Chapa

@VirusAM: In the texture filtering LOD Bias (DX) setting you have probably set a positive value... you must set a NEGATIVE value.

Guys, here are some maths to explain why your PD/Super sampling settings looks amazing. First, PD or should we say Super sampling is be definition an antialiasing technique. As far as I know, it is the pendant of SSAA DCS setting but for VR. It is not totally exact to say that but it's an easy to understand vulgarisation: When you set SSAAx2 on a monitor, your GPU will render an image wit the double the monitor resolution and then downscale it to the monitor resolution with the benefit to have reduce aliasing. So, for example, if you set SSAAx4 with a 1080p monitor, it will render a 4k image and then downscale it to the native resolution of the monitor 1080p. Doubling the resolution imply to multiple by 4 the number of pixels, so the SSAAx4 and not SSAAx2. All that to say that PD is the same idea. ----- The Rift S has a native resolution of 1280x1440 per eyes, so a total resolution of 2560x1400 for a total of 3'686'400 pixels. A 4k monitor has a resolution of 3840x2160, so a total of 8'294'400 pixel Here are now the maths: [TABLE]PD Resolution per eye Number of pixels per eye Total number of pixels Multiplicator native resolution/ Equivalent SSAAx Multiplicator 4k resolution 0,8 1328x1424 1 891 072 3 782 144 1,03 0,46 0,9 1488X1600 2 380 800 4 761 600 1,29 0,57 1,0 1648x1776 2 926 848 5 853 696 1,59 0,71 1,1 1824x1952 3 560 448 7 120 896 1,93 0,86 1,2 1984x2128 4 221 952 8 443 904 2,29 1,02 1,3 2144x2304 4 939 776 9 879 552 2,68 1,19 1,4 2320x2480 5 753 600 11 507 200 3,12 1,39 1,5 2480X2656 6 586 880 13 173 760 3,57 1,59 1,6 2640x2848 7 518 720 15 037 440 4,08 1,81 [/TABLE] The resolutions per eyes have been obtained by using the HUD provided by the Oculus Debug Tool and the PD corresponds to the DCS PD setting. In reality, the true HMD PD is sometimes for example 0.91 instead of 0.9 as indicated by the DCS cursor... As you can see, a PD of 0.8 is about near the native resolution of the Rift S. Interestingly, a PD of 1.2 is the equivalent of SSAAx2 and PD of 1.6 is equivalent of SSAAx4. PD has for effect to improve clarity and reduce aliasing and shimmering. If you play at PD1.3+ and are happy with that, there is really no advantage to run the settings proposed in this post. This post is for people that want good clarity but can't afford so high PD for some reasons: want to play always at 80Hz, GPU not strong enough, HMD with high native resolution, etc... With the proposed settings: Negative LOD Bias, it is possible to have the same clarity at PD 1.0/1.1 than 1.4/1.5 but of course without the nice antialiasing and shimerring provided by the so strong but costly PD settings

I am not aware of steam VR settings that could be profitable for a Rifts S that are not natively included in DCS VR tab settings. Keep it simple would be my advice, choice 1. For the story, when I choice my HMD, native support of Oculus in DCS and to be able to avoid to Steam VR was a strong argument. Lower the number of software layers, lower the numbers of settings, bugs, headaches....

I agree with you Wicked, Sparse Grid is not the way to go... Not worth the 0.1 PD it cost at the end for less... For info, SSAA has not effect (or I am not able to see it). I also think that he set positive LOD Bias. The importance is that he is happy with his stuff and settings. Concerning Confusius, he will be happy to know that I am a patriot and the important thing is to have the settings ready for the release of the JF17.

@Wicked: It appears that we are all converging toward a LOD Bias near -0.5 It the old days of DX 9, there was a rule saying that : LOD -0.5 for Sparse Grid x2 LOD -1.0 for Sparse Grid x4 LOD -1.5 for Sparse Grid x8 this criteria was driven by a mathemical formula with a log, so just to say it was something more complicated than a rule of thumb formula. I am playing from yesterday with the Sparse Grid x2 settings but to be honest, I don’t really know if sparse grid really improve the result instead MODE REPLAY ALL... However, LOD bias of -0.5 with minimum -0.75 seems to be the sweet spots to not induce tons of shimmering

I will try your settings because I always read that DCS SSAA is for monitor only. I have a rig similar to yours and it is clear that a PD of 1.3 tend to activate AWS most of the time. The settings proposed in this thread is more fore people wanting to play at 80Hz but with good clarity at the cost of some aliasing and shimmering. With a Rift S, a 1080ti and AWS on it is possible to have near perfect view. Until you chase a warbird and you see 4 times the plane because the gosthing effect induced by AWS and you have hard time to know if it is an ally or not (not easy for me at least). A PD of 1.2 is about the same number of pixels than a 4k screen, 1.4 is more than 11 million pixels and sometimes I read people playing with PD at 1.7. It can works with AWS but each time I try, seduced by the nice picture, I am hit by the hard reality that my 1080ti is tired or too lazy... but I will try your settings. Thanks you for the alternative and feedback

@lange: for the connector you need a Sata to Molex converter. I know it would be better to have one with the good controller and already the SATA connector as you wish but you have now at least one solution

The F-16 has performance issue in VR. Don't use this plane to tune your settings. And being on ground is not a good idea because there are a lot of lack of optimisation. Try to totally disable all the shadows because on ground shadows kills the FPS... It is really annoying and I post yesterday in the wish list forum the suggestion to add a shadow (cockpit only) setting to improve the situation. I suspect you are experiencing it :)

Not a good idea... Asmedia controller. Not surprising it is USB 3.1gen2 ports... As a hint, cards with USB type-C will have most of the time ASMEDIA controller. Try this one, you are in Belgium so it is probably possible to obtain it: https://www.exsys.ch/de/pcie-karten/usb-3.0/standard/pcie-usb-3.0-karte-2-ports-renesas1.html

@Lange: Sorry to hear all the issues you encountered. Very important !!!! : buy a PCIe card with power provided directly from the PC alimentation. Power provided by the PCIe port can not be enough to cover the needs of the Rift S in all situation. For info, I bought this card : Exsys EX-11092-2 The card has a jumper to decide if you want Power from PCIe or from PC Alimentation. By default it is set for PCIe port, so it has to be moved. My motherboard is an Asus Rog Strix Z370 egaming and I can garantee it is compatible with it. However cards with VIA controllers are not (or at least the model I tried first)

Personnaly, today, having a USB port on my GPU would be a pre-requisite. Why ? Because my 1080ti don't have one and I had some headaches to understand why I needed often to unplug and plug again the Rift to be able to play... And when I learnt that it could be caused by the USB bandwith shared by multiple devices, It was not so easy to find a compatible PCIe USB cards with my motherboard and the need of the Rift S. However, it doesn't mean that it's not possible to have a working Rift S with no USB port on your GPU. To have no issue, your Rift must have its own USB controller with all the bandwith dedicated to him. Good news, your motherboard have many USB controllers. Check the manual but if you are able to isolate one of them for your Rift, it will be probably OK and everything will works fine. If not possible, you will have to buy a PCIe USB 3.1gen1 card. Warning: Don't buy card with USB 3.1gen 2 port because they often use ASMEDIA controller and it is well known that this controller create stutters.... It seems that Renesas µPD720201 controller works well. Oculus suggest one card with this controller. I bought another card with this controller and it works perfectly now. But for sure, if you are able to cancel you order and find another GPU, it could be safer and good idea

Try other planes, if the issue is the same, you have probably some tuning to do but... my opinion is that the F-16 is not VR ready. I have clearly a noticeable drop in FPS with this plane and only this one (Ok MiG-21 also but less). I have most of all the planes and it is clear that if I would fly seriously the 16, I will have to drop some settings to recover the FPS somewhere. All that to say that don't use the F-16 to tune your settings and check after being happy with them, how the F16 feel... and adjust ;)

I don’t know the Index and if it has some similar feature than AWS for the Rift (reprojection maybe ?). The fact you are saying that the watery effect occurs on ground let me think it is an artifact caused by something triggering when the charge on the GPU increases. My advice to track it would be to put all DCS settings to low first. Keep only Texture: High, your PD setting (decrease it a little bit could be good for testing) and the Inspector settings at they are now. If it disappear, it means that it could be: 1) some DCS settings 2) because you have free resources, the AWS like system don’t trig and no more artifact. To be sure, then increase a lot the PD setting. It will force its activation and see the problem occurs again. If it occurs, it means that the watery effect is caused by the AWS/reprojection process

Yes Wicked the transparency Sparse Grid Supersampling antialiasing works. It even cost at least 30 FPS. I am speaking about other AA settings in Inspector: AA Mode that should override the MSAA setting in DCS. In fact we are lucky that the transparency setting works For sure, it is not placebo effect you are seeing

@Voight: Thanks you for your feedback. Effectively, we should say which plane we use to compare our settings because there are specific optimisation for VR to reduce bad effect like shimmering. (For example, adding around all textures a layer of full transparent pixels to reduce Aliasing). In my case, I test with Huey, P51 and F18. I bought yesterday the MiG21 and also noticed that shimmering is more noticeable in this plane and I pretty sure that I will reconsider my settings if I focus on this plane. Concerning the AA settings in Nvidia Inspector, from my experience, they are not taken into account in DCS. One simple test is to select the more costly AA in Inspector, run DCS in no VR mode and see that the FPS is exactly the same than with just MSAAx2 or no MSAA. But if you have really the feeling that some AA settings works, please share with us your settings because it is a debate on other thread with nobody being able to prove it works. At the time of DX9, the idea to improve some games was in a nutshell to: 1) Add negative LOD bias to increase sharpness but also shimmering unfortunately 2) Add transparency Sparse Grid SSAA to remove shimmering 3) Enhence/Override the application AA settings by adding MSSA from the Inspector with the same multiplicator than the Sparse Grid AA to remove the blur induced by the whole process As you can see, surprisingly, the steps 1),2) is what we did. Keeping the LOD Bias Driver to On allow the driver to apply negative LOD bias. But because applying AA settings from the inspector seems to have no impact we can’t test the full approach . P.S the AA settings that has no impact I am speaking about would be: AA mode. I tried to pair it with enhence and override application and try to apply the AA compatibility DX1x flags (all the possible combinations) with no success. P.S.2 However FXAA works and have impact on the monitor. But in the HMD... I am not convinced FXAA works

@Wicked: I would like to thank you warmly, Wicked, to have share your settings and offer the opportunity to investigate about it. I was already very happy with my Rift S but now it just a lot better. And there is no placebo effect :)

After some investigations about the meaning and history about the settings in NVidia Inspector (and some performances issues), the following settings seems to do the job well: - Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling: AA_MODE_REPLAY_MODE_ALL - Texture filtring - Driver Controlled LOD Bias: Off (very important to set to Off to force the LOD bias setting below) - Texture filtring - LOD Bias (DX): -0.625 - Texture filtring - LOD Bias (OGL): +0.000 - Texture filtring - Negative LOD Bias: Allow MSAAx2 is counterproductive for clarity. It blurs a lot the picture... (but remove aliasing for sure) So, I put MSAA to Off and added some PD at 1.1 (sweet spot for my 1080ti to stay at 80Hz and have some margin) The gain in clarity is huge and the counterpart acceptable for me

If you followed my advice by setting the 8x Sparse Grid Supersampling, it effectively tax a lot on performances. I did know when I wrote my post but I did some measures this afternoon and I discovered that this setting cost (all other things equal) about 30 FPS. These tests was done in no VR mode. Using 2x Sparse Grid SS doesn't change a lot the cost but reduce the effect, so I think the All-in is the best choice. Now, here is the dilemna: As suggested in the picture page 3, you can go with the setting AA_MODE_REPLAY_MODE_ALL and a negative LOD Bias (DX). My test didn't show any cost in FPS for that. But the price to pay is in shimmering. Applying negative LOD Bias increase the shimmering. Personnaly, I find shimmering as annoying as ghosting effect and I decided to stay with the Sparse Grid SS setting. I don't see now any reason to increase the PD for clarity and prefere to reduce at 1.0 or even 0.9 to increase other settings and stay at 80Hz. If you go with the AA_MODE_REPLAY_MODE_ALL setting, I found that a LOD Bias of -0.5 was good enough and do not introduce exagerated amount of shimmering. All of that tends to prove that it exists or will exist solutions to have good clarity without the need of the brute force solution called Pixel Density.

Hi, the ED Teams, First of all, thanks all for your amazing work. I recently discovered DCS but I am really impressed and have already spent a tons of money for very good stuff and started to play VR. Waow !!!! My wish would be to have more granular graphic settings in general but to keep my wish focussed, it would be more granularity about shadows : At least, we should have: 1) Cockpit shadows: Off|Flat|Low|Medium|High 2) Vehicules/Planes shadows: Off|Flat|Low|Medium|High 3) Terrain shadows: Off|Flat|Low|Medium|High Today, the 1) and 2) categories are merged and it is the issue, specially in VR. Cockpit shadows (when airborn) don't have a huge impact on FPS but as soon as there are other planes (on the ground), the FPS drops drasticly. To play in VR at native frequency, without AWS, shadows are the big ennemi. It could be solved by the proposed granularity. A cockpit without shadows are not as immersive as it could be. Vehicules and terrain shadows are more nice to have visual suggar and I am pretty sure that people prefer to set more essential settings like MSAA, Distance View, Pixel Density that are not so easy to handle well. I hope it will be possible to have this feature implemented. Thanks again for all the work and pleasure provided !!! Best regards, Chapa P.S I want to precise that I have found acceptable compromise to play with a Rift S at 80Hz, I have spent hours and hours to tune and understand the settings in DCS but also in NVidia Inspector. For some reason, vehicules/planes shadows kills the FPS and I tend to think it could be avoided , with the result to have cockpit shadows with AWS Off, even on the ground.

Yes, these settings have definitively positive impact with Rift S. However, I have better results with: - Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling: 8x Sparse Grid Supersampling - Texture filtring - Driver Controlled LOD Bias: On - Texture filtring - LOD Bias (DX): +0.000 / Automatic - Texture filtring - LOD Bias (OGL): +0.000 - Texture filtring - Negative LOD Bias: Allow I have also set the following anisotropic filtering settings and disable the AF in DCS (nvidia settings are taken into account): - Anisotropic filtering mode: User-defined/Off - Anisotropic filtering setting: 16x The 16x AF from Nvidia inspector is better than the 16x provided by DCS. And finally MSAAx2 in DCS settings. With these settings it start to make no sense to use VR supersampling at all. PD 1.2 stay better than PD 1 but.... with the transparency supersampling settings, it is at least as clear as it was with PD 1.4 or more without... At this point, using PD to reduce aliasing becomes very costly in performances. Even PD 0.9 becomes acceptable for my point oof view (note that I want to play at 80Hz so I accept some compromises). P.S. The new nvidia drivers from today or yesterday add support for sharpening to OpenGL and Vulkan. We will probably have good news for VR in futur driver release.

The 1080ti has alteady hard time to handle the latest HMDs. I don’t think that you can expect even a 2080ti to be able to handle well the future HMDs but if there is a card that could, it is this one at the moment. I would not buy a new GPU without knowing the HMD that will go with it. In your place, I would postpone the GPU buy when you decide to change your CV1 or buy the cheapest GPU that match the best your CV1 (to play at 90Hz)

I have a setup quiet similar to yours and I also started by the setup proposed in the link you provide. Honestly, after spending few days to try the settings, understand their impact and experiment how bad AWS can be, I don't recommend to follow this link... The goal is clearly to play at 80Hz and to accept that during taxi, take-off and landing to have ASW on but depending the scene, not always... First, your SS is way too high. Just to have an idea, a SS of 1.4 feed the GPU with more than 11'000'000 pixels, it is 1.4x the number of pixel of a 4K screen. I found the sweet spot to be 1.2 with my 1080ti. And I easily believe it is 1.3 for a 2080ti. For info I don't use Oculus Tray Tool because the same issues you describe and the PD setting in DCS is exactly the same because it is a native implementation of the Occulus SDK behind. In DCS with the ctrl + num pad keys you can change the ASW mode so you have everything included, except the HUDs for monitoring your FPS but you can use the oculus debug tool in the oculus support installation folder. Important note, changing the MSAA setting require to quit and relaunch DCS to take effect, even if the game don't ask for. I lost a lot of time, thinking that this setting didn't have real impact and was a placebo. But It has a nice impact but also on performances. For me the mandatory settings are: PD 1.2 Texture: High (nice cockpit first) MSAAx2 (to reduce aliasing and shimmering) Filter Anisotropic x 16 (I find it to much important to accept comprise and it don't tax to much the system) Terrain shadows: OFF (not worth the price in perf) Global illumination: OFF (not worth the price in perf) Then I start the optimization with all the setting at the lowest possible value. And increase at much as possible the ones that are the most important for me. Overall, it is a trade-off between Distance view and Shadows to keep the 80Hz. Last but not least, I found that the following setting in the Nvidia control panel gives clearer image: Filtering quality : Best performance (yes best performance, try it!) Sorry for the long post and the approximative English. Hope it will help you to find your settings but I think you are not far.

Thanks you for the info and the link. You are right the Anton has also the same behavior with AWS on. I also use the Rift S with AWS disabled because the ghosting effect in genera. I prefer to reduce some graphical settings and have stable 80Hz.

The base comes from factory with the soft springs and cams (with a bump) mounted. I changed both. The other cams in package don’t have the bumb and it gives a more continuous movement feeling when you cross the center (no bumb). However, the cam change will not solve the issue, I just find the feeling more natural with TM sticks and I think it is more adapted to their weight, especially after setting 5 deadzone on both axis. Imagine that your plane will start to move only when you will feel resistance from the stick. Here is a video explaining how to change the cams: and here some other Virpil tutorials that could interest you: P.S don’t be sorry to ask question ;)

I use the TM F18 stick with the WarBRD base and the hard springs and no center cams. I put 5 deadzone for pitch and roll to solve the issue you describe. Alternative is to increase the deadzone in the VPC software that is set at 2 or 3 by default, probably adapted for the VPC sticks height/weight.