reduced ground clutter by 25%. I cannot really comment on how it looks by comparison, as I always think daytime looks washed out and shimmery. So here we have the Hornet over the city at low level at mach 1.2 and in a shallow turn to load the card. 44FPS. I can live with that, still not seeing ASW artifacts or stutters. However I suspect I have encountered some thermal throttling on the card as turning around to fly back over the city, framerates drop to mid 30s and dont recover for a few seconds. I will also have to look at fan curves as well as the Nvidia easy overclock scan tool. clearly I have a lot more work to do. %5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A//i.imgur.com/pzIdNwM.jpg[/img]

You are of course correct. These will not be my final settings, even stuff like ground clutter can be dialled back. The purpose of this test is to load up the card and get solid figures on CPU usage. I already dialled PD back to 2.3 and upped SSAA to 2x, which seems to work better. However, all this is subjective and we are talking tiny changes that are difficult to spot at times. Other times, it is wow, that looks nice. No point spending several weeks wages on a card and not running close to 100%. I will know more when I try my Huey daytime missions in Normandy and Caucasus. If Normandy loses the shimmering trees it will be good.

Unfortunately I'm not on steam, so don't know how to get frame rate figures. Oculus tray tool has not worked since I moved a bunch of stuff over onto drive 3. All I can say is for the most part everything is butter smooth. Even turning onto the runway where I used to suffer bad frame rate dips.

I found this oculus reddit article that explains why it seems to work.

4.48ghz.

Resolved. It appears this bug was most likely a result of my cruelly overclocked 980TI dropping textures. Guess I took it one step beyond what I should have. It is no longer happening since I installed a new GPU.

Great stuff. A lot of money and a lot of performance that Rift CV1 display cannot take full advantage of, but you are set for gen 2. Of that I am confident. Still very early days yet. As the drivers mature and evolve, esp if ED adopt DLSS and Vulkan, as the song says....... Things can only get better. Conclusion. So the burning question... Do I have any regrets over blowing the thick end of £1400 on the factory overclocked Asus 2080TI? Certainly not at this moment in time. It's given VR, my rig and Rift a new lease of life. Very impressed and with my planned 2019 CPU replacement schedule now firmly on hold, that cash will go towards gen two headset instead. I will be watching pimax and star VR threads very closely since CV2 has not been announced. Decisions decisions.

Yes. However please do remember that all these visual descriptions are highly subjective perceptions. I have tried to quantify them for people to compare with their current performance and most of this subjective testing is on the PG map in moonlight as I rarely do day missions. The differences are subtle and more a case of "wow that looks better and sharper". But how can you quantify something looking sharper or more detailed? Flying off the coast of Dubai, maybe 5-6 miles out, in moonlight at 30,000ft. I could see the Burg al Arab. Not clearly, but for the first time, I could tell there was a building there. An attempt to quantify this for repeatability. Moonlight, just further out than the outer edge of the larger Palm and the world islands, 30,000ft altitude if you want to try repeat it and see if I am just having a placebo moment. I would not recommend anyone ordering a 2080TI based on my visual descriptions alone. Take those with a healthy dose of salt. I set the quick daylight mission for low level at high speed over a built up area to demonstrate how much headroom the CPU had when supplying data to the new card. I deliberately loaded the card to test VRAM performance, temps (78C but did not hear fans kick in) ect. This thread was initially started to inform some who were interested in my reporting back how the 4790k handled the 2080TI and if it would be a bottleneck. Hopefully I have helped those with a 4790k make a decision on whether they need to upgrade their CPU and board or not in preparation for second gen headsets. I say a resounding not.

It may not be. What I am seeing may be PD alone, but it is loading the system which is the whole point. Finding the limits of what my 4790k and the card can handle. I'm looking to next gen VR when I ordered the 2080TI, not this one. If I had listened to some advice on these fora, I'd have scrapped my rig, replaced it with something else and bought a 1080 instead and blown a small fortune in the process. Then had to replace it again when gen 2 was released. Facts, not opinions are what I'm chasing and that means evaluating every setting in the fullness of time. What I have found so far is the 4790k is handling it all rather well and since I was planning on upgrading the CPU, board and RAM next year, I don't need to, esp when Vulkan is implemented. Happy days indeed.

1. Appears to make a difference and loads up the card more than MSAA. I am looking for a worse case scenario and working back. 2. No idea. ASW on but not seeing any artifacts. Currently have PD at 2.3 and SSAA at 2.0. Resolution of cockpit slightly better, can read the time and distance to waypoint text on the top right of the Hornet MFCD without leaning forward. Medium range much sharper. Buildings not blurred at 10,000ft. Runway lights seen at 20, 000ft on night mission. Individual streetlights apparent at 8000ft. Runway lights on approach seen approx 2 - 3x distance further out. Terrain very much sharper out to maybe 20 miles. I did get a very slight stutter during ACM while missiles were in the air and planes were going down, while maneuvering hard at about 14,000ft over Iran. My stupid overclocked 980TI was a stuttering, jittering, slideshow wreck at that point. Whether it was CPU or GPU causing it, I don't know as I was far too exciteable to peer down the nose gap at task manager. All in all, I'm impressed with it. I have absolutely no doubt that it will run rift 2 with ease if the resolution is doubled as will my 4790k.

First performance results re I7 4790K and 2080TI. Loads of headroom left. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=221127

Still messing with optimisation of settings. Oculus Rift. Set PD at 2.5. Only other real change to settings so far are the clutter / tree distance sliders ect and I set SSAA at 1.5 to see what effect it would have on CPU and GPU load. Flying Hornet, low level over built up area at pretty much mach 1. Smooth movement and no stutters. Performance graph. CPU Vs GPU. %5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A//i.imgur.com/rKyfdDs.jpg[/img] Initial settings with 2.5 PD %5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A//i.imgur.com/jzuNGy4.jpg[/img]

It comes down to one thing. Can you afford the 2080TI and live with the fact that you may not be able to fully utilise the performance for a year or so? Most people would not dissuade you from upgrading that 980TI to a 2080Ti in the same way as if you you were upgrading from a 1080TI. The performance gains buying the 20 series cards for VR at this moment in time are minimal as the headset (and DCS) just cannot soak up the advantages the new hardware offers at this moment in time. However this will change. What the 2080TI offers is a little futureproofing. If you upgrade components in rotation, on a planned cycle of three years as do I, then the 20 series makes sense if you can justify the cost. It really is down to your own particular circumstances and the performance of your other hardware. Vulkan will be a godsend when implemented. Only you can decide what is best for you.

It would certainly be good for everyone if they got their act together. The longer they fail to offer serious choices to the consumer though, the harder it will be to pull back. This is because of a little thing called brand loyalty. As new PC builders come along and have little choice but to choose Nvidia products, they will tend to gravitate towards Nvidia products on their next build too, and maybe the one after that until something radical comes along to break the cycle. As a youth I had brand loyalty to Yamaha motorcycles and 2 strokes in particular, then I started with on road machines above 750cc and 4 stroke. I then switched allegiance to Honda as they were renowned to be the best 4 stroke bikes at that time, and never looked back. It took a quantum jump to get me off small (sub 400cc), high performance 2 strokes and buy into Honda. This is what is happening in the GPU market at the moment. We call them fanbois and it will be hard for AMD to make them switch allegiance.

Indeed. Even with 980TI, I found DCS to be reasonably smooth in VR most of the time. My worst moments were when VRAM started hitting page file and getting the jitters and some occasional artifacting caused by the overclocking to the point of instability. I have a bug submitted where water textures disappear, but I also have suspicions that it may be the OC causing it. I had half an hour spare yesterday evening and managed to get the card fitted and the driver downloaded (do not have optical drive on my machine so supplied CD Rom unhelpful), so I will be able to give my first subjective impressions after work tonight. Driver on CD Rom was a disappointment in this day and age and with the pricepoint of the card. Not happy with that. I mean how much would a 1gb usb flash drive cost wholesale? I was sure glad to see the 480 x 640 display get back to normal 1080p when the driver finished downloading and installed. I'm not expecting to see much difference in the headset as the resolution is the limiting factor and cranking up PD may load up the card more, but have little effect visually. What I am looking for is a more stable experience and maybe better smoothness when turning onto the runway ect. Waiting for next gen headsets and vulkan now.

These are the most recent performance graphs I have while running DCS in VR with 980TI, with the settings I have been using below. [/img] [/img]

I currently run Rift at 1.8PD on my admittedly heavily OC and slightly unstable 980TI. It is certainly something I am considering to get GPU utilisation up, depending on how it is performing vs CPU. Trouble is, PD suffers from the law of diminishing returns, but I will experiment with it and report back. Not sure if SSAA or MSAA would actually do anything helpful with Rift and not sure how it would impact CPU performance. Be nice if someone could advise on this as currently I do not use it. Be nice to be able to use Normandy without the shimmering trees. I do have a lot of overhead on my CPU but I still do not want to squander it on relatively small improvements or placebos. I intend to leave draw distance alone since most of my missions are in moonlight as that will impact the CPU. Currently IIRC, draw distance is very high, if that setting is the one below ultra. Likewise shadows. Currently shadows are medium and terrain shadows on flat. CPU would be affected, but again I will experiment with it and report back. Currently I reckon I am lucky to see 30 genuine fps without ASW, so 50fps would be an absolute dream. I will post back with screenshots of performance, overhead and settings in due course. Probably be the weekend before I get around to installing it.

I'll take that and the rest of your advice under advisement since my 4790k currently has a 75- 85% overhead running DCS on high settings with my existing 980TI and VR(1x physical core 2x logical core performance). How much of that overhead gets used up by the 2080TI remains to be seen, but I am betting it will not be double my current 15 - 20% utilisation. 80% of the useful VR settings in DCS are handled by GPU alone. And Vulkan IS coming to DCS, so why would I waste money on hardware that will be perfectly adequate in a few months time anyway. My 980ti suffers from a VRAM shortage, so why should I not get the latest and greatest card with DLSS for future proofing, not just for DCS, but other games too. I can afford it and it is currently sat on my desk waiting to be installed. I suggest a little introspection as to the real motives of your post. Nothing you stated actually adds up when applied to real world scenarios and my circumstances in particular.

It certainly did didn't it. See post 37.

Just got in from work with an interesting email. Ebuyer just had me revalidate my pre order, took my money and confirmed my order. Yippee. 2080TI should be in my hands before the week is out.

Nice effect, just needs to be at the front. %5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A//i.imgur.com/8nuDOJT.jpg[/img]

I made out a bug report with pics on the PG bugs section. Water used to disappear during a long mission, now its down to seconds, so you were right.

Deleted metashaders, FXO ect, run repair, rebooted game to no avail. Water textures disappear mid mission. The two pics were taken on an identical mission at Khasab. Takeoff, climb out and head for the Harbour. Within a few seconds of glimpsing the water it vanishes. Tide out pic taken on fast climb over base to see the coastline and have the water disappear before I arrive. Second pic - tide in taken by flying low and grabbing a screenshot. The water disappeared about 10 seconds later. boats in harbour floating in mid air. Water still there, just texture missing because you can crash into it. This happens on all PG missions with Huey, Hog or Hornet, Khasab to Al Dhafra, daylight or moonlight, 30,000ft or down on the deck. Tide out.. %5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A//i.imgur.com/G6wmvYm.jpg[/img] Tide In.. Tide out. %5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A//i.imgur.com/4Wkgrsc.jpg[/img]