Rosebud47

I think it´s pretty ignorant immediately start complaing about a new feature, which was just presented to public in it´s first stage. The problem with SRS is, that you need to arrange to have it actively using, like teamspeak etc. I don´t use text messages when flying in VR, what makes it difficult to get in contact with other pilots on a server to at least arrange, if SRS is used and which frequency to set up the radio. With new VOIP in DCS this problem now is obsolete and you could get very easy in contact with other players on any server, especially in VR, where typing text messages into the keyboard while flying is a no-go. Don´t understand the complaints - you could still use SRS as long as setting up frequencies with new VOIP is not yet implemented.

Thanks for your advice to look into the 8 x Sparse grid Supersampling setting to balance the performance. After downloading today´s patch, I just followed the advices given in here and took a round with some jets. Didn´t looked before into graphics/performance for some time, but recently I´ve changed the new Latency setting to ´Ultra´ and prerendered VR images to 1, what maybe reduced the ghosting... can´t say, which setting does reduced the ghosting finally. For me the shimmering effects are the most annoying things in VR. With some thanks to Wicked too, it is very good, pointing out some opportunities to enhance the graphics for VR with Nvidia Inspector. Have to try out more different settings, to see what fits best for my VR. btw: as just downloaded the newest nvidia driver, I meanwhile got used to set in nvidia driver setting/ display / change resolution / there under point 3. set to nvidia colors and then set the dynamic spectrum to full ( see picture ). This improves the colors a bit.

Also thanks for this thread. Definetely looks better in the cockpit, but it is also more taxiing on performance at the moment... need to set down PD in DCS to balance. Don´t know, if it has come with today´s patch, the new Nvidia driver or the Inspector profile settings, but the ghosting effect is now significantly reduced on my side. When looking with external view ( F2 ) to the jet, and moving around the view, there is absolutely no ghosting effect anymore. Before there was always a ghosting effect visible depending on how fast you move the view around the plane.

The new Voice chat is great! Now, Betty and ATC is talking through the headphones instead of the 2.1 Soundsystem - feels so much better. Even Wags talks in the Quickflightmissions through the headphones. Now, that´s a reason to enjoy Multiplayer Server again. Thanks ED! Perfect addition to DCS, especially for the use with VR!

...just being short in time for a long answer, but I´ve paid 832,74 $ for preorder the 8KX and Pimax just wrote me to open a ticket to get a refund of 100,- $, so it will be finally 732,74 $ for the 8KX. Edit: ... and I do hope, not to need buying another VR headset in the next 5 years.

Hi Hammer, like your videos independently from its content. The presentation, camera angles, cuts and music really make watching the videos a joy. It´s difficult to make people interest in the XTAL as its price tag is really out of reach for me and most people and therefore there´s not so much interest in the XTAL at all. Regarding the purpose of the videos to give an impression of the XTAL´s quality is also very difficult, as with all the through the lens videos made for any VR headset. The through the lens videos are always framed by the camera, what makes it difficult to perceive the distances, which you perceive in 3D virtual space. Therefore, when you´re going close to the object in focus, it will always appear very sharp with every VR headset, but in the videos the viewers miss, how close the VR headset was moved to frame an image with the iPhone camera. So, saying in short: through the lens videos are really difficult to get an impression of the quality, but the videos you make are definitely much more enjoyable, than any other through the lens videos of any other headset I saw on youtube so far. My question out of interest is: Is the XTAL running in permanent parallel mode? How does VR zoom in DCS work with the XTAL, are the images overlapping, when you use VR zoom? In aynway I share your happiness with this super expensive piece of hardware. No doubt about its superior quality. Some performance indications would also be interesting, like which graphical settings are you using and to which GPU-frametimes do they result ( "fpsVR" is a good tool to measure these ). This just to get an idea if there´s any advantage by more elaborated driver performance in conjunction with SteamVR.

Same with me as mentioned. Never flew without VR. Got a trackball left and one to the right, but try to use them only while being on the ground ( startup etc. ). Mapped gear, fuel probe, Antiskid to the same buttons on the HOTAS for every plane ( currently 2 ) and the others close in configuration to each other jet. Also orientating to map the switches close to the position in cockpit, like left console / right console. For interface with DCS using a small gaming keyboard, like refuel/rearm, comms menu, F10 map, F1 - F12, kneeboard, etc. p.p.

You´re right not to talk about 4k displays with the Pimax5k+. I know, that´s just marketing speech and not a real fact, so my fault taking it into argumentation. Talking about compromise between performance and budget with regard to VR headsets, was exactly the point I wanted to add in the way not to relate the performance/budget question to the VR headsets in the first place, as the headsets technically don´t have any influence on the performance, only on the demand of performance to get good graphical quality. I´ve upgraded some time ago from a 1080 to a 2080TI and the push in performance for DCS made a huge difference between unplayable ( with individual demands ) and well playable with some rare options to increase graphical fidelity. The price for the 2080Ti I would considered very much overpriced. Nvidia seems to follow in the last years a marketing strategy to let the customers pay for FPS instead for hardware. But looking back into the nvidia series it seems that with the flagship graphic card as an Ti edition, you could always live good for at least 2 generations of Nvidia graphics adapter. I hope it does not sound like a conspiracy theory, but I think, Nvidia releases every new graphics adapter while having in mind the exact product cycle for it, to sell to the same customer a new graphics adapter, when its product cycle is over. The blackfriday sales is surely a good opptounity to safe some money, but waiting for the next generation for the same product doesn´t make so much sense, as it will place you in front of the same performance/budget question as now - especially for the use of VR and its ongoing development in hard- and software and with this increasing demand for performant graphic adapters. What I would criticise on the Pimax 5k+ are it´s meanwhile (!) poor panels, which tend to create too much shimmering. The Valve Index´panels must be much better at this point, but I can´t go back to any smaller FOV than 160° :D HTC Vive was overpriced from the beginning and still is. Oculus did have a change in its marketing as they were bought by facebook and focused on the low end mass market. I guess the Odyssey+ will be about 299,- $ again on black friday, what is a pretty good deal for entering or upgrading from a CV1 or OG Vive. HP Reverb must be very good in visual quality - it has its price, but the narrow FOV and small sweetspot surely is a trade off. We don´t know yet much about the new 8KX or 8k+ with regard to performance with DCS. I will post some tests with DCS, when the 8KX arrives, but this happens soonest in February next year. Edit: price always matters

Well, being involved into internet gossip only seems to be an attractive alternative for discussions. :-)

I wouldn´t totally agree to this. First of all, you always read in the forums, that performance relates to the VR headset, to rate/unrate any VR headset. That is not the case, if you put it this way. You´ll never read any comment, which states, that 4k Flatscreens are badly rated, because they need more performance of the system to expose their fully potential of graphical brilliance in comparison to full HD flatscreens. Performance depends only on your system and the application you´re running on your visual device. It´s not, that I wanted to correct you´re statement, as you´re finally right by fact, but not in the way of presentation, I think. The presentation itself then leads to wrong assumptions regarding performance and VR headsets. Now, the P5k has some pretty nice advantages, but the problem with it, is a too blurry image resulting of its panel technology. It could be counteracted by supersampling, but this is an adjustment made by the application or software to enhance any application´s visual quality. The point in comparison to let´s say the HP Reverb is, that the panels are much more smaller in FOV, means the Reverb has got an higher PPI than the P5K, what results in better clarity and less observable blurryness, what then means you don´t have to put higher software adjustments, like supersampling or MSAA to reach the same visual quality on both compared VR headsets, what, if you do, surely results in a higher demand of performance needed for a 180° 4k display than for a 100° 4k display to perceive the same visual quality. It´s a matter of individual choice, perception and individual demand. In my personal opinion, the technolgy of VR headset are still in kind of development and what rejects most people from VR, respectively what needs to be solved by technology to bring VR headsets to an overall valued experience are: 1.) eliminate any screendoor effect by high resolution display technology ( resulting in more clarity / less blurryness ) 2.) reaching a more natural perception in VR by increasing horizontally and vertically field of view / increasing or eliminating the sweet spot of the lenses 3.) reaching higher refresh rates/ higher reaction time of the displays/panels to get a more smooth and natural image quality and counteract nausea. What we have today with each VR headset on the market is a trade of between one ore more of these issues, as the technology is not quite there, to solve all of these at once. The demand for performance comes more from the usual habits of a 3D shooter generation, which is blessed by being born lately and not have experienced the time, in which software was way ahead with potential graphical fidelity, than Monitors/flatscreens and CPUs/GPUs could provide to reach this potential. I would say we´re quite in the same situation with VR headsets at this time. We have to deal with trade offs. Which trade off it is, belongs to individual decision, but there´s none VR headsets at present time, which comes without trade offs ( not starting to speak of pricing ). I´m not very much in thinking of the forums as a competition to profile yourself as the greatest supernerd in the forum, so please simply take my post as one personal opinion on the topic only.

The gesture for the catapult start from a carrier is a really cool thing. What I am wondering about LeapMotion is, that they are active from the beginning of Rift and Vive in promoting their technology, raised million after million in funding, never showed anything more, than what you do with the software base technology and finally been sold to another company. Really hope, that with your ability and start working from scratch, you could bring the technology to a fully use for DCS one day. I think it´s more likely to fully use with a seated VR experience, determined by a virtual cockpit, where the stick and throttle, which every simmer got, could be used for calibration, than with a room scale VR experience. The LeapMotion / handtracking approach is much more likely to succeed over VR gloves simply because of the much more comfortability in practice use. Finally it´s a much more accurate hardware tracking system needed, than what we have today.

Your videos really look amazing. I don´t wanted to sound unrespectful for your work. Really hope that there could be invented some technology, like additional hand tracking cameras to be placed in the simpit to make handtracking much more accurate and to come over the limitations of the hardware providers with a handtracking-system attached to the headset only. If then the visualized hands in VR would be connected to the virtual pilot body and move with the pilot´s arms like with a ragdoll system, some dreams would come true.

Close to 2560 x 1440 but not less, better a little more.

I would think, there is no necessity to adjust the values in the profile.json manually. Also I couldn´t say, if your or mine setting would result in a better image quality/performance setting. If you would not have asked, I would not have touched the profile.json again, but anyway tried to proof for you if it is still working. the new Pitool version and frimware upgrade for the 5k+ did improve the rendered overhead in the way, that 10% of the masked rendered pixels are no longer rendered at all, which should result in some performance improvement. While increasing the pixel density in DCS or render resolution in SteamVR or Pitool must have a much bigger impact on performance and visual quality, than what we´ve tried to proof here with adjusting the outer FOV degree. With the old Pitool version I always got the feeling that the aspect ratio and with this the overhead in rendered pixels as shown in SteamVR is way off from 2560 x 1440. Beside this the aspect ratio and overhead changes with the 3 different FOVs ( large, normal, small ), but nobody could say, if with this only the masked area changes or if with a change of FOV the rendered pixels in the masked area changing too. I could live very good with current settings for the 5k+, without trying to adjust the profile.json and wait for the 8KX and then never care for image quality again :-)))

Yesn the option to check is something similar to "enable custom resolution" in the German SteamVR version. It was named "override" in a previous SteamVR version. Anyway, I´ve tested before I responded to your post recently. My profile.json looks as follows: { "Pimax P2 5K Formal" : { "color_brightness_0_rgb" : { "x" : 0, "y" : 0, "z" : 0 }, "color_brightness_1_rgb" : { "x" : 0, "y" : 0, "z" : 0 }, "color_contrast_0_rgb" : { "x" : 0, "y" : 0, "z" : 0 }, "color_contrast_1_rgb" : { "x" : 0, "y" : 0, "z" : 0 }, "display_timing_selection" : 0, "fov_level" : 1, "fov_outer_adjust_degree" : 5, "lens_separation" : 0.09089744091033936, "lens_separation_offset" : -2.374872520860549e-11, "lens_vertical_offset_0" : 0, "lens_vertical_offset_1" : 0 }, "dbg_asw_enable" : 1, "dbg_hidden_area_enable" : 0, "enable_foveated_rendering" : 0, "enable_pvr_home" : 0, "ipd" : 0.06496326625347137, "pixels_per_display_pixel_rate" : 1, "steamvr_use_native_fov" : 1, "support_vive_only_games" : 0 } With this I´m running SteamVR at 50% = 2568 x 1860 DCS PD 1.4, MSAA 2x, Pitool 1.0 render quality, Parallel Projection activated, normal FOV mode. It´s a good compromise for me at the moment as I´m more into learning the Tomcat and Viper, for what I need better visuals to identify the instruments etc. easily and don´t need performance over visual quality so much at the moment, as I would, when flying multiplayer on online server. I don´t think, that it is entirely your fault, that you couldn´t make it work on your system. Pitool acts very strange from time to time on my system. It is very much a work in progress application, I would say. Until today Pimax didn´t managed to register Pitool for Microsoft Windows, for that Microsoft Defender always recognizes Pitool as a virus software.. a bit annoying. But also Pitool often changes its setting without being motivated. From time to time the refresh rate changed from my set 90Hz to 64Hz or 72Hz and I got to reset it. Also parallel projection is sometimes, when I start the Windows, set off instead of being set on, liked I´d safed in last session. Also, at mine, Pitool never showed the new 120Hz mode, even I got the new version. Anyways, it does what I want, but I have to recheck many times the settings and reset them to my demands. *Sigh* ... it´s still very much beta software, maybe that could be the reason, why it does not work for you as for me.

You don´t have to pretend to be an expert, Willie Nelson, to have doubts, that with any of these techniques, in current stage of development, interacting with an Antiskid switch or uncage the HSI would work as you imagine. But surely I´m happy too, that some companies are in development for that.

Pimax interacts with Pitool as a driver and software configuration tool between SteamVR and the headset. They got an own module in development for handtracking, which might work quite well for grabbing a beachball or something similar of this size, but I got serious doubts, that any leap motion, handtracking or VR gloves work with the precision needed to properly interact with the DCS VR cockpits in this early stage of development of such technique.

Do you have checked ´Override´ in the SteamVR Video Tab? The other tab in SteamVR, where you could set DCS settings is for setting up different resolution profiles to different Steam Apps. With mine SteamVR DCS doesn´t even show in the pull-down-menu, as I don´t use the Steam DCS version. The setting under Video tab is a general setting for resolution, but it has to be checked ´Override´ to adjust the setting manually. The profile.json is located in c:\user\*username*\AppData\Local\Pimax\runtime\ @biggness Sally Huang from Pimax wrote, that they will start delivering the P8KX in January. I got mine ordered for totally 860,- $ including tax/VAT and shipment due to the backer upgrade path. Recently they wrote to refund another 100,- $, so it will be finally 760,- $ ... pretty fair I think.

Just had a quick look and it´s still working. I´m sorry, moespeeds, but forgot to mention, that the profile.json file should be set to write protected after editing, so it won´t load the default settings after reboot. So here some quick results: In regular, I´ve set the resolution to 48% = 2668 x 2276 in SteamVR/Video override Pitool normal FOV / render quality 1 ( or maybe 1.25, I have to look again, not sure atm :-) ) After editing the "FOV_outer_adjust_degree" : from default 10 to -2.32 ... setting write protection to the profile.json ... rebooting the system SteamVr now shows a render resolution of 6108 x 2276 @ 48%, 3944 x 1468 @ 12% I think with the new Pitool version some values changed and -2.32 is no longer the right value to get exactly the native display resolution. I´ll try later some more values, but would suggest to increase this value in small steps and observe the result in SteamVR ( need to be rebooted or shut down completely by windows application manager to have effect with fresh loading ). Jesus, I want to leave this stuff, until my 8KX arrives in February next year :-))) Edit: with "FOV_outer_adjust_degree" : set to 1 resulted in a resolution of 28xx X 1468 @20% in SteamVR, which increased the performance a lot, but decreased the visual quality as well a lot with "FOV_outer_adjust_degree" : set to 5 resulted in a resolution of 2588 x 1740 @28% ... very close to native 2560 x 1440 .. I guess some value between 3 and 4.5 will match the native resolution. render quality in Pitool is set to 1 in my config. Also it should be considered if it does make sense, if setting to native panel resolution, while having set the P5k+ to small or normal FOV instead of wide FOV.

Yes, that was my goal too, but not sure if it does counteract visual quality. Meanwhile not sure in the way, if the rendered pixel overhead could be reduced for the benefit of performance, but then the visual quality need to be balanced by supersampling for the cost of performance. With the new Pitool version and firmware, they have also managed to reduce the rendered pixel overhead for the headset, which should result in a performance gain of approx 10%. I, for me, decided to not touch the configuration files anymore and wait for Vulkan implementation in DCS to get better performance. It´s better to let the professionals do what is good for us.

Hi moespeed, didn´t look for long time into this. Things change, like SteamVR and Pitool by newer version more compatible to each other. If you like to test with the settings, try adding the line: "FOV_outer_adjust_degree" : -2.32 to the last section in the above noted profile.json and observe how it influences the given resolution in SteamVR under "Video". After editing, both, SteamVR and Pitool, should be restarted completely ( reboot the system ).

Hi Spectre, on how the issue appears, reminds me on some issues with Virtual Reality, like the disappearing clouds and contrails in VR, when they are in the center FOV and reappear when they are in the outer FOV. Some comparable graphical unnormalies experienced when the "single parse stereo" option in the graphics.lua was activated, but differently from the coulds and contrails issue, with "single parse stereo" the graphics disappeared only on the left outer FOV. Could you reproduce the problem on Monitor or with another VR headset? Maybe could help to enclose the issue.

same here...disturbing, but not a great issue. It´s definitely SteamVR related. Couldn´t find an option in SteamVR anymore, to deactivate the applications loading screen, while the application is not responding due to loading process.

The Motion Compensation option in Pitool is only meant for Simpits with a motion system. Try reinstalling Pitool, if problems appears. A good advise is to deactivate Windows AnitVirus protection for the Pitool reinstalling process.

It´s nothing serious, I would say. Looks like this new loading screen came up with one of last SteamVR updates. The flickering is a bit annoying, but appears while DCS is loading only. In one of former SteamVR versions, there was an option to deactivate the loading screen, while the app is not reacting, which has shown the SteamVR VR environment instead of the flickering loading screen of DCS.