DeltaMike

I dunno about 1080ti. I've bought a fair number of used GPU's and you do get the occasional dud, and good luck getting money back from ebay. Plus the 6700XT is getting close to that price range, as is the 3060ti, either of which could be pressed into service depending on the HMD and how much you enjoy tinkering with things. Don't get too excited about used HMD's either. Believe it or not it takes a lot of horsepower to make a Rift look decent in DCS. Rift S is very efficient, meaning it doesn't take much to make it playable, but a) it's not gonna cost much less than a Quest 2 and b) I still don't think you have enough, I could just barely run the thing with a Vega 56. I like the idea of a Quest 2 though. You can play Beat Sabre to your heart's content while you trying to figure out a way to sneak a new GPU into the house. Shouldn't be difficult to drive with a sub-$1000 GPU to give a decent experience in DCS. In contrast, the G2 is a niche product. Granted, DCS is pretty much the niche but still. It's a PIA even with optimal hardware, and a massive PIA without. It's also at the end of its life cycle, the new generation of HMD's are in the hands of early adapters as we speak. I wouldn't buy a G2 hoping you'll be able to drive it someday; when someday comes there will be MUCH better headsets available.

Yeah so in OpenXR Tools for WMR I set motion reprojection "always on" and have been messing around with OpenXR Toolkit Companion App I've been trying "unlocked" vs locking at 45 or 30. Nothing to scream about but it's not as horrible as I thought. Looking at my frame rates, when I'm on Caucasus, where I know I can maintain >50fps all the time, when I lock it at 45 or 30 that's the FPS I show regardless of which counter I'm using iirc. (Today was using the DCS counter). When I set OXRTK to "unlocked," I keep getting odd numbers. 28, etc. Which suggests to me it's flipping around between 22.5 and 45. Which can't be helping. Interesting and all but still leaning toward just turning it off. Needs to be put back in the oven for a little while imo. RE shimmering, it's still there somewhat, but ground targets are an order of magnitude more stable and easier to identify. You know how I am about spotting my targets. (Nice also when things like buildings and bridges are sitting still instead of doing the worm dance.) The remaining shimmering I see looking out over a city, I just pretend it's a hot day and roll with it. Also I'm digging the color and contrast adjustments. Between that, and the reduction in shimmering, I don't miss ReShade. I sympathize with people who say, "I just wanna run DCS without any mods or hacks" but the thing is, WMR4SVR is kind of a hack. Installing OpenXR isn't any harder or any more steps.

Ah. GPU was out of tune. Adrenaline has a tendency to do that sometimes. Now it's doing something. Thanks Still think I get better results locking it in OXRTK. Maybe. Kinda surprised locking it at 30 really doesn't look half bad. Happened to run my "shimmering" track on caucasus for this test. You know shimmering is substantially better in OXR for some reason. Ground targets are much better defined. Substantially better and I'm running no AA.

RE motion reprojection Have come to the conclusion that "Auto" has a fine placebo effect with virtually no cost (my favorite kind of placebo; sadly, one hard to come by). Am considerably less sanguine about "always on." Did testing yesterday on NTTR and Marianas, I guess the latter isn't really a fair test. Even in NTTR it doesn't seem to be doing anything to reduce judder on the 3-9 line. If I turn shadows on, I'm in the 30's low over the city sometimes. Suspect I'm jumping back and forth between 30 and 45 most of the time, which doesn't exactly smooth things out. If I turn shadows off, I'm typically 55-62fps and frankly that looks as good to me as 45fps with repro on. Not sure it's worth further messing-with until the algo is updated... thoughts?

Keep in mind most of your graphics settings affect CPU at least as much as GPU. On an empty Caucasus map, OXR tempts you to dial it up. Vis range! Shadows! Lions and tigers and bears! Then you gag as soon as you get into MP. Gotta turn right back around and dial that stuff back down again. Start with vis range, medium should be plenty. Trees to match. Bye bye grass and shadows and clouds. About the only thing you won't have to change is resolution, MSAA and maybe AF. One way of looking at it is, OXR allows you make more pixels. How you use em is up to you.

Hm. Either motion smoothing isn't working at all with the Toolkit enabled, or it's working extraordinarily well. Can't quite decide. Suspect the former. Got myself kinda dizzy today. With motion smoothing off, and not using anything in Toolkit other than color and contrast, there's a remarkable sensation of speed. I think it might be a latency thing. So, my brain isn't saying "huh nice video game" it's saying "waaaaaaaaaaah SLOW DOWN" (and I'm like, I ain't slowing down for nobody)

Interestingly 6900XT seems a smidge better than the 3080 when tested head to head in DCS, with the G2 anyway. Now, the 3080ti.... that's a nice looking GPU. Wish they were around at today's prices a few months ago. AMD can't touch that

Dunno about 3070ti for VR. Depends on the headset. Almost certainly not enough for G2 without mods. It is possible to get even a 3070 running but it's rather complicated. 3080 or better should work right out of the box, 6800 or 6900XT with a bit of tuning

Cuz I wanted it all. For a while there I was using SMAA, plus lumasharpen, plus either curves or HDR. The three together was adding just a little too many milliseconds. VR Toolkit is almost as good and was almost free (it cost me like 1.3ms or so). Yeah me and SVR, we've decided maybe we should start seeing other people. We are still friends though. I personally did not have ANY issues with OpenXR, its the only thing I've ever done in VR that worked on the first try. Others have had markedly different experiences though. This is a very active area of research and it seems things change weekly. They've had FSR/NIS integration, last I heard it wasn't working very well. They've also added color/contrast adjustments which I plan to play around with shortly. So, no more VRPerfkit and no more ReShade but that functionality is being developed in OpenXR Some (myself included) have convinced themselves the shimmering isn't as bad in OpenXR. I dunno. Trying to ignore it. Many have reported OpenXR gave em enough extra overhead to where they could slip in some AA without bogging things down. I'm still skeptical about undersampling just so you can run MSAA but OpenXR may give you a little extra room running at native resolution. So you could try supersampling (I've only heard from one player doing that) or MSAA (a bunch of people are doing that) If you're interested in OpenXR, find the thread and read the first post, it's up-to-the-minute. You literally have to read every sentence, and do exactly what the instructions say. If you're not up for all that drama -- like I said, if your HMD is working fine and you really don't want to mess with it -- VRTK is like pressing the easy button.

Correct. I did use the VR Toolkit effect in ReShade 5 with those settings. Not any more. I have a very short attention span. Presently fiddling with color/contrast settings in the OpenXR Toolkit. So now there's three "toolkits" to keep straight. Not to confuse OpenXR "tools" with OpenXR "toolkit"

Solves one problem, causes another. If you are mainly interested in high-performance TV's, you would use the term "judder" to describe a mismatch between FPS of the source material and monitor refresh rate. Locking FPS to some multiple of refresh rate solves that problem. If you're mainly interested in cinematography, you would use the term "judder" to refer to the stroboscopic effect that comes from panning a camera that's operating at an absurdly low FPS (usually 24fps in movies). In DCS, locking FPS at... well, anything can result in that kind of judder, which is most obvious looking out your 3-9 line, especially at high speed, low to the ground. You notice it at any altitude when doing a barrel roll. Motion reprojection gets rid of both -- it locks your FPS at some multiple of refresh rate, and uses synthetic frames to boost you up to 90hz or whatever. Only question is, can you stand the artifacts. Thus, three options Motion reprojection Fixed frame rate and live with one kind of judder (ie doing barrel rolls) Floating frame rate and live with the other kind of judder (in which your HMD runs like a Harley, basically) You just gotta figure out which one drives you the least bonkers The deal with OXR is, we think the interface between WMR and SVR is introducing a lot of stuttering. Where I would define "stutter" as "dropped frames." How well it works seems to depend; as one poster observed, may depend a lot on what GPU you're running. The 2080 is an interesting beast. At least one observer suggested it doesn't handle textures very well in DCS; so in other words, if you can back off on textures a bit you may be able to unlock a lot of performance. ETA: If you can consistently hold 60fps a) well done! and b) might consider setting your G2 to 60Hz. If you can stand the flickering

Reshade is reshade, the new versions (5.0+) work natively in SVR. Same circus, different tent. VR Performance Toolkit is a scaling mod. It allows you to reduce the number of pixels you're rendering, without screwing up your image too much. Your FPS will go up, but it will increase or worsen shimmering. Anything having to do with ReShade -- including the confusingly-named "VR Toolkit" -- is a collection of post-processing effects that may pretty up your image, but it's going to cost you performance. Some effects will increase shimmering, some may reduce it (a little) So what are we trying to accomplish here? Can you drive your HMD at native resolution? So in other words, if your Pixel Density is 1.0 and Resolution is 100%, are you getting more than 45fps on average? If not, I have bad news for you -- there is no good solution to shimmering. If you can drive your HMD at native resolution, and have a little GPU overhead to work with --- I have bad news for you. There's no good solution to shimmering. To reduce shimmering you're basically looking at anti-aliasing. Here are your options: Supersampling. So in other words, run your pixel density up to 1.4, or your Steam/Oculus resolution to 200%. This has some advantages, and will help shimmering some, but it's very GPU-intensive. Most people don't have enough horsepower to do this. MSAA. Ditto, although I think it's a bit more effective at softening up the image, than plain old supersampling. For reasons that aren't at all clear to me. DCS has kind of a weird implementation of MSAA. Which works I guess, if you have the juice FXAA. This is included in ReShade. Very inexpensive and it does something at least to reduce (not eliminate) shimmering. Reduces spotting distance. SMAA. Also included in ReShade. Most ReShade users feel this is the superior anti-aliasing effect and I do go through my moments where I like it some. Reshade actually has several effects that might reduce shimmering, you just have to mess around with em. It's hours of fun. Seriously. VR Toolkit is a ReShade "effect" that actually applies several effects in one pass FXAA Color/contrast Sharpening Super-efficient, a well implemented effect. Worth the price of admission all by itself. Note, sharpening filters tend to increase shimmering. So if you're mainly trying to soften up your image, go easy on the sharpening filters. ------------------- I don't think anti-aliasing is all that great an idea if you can't drive your HMD at native resolution to begin with. Some people seem to like using a scaling algo like VR Performance Toolkit, which increases shimmering, and then lay on a bunch of MSAA, which reduces shimmering. Resulting in what looks to me like a blurry mess, although YMMV (ie you might like a "soft" image) If you're running a WMR headset, and you're right on the edge, you might check into the OpenXR mod, which may buy you enough performance headroom to try some MSAA at least (ReShade won't work with OpenXR). The best advice I can give you on shimmering is, to try to ignore it. Now, if what you're saying is, "I have a G2 and it's running fine, I just want to pretty up the image a little" then I think ReShade's VR Toolkit is what you want. Install ReShade 5.x.x Fire up DCS in VR Pull up your SVR console (right hand controller menu button) Click on your new ReShade icon on the toolbar Check "VR Toolkit" Check on "Performance Mode" Enjoy Here are the settings I like: Circle radius 0.4 seems to work for my G2. Sharpening: I'm using CAS. Sliders generally to the left. 0.22 Contrast Adaptation 1.0 Sharpening Intensity 0.2 Contrast clamping. Color Correction: I'm using Contrast & Saturation, which is easy-peasy. Just adjust to your liking. Antialiasing: (FXAA). Settings taken from discussion in ReShade Forum 0.75 Subpix 0.16 Edge Detection Threshold 0.8 Darkness Threshold

I said "no" not because it wouldn't be cool -- it would -- but because I wouldn't want ED to stop development on something else just to implement FSR. FSR can be done after-the-fact, it could even be included in your GPU driver. AMD is making some moves in that direction already. It would be easy enough for Steam to implement it, heck the code is already written and available for download. What would be the advantage to native implementation? The primary benefit of which being, you can spare 2D overlays from the scaling algo. Which DCS doesn't have. Beyond that, one more knob to twiddle isn't going to reduce user error. The list of do's and don'ts with which we confront new WMR users is already intimidating enough as it is. Steam might do well to ditch the whole "resolution" fiasco and consider implementing FSR right out the gate. DCS? At the risk of sounding like Larry David... eeeeeeehhhhhh

^Although the settings do translate. Doing "A/B" tests in VR is a little cumbersome. So if you want, you can get things grossly tuned in flat-screen mode, then pop into VR to fine tune it. In VR: Start up the game. It'll work better if you're in a mission, hit "pause" Press the Menu button (three bars) on your RIGHT controller. This brings up the Steam VR console. Look for the ReShade icon on your toolbar, press that. Up pops the familiar ReShade menu. To enable an effect, click the check box next to the effect and then check "performance mode." To tweak the effect, uncheck "performance mode." To re-activate, check "performance mode" again. To turn off an effect, un-check it.

^Yes. That and a couple bucks will get you a coffee at Starbucks. To the extent we are agreeing that any VR headset short of the XTAL has lousy PPD, it's all good. Interesting discussion here with some slightly different calculations that make that old 640x480 monitor look like a champ compared with a Reverb G2. Of course when we gush about how sharp our reverb looks, we are comparing it to our old Rift headsets, not our 4K TV, much less our 4K monitor (for the reasons you describe). Which is fine. I don't spend a ton of time perusing the pancake-style sections of this forum, but it appears there is a vigorous discussion about spotting distance as a function of monitor resolution, with the people sporting 4K monitors complaining that it's more difficult to spot than with a 1080 monitor. As an object gets farther and farther away, it is rendered as a smaller and smaller model, until after a point it is rendered as a single pixel. The easier it is to pick out a single pixel in your monitor, the easier it is to spot something 20 miles away. In my experience, the G2 does a fine job of that. When the object is first displayed as a polygon, for reasons I don't fully understand, it's hard to get the pixel colors just right. The object tends to blend into the background. So, first you see it, then you don't, then you see it again. As you get closer, once you can actually see the polygon, how pixelated it appears does depend in part on PPD (examples here). So we could say that, these days anyway, spotting distance is OK in VR (haven't directly compared it to 1080, guess I should get on that) but still gripe that aircraft identification is a pain in the rear end (for example). With the next question being, does it matter in competition? I think probably not, as I mentioned at least in my experience getting stuff sorted isn't the biggest challenge, depends on what you're flying I guess. So in other words I haven't heard of a competition where you actually had to VID the bandit before you started spamming missiles, quite the opposite usually. I've been in training scenarios where VID was part of the game, but not in competition. Feel free to take this with a grain of salt, I'm pretty lousy at competition, I'm just saying I lived through this debate in real time and in the Rift S days it came down to "I like VR so that's what I'm gonna use" and it didn't seem to hurt the dudes who had real talent. The real game changer was datalink, which is why I mentioned the F16 displays. They can be a bit hard to read in VR. Haven't had a chance to check it out with my G2 yet, guess I should get on that, too. Regardless, a top notch Viper pilot with a functioning Track-IR setup might want to try before he buys. In the Hornet, eh pick your poison. I'm pretty sure the same amount of information is on your displays, just a question of how pretty it is, and whether you can or should "pretty it up."

I dont know about WMR but some of the scaling mods include a sharpening filter which helps text legibility. In my testing a modest amount of scaling, say with a Scale factor of 0.77 doesn't hurt spotting distance to a measurable extent. Using mods in competition runs the risk of being accused of cheating, justly or not. Good news is, you can't spend your way into the finals. A dude with a single monitor and home made track IR can dominate if he puts in the study and practice. Dude with a 3090 and a Pimax will get his fanny handed to him if he doesn't understand geometry and tactics, and doesn't know what his wingman's gonna do before the wingman himself knows it

That's the only way I've ever done it. I came along when the ldo response would have been "VR is fun and all but you must have trackIR for competition." Even so, the majority on our SATAL team flew Rift S, we made it to the finals and at the end of the season two of our team members were picked up by arguably one of the best teams out there. Mid season we transitioned from F15 to F16. Displays were harder to read but the game was still playable. In competition there's seldom any difficulty sorting targets. I only got team-killed once, in practice Comparing G2 with Rift S, spotting is an order of magnitude better and I'd bet money it's easier than with a 4k monitor. With caveats: full res and no msaa (or FXAA). Harder than it sounds, you'll need a 3080 at least. Displays just are what they are, they aren't rendered at particularly high res to begin with I don't think VR can be beat as an SA tool, and imo that counts in competition

PPD accounts for that. Pixels per degree.

Spotting is excellent; a/c identification, not so much. Not likely to be a big issue in competition. Pixels-per-degree is a function of physical pixel count, size of the monitor and how close you are to it. Even a 4k monitor is gonna look grainy at imax size, right on top of your eyeball. Your iPhone is 60ppd, G2 is 20.

Yeah. Trackclit and Snackview Pro is bare minimum imo

The "recce" button is actually a five way hat switch. It's a tiny delicate switch and it's not easy to get a clean center press but it's usable as a four way hat.

With a G2, pixels per degree is about the same as a 640x480 monitor. Good news is you get a big fat pixel for distance spotting. Bad news is, aircraft are kind of a pixelated mess until you get close. I don't have the neck range of motion I used to, hard to keep track of the bad guy after the merge. But, you can't beat the situational awareness overall. Especially at unusual attitudes. I don't see how you fly formation in flat screen. Shoot, I don't know how you land in flat screen, although I did it for years (poorly) before VR came along. Depending on the contest you might need to do either and you'll almost certainly want to keep track of your wingman if you can. I haven't checked the f16 mfds in the G2 yet, I used to fly the f16 with rift s, it's doable with a little practice. F18 mfds are fine. I'd say if you're sporting a G2 at native resolution and no anti aliasing VR has the potential to give you an edge. Plan on a 3080 or better to do that. We had one guy flying track ir, I remember several times it spazzed out on him and he had to reboot it. Not good. We made it to the finals in satal most of us in VR.

@Thanatos31 Nothing wrong with your CPU, your GPU is probably not gonna push G2 at native resolution using the standard setup. Up until recently the answer would have been undersampling but you should at least look at the openxr mod Still unclear why you're gagging on MP. You have a strong cpu. Maybe check background processes? How are your thermals.? Is your RAM running at the right speed?

If you read the instructions for manual uninstall it'll tell you which files you need to put in ovgme or the like Reshade doesn't scale. You might consider running native resolution and doing a pass with lumsharpen.

Ok let me make sure I have this straight -- The "developer tools" we get from the Microsoft store one really does one thing that's helpful: it turns on motion reprojection. The "tool kit" we download from GitHub has two tricks. It can do the fancy scaling routines, AND it allows the motion reprojection to float as low as 22.5 hz? Well worth the price imo