Supmua

You can have NIS or FSR as well as CAS right now via fholger’s VR perf kit mod.

A lot of people think it's too expensive for what it offers, but in this era where a lousy half-inch Subway sandwich costs $8.50 (without tax) it seems about right to me--if you can get it at MSRP that is.

According to some posts on Reddit, (non DCS) VR performance is similar to 3080. This may change when DCS has DLSS mode since current gen cards have better tensor tech but as of now think of it as 3080 equivalent in VR.

Am I dreaming or what. According to the latest newsletter it will happen. Expect huge performance jump in GPU frametimes like you see with MSFS. This plus multi-core CPU support will make DCS exciting again.

Foveated rendering works but I think of it as something that improves performance but not necessarily image quality. One easy example of this is Varjo Workspace desktop, which uses eye tracking FR. Now the problem is that while it works it doesn’t give a very good first impression of the headset to new owners, because the gamma setting is off resulting in crushed blacks and blown out whites, plus foveation causes loss of detail in peripheral vision—bring up a web browser on a page with small texts and you’ll see fuzzy fonts when glancing to the sides. These visual issues fortunately are not present with SteamVR overlay or other 3rd party virtual desktop apps because they don’t use foveation and have correct gamma calibration. Why Varjo leaves their Worksapce app in its current state is beyond me because on a high res HMD like this there is no need to supersample central imaging area while degrading the peripheral area as the central part is already sharp enough. In addition, destop virtualization has very little effect on performance so you can just supersample the entire FOV. What this does instead is giving misrepresentation of the Aero as being only marginally better than your older headset when it comes to clarity and image fidelity. Open up SteamVR overlay or Virtual Desktop and you will see significant improvement in image quality, especially with web browsing or movie watching.

The headset’s OLED panels is the most exciting factor for me as LCD can’t really reproduce deep blacks well. I have a PSVR2 headset on preorder that also uses OLED screens but it will be no good for DCS. Need more info from the CES demos though (FOV, edge to edge clarity, chromatic aberration, etc.). There’s also a new HTC Vive that will be officially announced tomorrow, but the specs might be closer to the Quest Pro including the screen type and resolution. The MeganeX is also for NVIDIA RTX GPUs only, which implies that it will use some sort of DSC tech similar to the Aero

MeganeX - Shiftall Inc. The pricing is a bit high but the specs seem great with dual micro OLED HDR screens, 2560x2560 pixels per screen, display port, 56-72mm IPD, 330g weight, very portable form factor. Steam's lighthouse adapter and eyeglass lens adapter are included in the package.

The Aero uses NIVIDIA’s DSC compression video and that lowers the bandwidth requirement for rendering vs headsets that don’t use it. Foveation right now is mostly gimmick and only works with Varjo workspace and very few apps. It may help performance but at the expense of blurry peripheral vision when you glance around quickly.

I would avoid AMD’s latest GPUs for now at least until they manage to sort things out.

When SteamVR crashes for whatever reason, it will automatically disable all add-ons (including Varjo) the next time you run it which may result in game crashing/incompatibility. This is the safe mode to ensure that SteamVR GUI will function after a crash. However, Varjo add-on for SteamVR is required for normal SteamVR operation with this headset. The sequence to make sure things work correctly is to start Varjo Base, then manually start SteamVR (either via Varjo Base or Steam GUI) then go to SteamVR settings and make sure all the add-ons are enabled, then launch DCS. If and when things work properly, you can skip manual SteamVR launch as it will happen automatically. Remember that crash will not happen even if you do not run DCS via force command line as it will simply go into Varjo quad rendering mode, but crash will happen if SteamVR Varjo add-on is disabled.

Depends on the type of filters that you choose. Lumasharpen, for example, has negligible effect on performance but can enhance ground details significantly. Filters that alter color saturation or contrast also tend to have minimal effect on performance.

I either run DCS repair or drag the original dll back into the bin folder to switch back to SteamVR. Repair itself is fairly fast just select it from Windows menu and hit ENTER. OVGME can likely do the same thing, but I don’t like to depend on external programs in general.

For best image quality, SteamVR + Reshade 5. There is so much you can do with video post processing, it’s almost like getting an upgraded headset.

Don, sign up with nowinstock and get real-time notifications on your phone. That's how I buy difficult to find items these days. Bestbuy typically has them in stock regularly, sold out very quickly though and might not be the model you want. Unless you're picky on the brand you should be able to buy one from legit stores.

The latest DCS beta update did something to improve performance. I'm getting steady 90fps with Harrier Caucasus free flight in SteamVR mode now with CPU frametimes as little as 6ms and GPU 10ms or less. Similar findings with F-16 Persian Gulf in noncongested areas. I've messed around with Vulkan wrapper (DXVK) also unfortunately doesn't work in VR. This works really well in other games though, especially ones that use Unity engine...completely eliminates stuttering in Unity games that are affected.

For me the shadows are now flat with flat setting, but has softer edges (better antialiasing) compared to old flat shadows. Performance-wise not as good as the old one but I prefer this as it looks better and also costs less than low/med shadows.

At the current state, Varjo's motion smoothing works as long as your head remains stationary. If you move your head around there's this 0.5-1sec period of image retention artifacts, then everything catches up and it becomes smooth again. The cost is also high on GPU/CPU processing, so they need to work on optimization. I think they're trying to implement it such that it will work with both SteamVR and OpenXR, but the problem is that it doesn't work well with either. Might be better just to stick with SteamVR's motion smoothing...but to actually make something happen is probably harder than you think and that's why it hasn't happened yet. The good news is that this latest release is the only version that Varjo desktop shows no artifacts on windows taskbar with head movement on my setup (since the 4090 upgrade).

I guess a 4080+ tier GPU might be needed to get decent framerate with motion smoothing with the current VB. There's also a trick that can help increase the framerate by reducing LOD. In config\graphics.lua, you can reduce LOD multiplier values (LODMULT) to 0.5 instead of 1.0. Make sure to do a lua backup first, or do a repair in case there's a problem.

It’s a toss up for me between stutter-free flying with blurry ground objects as you fly by vs no blurriness with occasional jittering. Need to do more flying to decide but work has been busy.

At the current state it is decent if your head remains mostly stationary, and if fps stays above 45. Not for driving games though, too much artifacts. That’s why it’s still beta but they decided to release it for public testing now.

They call it motion smoothing now, expect to see around 2ms of GPU frametime increase in DCS (at least on my setup). So this is not for people with weak GPU especially after 2.8beta update as that also taxes the GPU frametime as well. I’d say rtx 3080 minimum.

Gigabyte rtx 4090 is still available on Bestbuy website, the FE was restocked briefly earlier today but all gone now. Basically buy before the GPU tariffs hit next year (Q3 I think) if you can get it at MSRP, expect the price to go up even more afterward.

There is no magic bullet for any setup, it’s all about compromise in settings and things that sound too good to be true are usually just that. I listed my settings for high fps (90) at the end of the very first post. You should get at least 45 with your setup using that in typical free flight missions.

Not any better than Vive or Index at present. Remember that these use generated (fake) frames, so very fast moving objects can still show artifacts. It’s still not ready though that’s why they haven’t released it to mainstream. In games that use depth info such as MSFS, it taxes CPU frametimes heavily resulting in low fps even though stuttering is minimized. For me the best way to fly in DCS is to get my fps close to 90 as much as I can. The second best is a toss up between current motion smoothing with occasional artifacts vs smooth locked 45 fps with blurry ground objects during high speed runs.

Because when I watch movies or do other things in VR, the images and GUI look pristine. The same reason I don’t set my 4KTV to 2K even though I might run some games with raytracing at 2K.