Supmua

Yeah. Having 39 PPD in the central visual area is no joke. You can push it even higher if you don’t mind 45 fps.

Yes, although some users on Varjo Discord are now requesting resolution even higher than what’s currently available because there’s so much performance gain via DFR. This might just be what the Aero needs to stay competitive with the Pimax Crystal.

This may be true with fresnel lens but not sure with the current pancake or aspheric lenses because they all have different properties. For example, the current pancakes while provide great optical quality suffer from low FOV and significant light reduction compared to other lens types. Aspherics on the other hand tend to have more prominent geometric distortion and chromatic aberration.

DCS MT quad view doesn’t necessarily show 4-screen mirror. I posted on this awhile back and originally thought that DCS MT wasn’t quad view because of single screen mirror and lack of double cursor in cockpit. However, after checking with mubucchia he suggested that this might not have been the case because it is not compatible with OXRTK (quad view doesn’t work with OXRTK at present), and since double cursor is no longer an issue this sparked a new interest in the quad view mode because he was able to easily inject eye tracking and ability to modify resolution via multiplication factors. All this have made quad view mode viable with the MT build. Use OpenXR Explorer to check and it will show all the active extensions including quad views, eye tracking, mucchia’s extension, etc. If DFR is active, there is also a background processs called Varjo Gaze in Task manager.

PPD is somewhat of a marketing term but Varjo do give out the correlating numbers at specific pixel settings as seen in those charts, and it gets more complicated after you add DFR into the mix because now the resolution is not uniformed across the entire FOV. This is why when someone said headset A is much sharper than headset B even though the physical screen has lower res, you have to also question the pixel renderings that were used. Even headset B can still appear much sharper than the same headset B via supersampling.

There’s a link from mbucchia’s Varjo Foveated site to Varjo’s doc on resolutions, and it’s complicated because Varjo HMDs offer stereo as well as Quad view modes. For VR in general you will see much better visuals by upsampling over the physical screen res, so I’m not sure if there is any true 100% res for any headset. I still lack full understanding of how the quad view works so can’t help you there, but 39 PPD is only achievable in this mode with helps of DFR. The current Highest setting in stereo view mode has 4.1K pix but you can also go even higher via upsampling. From my experiences the point of diminishing return in visuals starts there but you can still see better sharpness up until around 4.5K. Of course running at that res is ridiculously taxing and probably doesn’t make sense right now.

Oh ok. OXRTK is per app I think. So settings vary as you don’t want to use your exact DCS settings with MSFS for example. For global res you’d still rely on VB which unfortunately provides only 6 settings.

Yes. With OXRTK resolution override section, turn it on and it will show the current rendering res which can be adjusted from there. Alternatively you can open OXRTK log file from companion app and it will also show that and more. Your VB setting is like your windows desktop resolution setting which is considered the default setting by other apps. For Very High the horizontal pixel is around 3.6K. For Highest it’s 4.1K. When you drop the setting one step it will typically drop GPU FT by 1.5-2ms (this is my pre-DFR experiences, not sure if this will still be the case with DFR)

Did some quick comparison test between Varjo Quad DFR and SteamVR Stereo (which lacks DFR support). Interestingly, very small differences in performance--within 5 fps. The Quad mode might look slightly better but could be placebo because at this res (4.1K horizontal pix) both show great clarity. This is at Highest res setting on the Aero.

Runtime in this case is a platform that executes OpenXR API, so it would be either SteamVR or WMR in your case. One runtime can be active at a time. Final resolution can be seen in a log file from either SteamVR dev menu or OXR toolkit depending on which runtime you are using.

Turbo on caused both CPU and GPU FT spikes with DCS MT (non-DFR) at regular intervals in Steam OpenXR seen via fpsVR graphs (as well as low avg FT numbers below 11 in OXRTK yet final fps was 50-60s—reproducible on my PC), but not with Varjo OpenXR. I haven’t tried to Turbo off with DFR though, been messing around with various combinations of resolution settings via multiplication factors and DCS PD setting, probably should check turbo option next time I run DCS. Running an hour long DLC campaign mission also took a big chunk of time, but it’s much better for picking up glitches than quick flights that has no complex logics/scripts/voiceover/music. I do notice 1-2 sec pauses in complex missions also but rare, not sure if it was CPU or saturated RAM vs VRAM or DCS being DCS (GPU FT graph was smooth when it happened).

Very early release so there'll be some bugs to iron out. Too bad the only on-screen graphs you can see is GPU frametimes via DCS counter, so I have no idea what's going on with CPU frametimes in this mode. Perhaps it's more taxing to CPU in certain scenarios due to constant eye-tracking. I did experience poor fps in some campaign missions when CPU was taxed with multiple ground/air objects especially when on the ground. If anybody found a way to check CPU frametimes from within DCS without removing the headset let me know, preferable in graph mode so you can track frametime spikes and intervals. There's also an option to disable eyetracking in this mode via settings.cfg, haven't got a chance to try this yet so no idea how the perfomance is without ET.

I find MT takes a while to load also, especially textures/shaders at the start of a mission can take several seconds to come up. To verify OpenXR runtime you can use OpenXR Explorer (https://github.com/maluoi/openxr-explorer). Once you load DCS, run this and look at top left section and it should say which type of OpenXR runtime is being use, only one can be active at at time (SteamVR, Varjo, HTC, etc.). Alternatively, recent SteamVR update has similar option in the developer's tab (desktop only not in headset). OpenXR toolkit log file also does the same thing. These tools can also show active extensions or layers, if you have redundant or unwanted OpenXR extensions/layers it will also show (these can have negative effect on performance and may need to be uninstalled or disabled, some people may have a few left over old xrnecksafer layers for example which can cause issues).

For the mt version you shouldn’t need to, but it’s also a separate exe in a different folder, so your old shortcut for the original exe will not run it. The st version still outputs OpenVR, and will still need command line if you want to run in OpenXR.

No idea, but it's something to avoid for now I guess. Good finding on the peripheral setting tho. 1st mission of Hornet Syria campaign (Op Inherent Resolve) is very performance heavy on the ground. I got around 40 fps just taxiing along to the runway, tons of ground objects at the starting airfield...and I'm using the settings that gave me 90 fps with all the free flights except Marianas. Once up in the air it's back to 80-90 though. So despite all the good improvements we got recently the congested areas can still kill the fps, likely CPU related.

Depends on what you want to do. DCS.exe can now be run directly from the bin-mt folder without shortcuts or command line, because the mt version's default output is OpenXR. 1. The newest DFR mode. You need to install mbucchia's DFR foveated mod, and make sure to disable OpenXR Toolkit. Varjo OpenXR only. SteamVR OpenXR will run but no gazing support hence no DFR. 2. Non-DFR mode. Nothing new. Use either Varjo or SteamVR's OpenXR runtime. Is it possible to make this (eye tracking) work with Steam's OpenXR?

I’m more of an fps snob, so I usually don’t max out my settings. But this is a good thing about PCVR, we have choices and options. For console or mobile VR the choices are very limited.

If you reduce pixel density setting in DCS to 0.8 or 0.9 you’ll see even better fps The image is slightly softer but more performance gain. I’m running Hornet Syria campaign, will see how it goes.

Doesn't happen where you need to operate the switches. It's only around the border which isn't a big deal. Overall, though, the experience has been great with both DCS mt and mbucchia's DFR mode. The combination provides a leap in both performance and visual quality. Lots of testings to do though especially with other mods.

It looks like we're still getting double cursor in the quad view, but only at specific locations on the screen typically around the HUD or cockpit perimeter. Not that big of a deal since this doesn't happen inside the cockpit but it's there.

Did some more testings and interestingly no crash at 35 or 39 PPD settings with either Turbo on/off. So far my specific crash conditions are motion smoothing with PPD at 37 and multiplication factors below 1.

fpsVR works as long as you use OpenXR via StramVR, because it supports OpenXR but only through Steam layer. I still use fpsVR to track frametimes with DCS MT. If you read recent SteamVR update blogs you’ll see that OpenXR is now the preferred API for Steam because it’s more modern and no longer being used in newer games just like how Windows 11 is now preferred over 10.

Thx. I’ll try turbo off tomorrow spent way too much time on this got some real work to do. See if u can reproduce my crash. Focus 0.9, peripheral 0.7, Vsync 45 fps, MS always enabled, PPD 37.

I'm getting reproducible crashes with motion smoothing, if multiplication factors setting is not 1. So be careful, but it's not a big deal. If you experience similar crash change the factors back to 1 or don't use motion smoothing. On the other hand no issue so far with reducing PD setting with motion smoothing. Varjo Gaze Tracking can also use up to 7% of CPU, might cause a problem with older CPUs. Update: No crash with motion smoothing as long as multiplication factor is 1.0 or higher. Crashes with factor below 1.0 when motion smoothing is on. Yeah wait a couple of days for things to settle down. But you will likely get better performance and better visuals with DFR.

This is a great start for Dynamic FR implementation moving forward for Varjo owners. The performance and image quality in this mode is just bonkers, the optional multiplication factors settings for rendering res for both focus and peripheral screens are also available. I'm getting smooth 90 fps in F-16 Persian Gulf free fight (which is more taxing than the Syria free flight, btw), by simply lowering the focus res to 0.9 and peripheral to 0.7 (at 37PPD setting in VB). To me this is as big as DCS MT release, and it will only get better once we have some more tools equivalent to OXRTK for this.