VR Shaders mod for better VR experience

[speed-of-heat]

i'm on the same build ... what are the other mods you have installed ?

[DERacing]

just what I have in the pic I posted before. Nothing crazy. Just a vr menu of the F14 on the carrier, opening screen music... Thats mainly it.

 

 

I have disabled everything but the IC Pass and Clear Water and it is failing.

 

I know your busy and dont want to take up too much of your time. If it works it works and if not no biggy.

[zaelu]

Sorry I got confused. To enable bloom, should ENABLE_NO_BLOOM be set to 0 or 1?

 

:D It's a simple YES to a NO... So with 1 you activate the no...

[Hammer1-1]

isnt that like a double negative?

[speed-of-heat]

just what I have in the pic I posted before. Nothing crazy. Just a vr menu of the F14 on the carrier, opening screen music... Thats mainly it.

 

 

I have disabled everything but the IC Pass and Clear Water and it is failing.

 

I know your busy and dont want to take up too much of your time. If it works it works and if not no biggy.

 

Sorry not that I am busy, but, not sure what to do.

 

Is the red shield always up or is it on specific servers?

 

What worked for me, was uninstalling all mods, including shaders , then running repair, then re installing via ovgme just the shaders mod with masa and all shadows off. And mirrors off

[Quekel]

I also do a repair and clean after installing a patch, and then reapply it all after again.

Just make sure you have your skins/cockpit skins in your USERS/DCS folder.

[zaelu]

isnt that like a double negative?

 

No, it's like you negate a quote. It doesn't matter if it's an affirmation or negation. :D

 

 

=============

 

 

I tested with water shader removed from pack and the artefacts are gone 99.9%. Sometimes when you start viewing a flotilla they produce a strange patern of waves at first ... could be DCS here and from 10 000m alt you can see a strange reflection of the clouds in the water.

[DERacing]

Sorry not that I am busy, but, not sure what to do.

 

Is the red shield always up or is it on specific servers?

 

What worked for me, was uninstalling all mods, including shaders , then running repair, then re installing via ovgme just the shaders mod with masa and all shadows off. And mirrors off

 

 

Red shield is always up.

[speed-of-heat]

Then I would try uninstalling, and repairing

[Hammer1-1]

which one of these files tweaks the water? Im getting these weird graphics glitches that dont go away.

 

 

edit : nvm found it

Edited April 25, 2020 by Hammer1-1

[speed-of-heat]

Water.fx for future reference

[zaelu]

After a gazillion of testing I ended up with this config for my rig. Note that I have DCS World on a HDD drive which really ads to "the fun".

 

I don't have any AA added through the nvidia drivers as I found to be either a placebo or simply mirage. Nothing happens with any setting. 2x 4x 8x FXAA on/off MSAA... enhance or override... nothing! Waste of time! All I have forced in the drivers are high performance power setting and the optimizations on. No Vsync etc.

 

Simple shadows in Kegetys mod adds to little to the FPS while ruining the lighting in some aspects. Some flickers... and general appearance a bit dull. Same if you put Shadows bellow high... you get a bit more FPS but artefacts and flickering appear immediately. So High shaddows is a worth sacrifice.

The MSAA mask size is 0.4 as I really dislike that you can spot the aliasing on the sides so I keep it in a medium range.

 

Also I removed the Water shader from mod for glitches reasons.

 

 

#define ENABLE_HMD_MASK 1

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_SHADOWS 0

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_GRASS 0

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_CANOPY 1

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_HG 1

#define ENABLE_NO_BLOOM 0

 

// improvements

#define ENABLE_DITHERING 0

#define ENABLE_DIFFUSE_SS 4

#define NVG_GAIN_ADJUSTS_POSITION 0

 

// other settings

#define MASKSIZE 0.620

#define MSAA_MASKSIZE 0.4

#define NVG_SIZE 4.0

#define NVG_VERTICAL_OFFSET 0.07

#define NVG_NOISE_STR 0.075

#define NVG_HOTPIXEL_THRESHOLD 0.99982

 

Attached are my ingame settings and opinion about them. Emphasis on "opinion"... you know... everyone has one...

 

Also I run ASW OFF religiously. and 1.5 SS in OTT.

 

With these settings I have between 20 and 35 FPS, usually above 25 which I can tolerate.

Edited April 25, 2020 by zaelu

[speed-of-heat]

you are going to get super transparent water over rivers, its like the river is not there, try this water file which was leveraging this post from CaptYosi

water.zip

[imacken]

That water file certainly looks better, but the sea looks pretty weird at times in Caucasus and the lakes etc. in PG also look overly transparent.

 

As we have discussed before, I can't understand why removing the water file in this version of the mod doesn't preserve the original water. Oh well...

[CaptYosi]

That water file certainly looks better, but the sea looks pretty weird at times in Caucasus and the lakes etc. in PG also look overly transparent.

 

As we have discussed before, I can't understand why removing the water file in this version of the mod doesn't preserve the original water. Oh well...

 

 

It is clear that other mod files cause this effect keeping the original simulator file.

 

 

Now the question of which file / files cause it, I don't know. In its day I found a solution for the transparency of the rivers / lakes of the Caucasus, but it was by chance.

 

 

I have no programming knowledge so I worked using the trial and error technique. But I ended up losing my patience because there were endless tests to do, so they had stopped.

 

 

I know that the sea water is extremely transparent, but at a certain altitude it becomes bearable. At least I prefer it to how it looks, if I install the mod file, then it loses any transparency and looks too poor...

Edited April 26, 2020 by CaptYosi

[imacken]

I know that the sea water is extremely transparent, but at a certain altitude it becomes bearable. At least I prefer it to how it looks if I install the mod file, then it loses any transparency and looks too poor...

 

Agreed!

[speed-of-heat]

After a gazillion of testing I ended up with this config for my rig. Note that I have DCS World on a HDD drive which really ads to "the fun".

 

I don't have any AA added through the nvidia drivers as I found to be either a placebo or simply mirage. Nothing happens with any setting. 2x 4x 8x FXAA on/off MSAA... enhance or override... nothing! Waste of time! All I have forced in the drivers are high performance power setting and the optimizations on. No Vsync etc.

 

Simple shadows in Kegetys mod adds to little to the FPS while ruining the lighting in some aspects. Some flickers... and general appearance a bit dull. Same if you put Shadows bellow high... you get a bit more FPS but artefacts and flickering appear immediately. So High shaddows is a worth sacrifice.

The MSAA mask size is 0.4 as I really dislike that you can spot the aliasing on the sides so I keep it in a medium range.

 

Also I removed the Water shader from mod for glitches reasons.

 

 

#define ENABLE_HMD_MASK 1

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_SHADOWS 0

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_GRASS 0

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_CANOPY 1

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_HG 1

#define ENABLE_NO_BLOOM 0

 

// improvements

#define ENABLE_DITHERING 0

#define ENABLE_DIFFUSE_SS 4

#define NVG_GAIN_ADJUSTS_POSITION 0

 

// other settings

#define MASKSIZE 0.620

#define MSAA_MASKSIZE 0.4

#define NVG_SIZE 4.0

#define NVG_VERTICAL_OFFSET 0.07

#define NVG_NOISE_STR 0.075

#define NVG_HOTPIXEL_THRESHOLD 0.99982

 

Attached are my ingame settings and opinion about them. Emphasis on "opinion"... you know... everyone has one...

 

Also I run ASW OFF religiously. and 1.5 SS in OTT.

 

With these settings I have between 20 and 35 FPS, usually above 25 which I can tolerate.

 

So some opinion, some data, re the nature of acceptable i'm not going to touch it , thats down to each individual, but my observation is you seem to value quality over performance in terms of frame rates , i know i can't tolerate jumpy frame rates, you can so... as a result you have made some very different choices in terms of quality vs perf...

 

However, grass in particular is difficult to analyse unless you are very careful with your methodology:

 

1) you have to be somewhere where the dev's put grass

 

2) you have to leave the game and restart it before the effects of a change in the settings have an impact

 

if you follow that methodology you find something like a 2ms GPU frame time increase between Grass at 0 and 1500 (on 2.5.6) so up from 16ms to 18ms

 

(F-18 Instant action, Caucuses, Ready on the Ramp, taxi into the grass area straight ahead, look down and to the left)

 

now a 12-13% increase in frame may or may not make a practical difference to your personal performance will depend on the scenario conditions etc...

 

the same can also be said for global cockpit illumination about 1-2ms improvement by turning it off... but only if you restart your game... (i really don't like the grass effect either turns the ground into a shimmering mess)

 

so my guess is you are only measuring displayed FPS rather than GPU and CPU frame time, which makes me question your baselines and methodology. You also need to test across a variety of scenarios, but i would suggest you need to create a fast mission that you use , set every setting in the mission to high/max, as a way of getting a semi consistent frame work and then look at standard flight routes ore even tracks (more regular) to test certain performance regimes, for example trees and shadows and mirrors and grass interaction ... and so on. I would restart the game between each setting change , just because you really can't be sure which ones need it...

 

Trees was illuminating however and i will do some more testing with this, and you are right the difference between 75 and 100 seems to be margin on of error

Edited April 26, 2020 by speed-of-heat

[zaelu]

Yes, on my system the difference is minimum as the FPS is low so for example 25% might be just 5fps bu in a higher end system it could go to 25FPS and that is big.

 

The grass looks horrible in some settings. like shimmering dots... like old MSFS terrain textures used to look 20 years ago. But the filtering settings do make the grass look better. It's a combo of MSAA/AF/SuperSampling in OTT and the shadow settings in game.

In my observation shadows look good even on low, almos same quality with mid and high and with a bit better FPS but flickers tend to appear and those flickers on grass combined with the rest of things needed to be applied makes it look awful imho.

 

My Methodology is not perfect but I always load same mission and spawn/fly in same places and observe the FPS and "general" feeling". Sometimes at 20-25 FPS all feel fluid and sometimes is a jerky mess. So I choose between the two.

 

I always restart the game and delete FXO/Metashaders2 contents... a real fun time on a HDD :D

Edited April 26, 2020 by zaelu

[imacken]

 

Also I removed the Water shader from mod for glitches reasons.

 

If you are using the latest 2.5.6 version, don’t you have the transparent rivers/lakes issue?

[speed-of-heat]

Yes, on my system the difference is minimum as the FPS is low so for example 25% might be just 5fps bu in a higher end system it could go to 25FPS and that is big.

 

The grass looks horrible in some settings. like shimmering dots... like old MSFS terrain textures used to look 20 years ago. But the filtering settings do make the grass look better. It's a combo of MSAA/AF/SuperSampling in OTT and the shadow settings in game.

In my observation shadows look good even on low, almos same quality with mid and high and with a bit better FPS but flickers tend to appear and those flickers on grass combined with the rest of things needed to be applied makes it look awful imho.

 

My Methodology is not perfect but I always load same mission and spawn/fly in same places and observe the FPS and "general" feeling". Sometimes at 20-25 FPS all feel fluid and sometimes is a jerky mess. So I choose between the two.

 

I always restart the game and delete FXO/Metashaders2 contents... a real fun time on a HDD :D

 

so a couple of things i would suggest, dropping MSAA to x2 I would make sure your in game PD is set to 1 and I would also suggestion you drop your SS to 1 or 1.1 in OTT to offset some of this set your textures to 1024... YMMV but you should get consistently better frames (and more importantly frame times), if you can get to 40 on a rift-s and 45 on a WMR/Steam device you should consider turning on ASW... but at your current FPS there is no point.

[zaelu]

If you are using the latest 2.5.6 version, don’t you have the transparent rivers/lakes issue?

 

No, they are blue. I would say normal looking. But I think is a shader issue. You need to delete old compiled shaders so they are not used anymore.

 

so a couple of things i would suggest, dropping MSAA to x2 I would make sure your in game PD is set to 1 and I would also suggestion you drop your SS to 1 or 1.1 in OTT to offset some of this set your textures to 1024... YMMV but you should get consistently better frames (and more importantly frame times), if you can get to 40 on a rift-s and 45 on a WMR/Steam device you should consider turning on ASW... but at your current FPS there is no point.

 

I had MSAA 2x but at some point I've noticed little performance loss by an improvement in jagginess from aliasing so I switched to 4x. Also I always had 1.0 Pixel Density in game but I think I will start testing the differences between it and OTT. I want to see if OTT does a poor job at SS because there is still quite significant shimmering even if I test 2.0 SS in OTT (with the expected performance loss but just for testing).

 

How to you set textures to 1024? You mean the cockpit displays? Aren't those controlling just the HUD MFDs?

Edited April 26, 2020 by zaelu

[imacken]

No, they are blue. I would say normal looking. But I think is a shader issue. You need to delete old compiled shaders so they are not used anymore.

 

Hmm, I'm very interested in this.

 

Prior to the latest version of the mod, I didn't like the solid dark water that it produced, so I would just remove the water.fx before installing the mod. This no longer works for me and others in that lakes and rivers became totally transparent. This has been dicussed here several times.

 

Stuart (speed-of-heat) then edited the water.fx to mostly solve this issue. The effects are not perfect, and I would prefer to go back to the original water.

 

So, not sure how it works for you and not others including myself.

[speed-of-heat]

No, they are blue. I would say normal looking. But I think is a shader issue. You need to delete old compiled shaders so they are not used anymore.

 

 

if you fly in IA in the Hornet in caucus and fly over the river what do you see... i see it "end" abruptly as the transparent grass is revealed beneath the shallow part and then continue ... it works OK over deep water its the shallow that seems to cause the pain, like this:

 

 

and yes i deleted FXO and metashaders, are you just deleteing water.fx before you apply the mod?

 

 

 

I had MSAA 2x but at some point I've noticed little performance loss by an improvement in jagginess from aliasing so I switched to 4x. Also I always had 1.0 Pixel Density in game but I think I will start testing the differences between it and OTT. I want to see if OTT does a poor job at SS because there is still quite significant shimmering even if I test 2.0 SS in OTT (with the expected performance loss but just for testing).

 

How to you set textures to 1024? You mean the cockpit displays? Aren't those controlling just the HUD MFDs?

 

yes cockpit textures, which is why a lot of people turn up their super sampling and AA to get better visibility of the cockpit snd its displays and dials

Edited April 26, 2020 by speed-of-heat

[speed-of-heat]

 

 

#define ENABLE_HMD_MASK 1

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_SHADOWS 0

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_GRASS 0

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_CANOPY 1

#define ENABLE_SIMPLE_HG 1

#define ENABLE_NO_BLOOM 0

 

// improvements

#define ENABLE_DITHERING 0

#define ENABLE_DIFFUSE_SS 4

#define NVG_GAIN_ADJUSTS_POSITION 0

 

// other settings

#define MASKSIZE 0.620

#define MSAA_MASKSIZE 0.4

#define NVG_SIZE 4.0

#define NVG_VERTICAL_OFFSET 0.07

#define NVG_NOISE_STR 0.075

#define NVG_HOTPIXEL_THRESHOLD 0.99982

 

 

this setting also caught my attention when i looked at it more closely, it seems to almost entirely remove the edge effect, which means i can reduce the mask size for me down to 600 ...YMMV

[zaelu]

Ok, I can confirm that I also have that too transparent water "bug" without fixing the Water.fx but just deleting the moded file. I need to "fix" it.

 

Also I tested now with 1024 on every frame and I would say.... ads a liiiiilte bit of readability in cockpit.... I would say very little but visible. I checked by looking at the radio altimeter in F14 (straight to it from normal zoom, that means NOT zoomed in).

 

Also I disabled SS in OTT and just went to 1.5 PD in game and performance looks better at same multiplier. Are they on parity the ingame and OTT, meaning 1.5x in OTT is the same with 1.5 PD in game? (I am not using steamVR)

 

Attached are the water without fix. I think I just played in areas with just small rivers that look OK see second screenshot where the river starts from lake/wide part it looks OK. And third picture is the weird effect I tried to avoid by deleting the water.fx.

Edited April 26, 2020 by zaelu