DeltaMike

Yeah I go for 20 to account for frame time variability and also because I feel it's better to be a little fast than a little slow. That said, fwiw my frame rate counter has been showing 46 pretty consistently so I'm sure I'm a bit above that most of the time... Does the same thing apply to the 60fps/60hz target? Should I leave myself a little wiggle room or does it matter? ----- @Eisprinzessin I'd ping @speed-of-heat for Win11 settings, a couple of which he mentioned in his 3090 tuning thread. Interested to know what you find, I've been sorely tempted (for reasons I cannot explain) to hit that "upgrade" button.

mitx build, nice! Doubt I'm going to upgrade my 5600X, it runs well in DCS, doesn't draw a lot of power and it's super easy to air cool (I'm using a Noctua tower with a 90mm fan). Air is what makes that case mesh-licious, no? That gave me enough headroom to go with a corsair SF750, which (to my relief) is working fine with my 6900XT although I'm not even remotely thinking about overclocking the thing, I can't keep it cool in rage mode as it is. I have it undervolted, and fans are in hurricane mode. Do it again, I would have gone for a 2TB SSD. x570 does a good job of cooling your primary SSD but the secondary slot is nothing to scream about, limiting your upgrade options. Depends on what else you want on there. MSFS takes up a lot of room and Xplane I'm sure would put me over the cliff. As it is, if I want to download any MSFS maps that'll probably have to go on an external drive. I went with a 1TB samsung on the front, and put an old 256GB SSD I had lying around on the back. I keep Windows and the swap file on the latter. That's one way of doing it but still should have gone 2TB for the front. RE: AMD vs NVIDIA. Just depends on what you can get your hands on. In VR at least, in DCS, the 6900XT is probably a shade faster than 3080. Disadvantage is, it requires some tuning to get there, and I think the cooling solution for NVIDIA cards is generally superior for those SFF cases. I guess it's kind of hard to screw up the airflow in that case, but still. SAM doesn't do much. If you can, ask about what bios version your mobo is shipping with. There was a time there, a couple of months ago when you had to borrow a CPU to get the durn things to post. Don't forget to set your XMP profile for your RAM, otherwise it'll run slooooooooow x570 is overkill of course. You don't need to overclock AMD, not for DCS anyway. I don't think you can overclock the 3D. When I built mine, the x570 cost the same as the b550, so I bought it, even though I lost a fan header in the process. Actually would have rather had the b550 but it was the principle of the thing.

Pixel density, a DCS setting found under the "VR" tab, is a relic of a past era. Put that at 1.0 and never touch that slider again. One fewer knob to twiddle, one step closer to your goal. Make sure you understand the difference between mSaa and mFaa. The first -- a DCS setting -- is a real performance hog. The second is an NVIDIA setting (and I don't know what it does).

I may, only problem is, I've found myself afflicted by Liberation. Even though I'm running it on a server I'll be flabbergasted if I can hold 60fps. Good news is, I've discovered I own the night. There are no microstutters at night. But, I imagine 60hz will be pretty sweet when I'm noodling around in my Christian Eagle. That should be the shiznit. Eager to try it. May try it with Civ Traffic on, although what I really need is civilians. Seems like there should be pretty babies down there when I'm buzzing the pool at Caesars'.

Haha yeah the G2 is a pain in the butt. It's not a "consumer headset" but as a steely-eyed rocket man you need a professional, industrial strength headset anyway so you're on the right track. Biggest problem is, DCS can't talk to your headset directly. It has to talk to SteamVR first, and then SteamVR has to talk to WMR via an intermediary (the delightfully-named "WMR4SVR", which looks as pretty as it sounds) and then WMR finally gets to talk to your headset. The definitive guide for how to do... um, that... is here. You can find Thud on his discord for real time help. Note, the guide doesn't make a ton of sense just to read it, it makes total sense if you have your headset unboxed and ready to plug in. It's kind of like karaoke that way, just sing along. There is another way, and it's an "Open" question in my mind whether we should steer new users in that direction to begin with. Maybe so. Consider taking a moment to read this. Where it says "don't open SteamVR, don't even touch SteamVR," you can take that as, "don't bother to install SteamVR in the first place." OpenXR is our little way of cutting out the middle man. They taught OpenXR how to speak Steamish. So, DCS is able to talk to OXR in Steamish, which it can understand, and OXR can talk directly to your headset. Pretty slick, and it seems to be a superior user experience in a number of respects. Most of us -- strike that, all of us went through the WMR/SVR/WMR4SVR dance, with a great deal of growling and gnashing of teeth, only to undo it all and start over with OpenXR. If it pleases you, consider reading both sets of instructions. Interested to know how all this sounds to the ears of a new user, which one seems the least intimidating for example. Very interested to know what you think.

VR is different from flat screen. Locking frame rates from any where other than in the VR software can cause problems. One possible outcome might be, a significant delay between when something happens in game, and when you actually see it with your eyeballs. Not sure it makes a ton of difference in SVR/WMR -- that stack is such a mess, I suspect that's already happening anyway. Personally I think Chill works OK in SVR; not great, but OK. On the other hand, OXR is pretty slick. Specifically engineered to be more efficient than SVR/WMR. Now we are wondering if Chill is really such a hot idea. Let's just say it's not "best practice" but if it works for you? Cool! Enjoy it. It's not gonna light your computer on fire or anything. Of course the "best practice" is to turn MR on, but then ya gotta deal with the jelly worms and such. Pick your poison. ----- MSAA is sort of a selective supersampling technique, only works along edges. This made it popular because it's more efficient than generic supersampling. In VR, we liked it also because it cleans up edges. The early headsets needed more than a little bit of that. I say this in past tense because when DCS went over to deferred rendering, MSAA lost its efficiency advantage, because now it doesn't know where the edges are. Then it became a question of whether it's worth using at all. And the answer for many people is "yes." MSAA is probably the best tool we have for shimmering. Only thing is, there's a lot less shimmering in OXR and I think we have the option to look at alternatives. Among them, plain old vanilla supersampling. ----- Where these two threads merge is on the subject of tuning. Let's say you want to run your G2 at 90hz. If you want things to look smooth, you're gonna need to hit a target. Ideally you want your frame time to be 11ms. That way you'll be at 90FPS most of the time, which matches your monitor refresh rate. Won't be perfectly smooth -- if you're zipping along at 500kts/500ft things are gonna look a little blurry along the 3-9 line, and you'll be jonesing for one of those 144hz HMD's and griping cuz DCS can't keep up with that. If you can't hit that target (don't feel bad -- nobody can) then your next target is 20ms, which should give you 45fps. Turns out, that'll be smooth too, albeit with even more blurriness along the 3-9 line. But you have to be right on it. If you're drifting up toward 60fps you're gonna get a great deal of microstutter which people will describe as ghosting, double images or stuttering. As you get closer to 80fps, you're gonna be dropping a lot of frames and it's going to annoy you to no end. I think a lot of people with high performance GPU's get into this situation, where they can't quite hold 90fps all the time, but can't quite figure out how to get rid of the microstutter. Several ways of dealing with this, but clearly, turning settings down doesn't help. You gotta turn em up to get closer to that 20ms frame time. So if you look at the process @speed-of-heat followed with his 3090, he exhaustively studied the effect of each setting on his render times, and found the perfect combination to get him right where he needed to be. Every bit as much work as @edmuss did with his 3070, just moving in a different direction. Trying to slow things down a little rather than speed em up (which is a good problem to have, believe me). For those who need to turn their settings up to reach a target -- who need to slow their computer down a little to dance better with VR -- I'd suggest looking at your resolution slider. It's an easy way to get things just right, and it has its advantages. Among them, it has an anti-aliasing effect and it does reduce shimmering. Among them, it may make your sweet spot bigger, as one poster recently reported.

Note not everyone is seeing an increase in FPS. Some improvements may be beyond our ability to measure (fpsVR can only measure up to the point where SVR passes the frame along). We are seeing consistently better loading times, improved image quality (eg less shimmering), less judder. First step is clean install as per instructions. Second step I think is to make sure we are comparing apples to apples, so we want to be comparing similar DCS frame sizes. So whatever mix of pixel density, global resolution, per-app resolution and scale factor we had in SVR needs to be replicated in OXR. FSR and NIS scale differently (and not as aggressively) in OXR as I learned the hard way

@Sr. -- what settings are you running?

Deserves emphasis imo. Undersampling has disproportionate effects on the sweet spot. Nice to hear that supersampling does the same thing, in a good way. Unclear to me what MSAA is doing for us precisely. It's probably not that different from plain old generic supersampling. Pound for pound I got the feeling MSAA worked a little better than SS in SVR but maybe not so much in OXR. With the added bonus of being, SS is easier to fine tune I guess maybe if we held perfectly still there wouldn't be any v-sync action going on. But, when does that ever happen in VR. Every time you move your head, asynchronous time warp (or whatever they call it) is dancing with the CPU in the background So I guess it's not that the headset wants to run at 45fps; it's that the CPU is, for all practical purposes always on a timer and at 45 fps everything is synchronized even with MR turned off, no? I'm coming around to the idea that some forms of microstutter are worse than others. Seems to me it's a lot more annoying to drop a frame than to get one early. For years I've been tuning to a frame time of 20ms, so I'm sure I'm not right on 45fps 99% of the time. Maybe just at the right end of the spectrum? Maybe? And perhaps an explanation for the perception that there's a sharp dropoff in image quality below 45fps MR is a great solution for a lot of problems, and it sounds like people are warming up to it. Only reason I turned it off is, I've been flying the Hornet almost exclusively lately and I'm head down in the cockpit messing around with the computer all the time. Who looks out the window, right? I treat myself like like I used to treat NoWheels when I was flying RIO for him. "Turn about 10 degrees to the north and don't do any of that pilot ****, put it on autopilot if you have to. I'm busy back here."

Score! Loading up is way less of a chore in every respect Not totally clear how/if/when Vulkan is going to support OXR. Seems like they are going to have to figure something out, but it's all up in the air right now. How did you get Marianas working so well? Post up your settings, I imagine there are a lot of 1080ti users out there who would love to see how you did it

I sent you the link, check your messages

I haven't seen that one, you'll need to ask em on the discord. pm sent. @edmuss i haven't tried fixed foveated yet, wonder if that might put me over the top. The 60hz flickering doesn't really bother me. It's bad in the cliff house but hardly notice it in game Eta nm I would need dx12

^which leads me to think I'm just not doing it right in OXR. I'm currently tuned to 46fps, I need to be running closer to 50 to make it work I think. If I could just let go... let go of those darn shadows....

I think the problem is, we keep forgetting, if you're gonna use MR, you have to keep your frametimes well above minimum, otherwise (in the case of WMR) your motion reprojection is always going to be switching on or off, or (in the case of OXR) you're gonna be constantly flipping back and forth between 30 and 45fps. That's why the MSFS folks keep saying "30 is the new 45." Better to lock in 30 in MSFS. We can still shoot for 45 in DCS. But we have to meet or beat that every frame for it to work.

@Rosebud47 Good article on microstutter here Relevant to G2 -- We can't turn "v-synch" off. It's forced on, to either 90hz or 60hz Nobody's gonna put a variable rate monitor in a VR headset, apparently it makes ya puke I think it follows, then, that you have to be close if you want those stutters to go away. Close to your refresh rate, or to a --ahem-- whole-number-fraction of it From what I can gather, to the extent the G2 has "v-synch," the headset sends a signal down through the VR stack to let the CPU know when it's ready for a new frame. If you lock your framerates externally, for example with Chill, then your GPU driver is also sending a signal to the CPU, outside the VR stack, when it feels it's ready for a new frame. Your CPU, then, is getting bossed around by two entities that never talk to each other. If it's anything like the place where I work -- and it sounds like it is -- that's non-optimal. The guy who wrote the OXR Toolkit says that results in "non-deterministic latency." I don't know what that is, but it sounds.... like, bad. Where motion reprojection come in, is when you're running at 45fps, and your refresh rate is 90hz, you have two options: Watch every frame twice Watch a new frame every time, realizing that your GPU is just gonna make up what it thinks every other frame should look like In Windows, motion reprojection does a great job with those synthetic frames, and also locks your framerate from within the VR stack. So if you can consistently meet that frame rate, it looks fantastic actually. Solves a lot of problems in WMR/SVR. In OXR... it has some cool features but, I think it needs a little more time in the oven myself.

No but the Companion App ("Open XR Toolkit Companion App That You Download From Github") has most of that functionality in it.

Perfect example of what I'm talking about. As Lynyrd Skynyrd said, "turn it up." There's a world of difference between "60" and "50-60" which Edmuss explained in detail above. Let me guess -- 2000 series? Better yet, post up your specs and settings and let's get ya tuned up. ETA: weird being right all the time... lets see a screen shot of your settings. 2080S is plenty, you'll be zipping around in no time

It's a really an elegant solution for DCS. I should ditch the shadows and do that. Shadows do precisely nothing for game play.

All this talk about fractions has me thinking. If you set your G2 at 90hz, it's gonna show an image every 11ms. Question is, what. If by some miracle you can consistently hold 90fps, even close to the ground, then it's gonna have a new image to display every 11ms and there shouldn't be any stuttering. If you're running less than that, at times you're gonna display the same image twice. Which could be problematic, stuttering-wise, unless (by some miracle) you're running precisely 45fps. That way, you're displaying every image exactly twice, and there's no stuttering. Now, if you're at 50fps, most of the time you'll display each image twice, but sometimes once. At 70, you'll show a new image most of the time, but sometimes you'll show the same image twice. Seems to me, if you wanted to induce microstutters on purpose, you'd tune your machine to run at exactly 60fps. Which I think is what's happening to a lot of people who have high performance GPU's. If that's the boat you're in, there are three options turn down your settings and try to get as close to 90fps as you can. More is better. turn up your settings and try to get as close to 45fps as you can. But no less, under any circumstances. run your headset at 60hz Which I suspect is why we have the option to run the headset at 60hz.

The old clouds had bad albeit somewhat amusing artifacts and didn't look like clouds. New clouds are gorgeous. I expect the will iron out the pixelation, meanwhile I'd say it's been an outstanding quality of life improvement and definitely adds a factor to game play

So, flying final bearing will kind of be like a cross wind landing, only without the wind. So I guess crabbing (pointing at the superstructure) may not work all that well, but a slip (right wing down, left rudder) should work the charm, no? @Zodiacc just to be clear, I'd follow the stack radial down to 15mi, than reset my course to final heading? Or just ignore course and fly the needles from there?

Call HP and tell them to send you a frickin cable. That's just basic trouble shooting, #3 after "is the computer plugged in" and "is the power on". Especially now that you've isolated the problem to usb, and proved that the USB port works.

CPU times seem a little high to me, no?

Or 60, I should have said, a lot of people really like 60 hz I tune to 20ms close to the ground on the Syria map. Up in the air I run a bit higher that but I don't notice the judder at those altitudes. That's close enough for PG and NTTR, maybe a little fast for Caucasus You don't want to be precisely 45 fps because of frame time variability, that's why 20ms works better for me ime than 22ms. And why the plain old eyeball is the final criteria That said if frame locking is working for you, that's awesome. You're still working a 20ms target and still have room for some eye candy

This is the part I was looking at # control how much the render resolution is lowered. The renderScale factor is # applied to both width and height. So if renderScale is set to 0.5 and you # have a resolution of 2000x2000 configured in SteamVR, the resulting render # resolution is 1000x1000. # NOTE: this is different from how render scale works in SteamVR! A SteamVR # render scale of 0.5 would be equivalent to renderScale 0.707 in this mod! renderScale: 0.9 It's more than a little confusing but clearly in OXR it scales linearly... all makes sense now