VR Shaders mod for better VR experience

[Eldur]

so your running on an i5-3570 is that at native or have you tried OC'ing, you should be able to get at least 4ghz out of that with a good cooler and a 1080. You are running on much weaker hardware and running way higher settings than me.

 

I can't speak to the mods, but i would seriously recommend uninstalling them for the moment... I have seen mods do very odd things just buy being installed ... you can always add them back later.

 

I would strongly suggest dropping the following shadows to low/medium if you absolutely must, grass to 750, take cockpit res down to 1024 , you dont need every frame, turn heat blur to low, terrain textures to low its doubtful you will notice the difference, and drop heat blur to low, smoke drop to 1 or zero, Terrain Object Shadows ... i'd turn off for the moment... and see about the rest.

 

However what is absolutely killing your FPS are three things;

 

Cockpit Global Illumination ... turn it off

Visibility Range set it to High , and likely medium (i see you have done that already good)

Shadows turn them to medium at most i would suggest low on your spec or off preferably

 

these last three are going to absolutely give you poor perf... remember to restart after apply changes

 

 

I would absolutely recommend doing something in consistent in the same plane to test settings.

 

you dont say what your PD is but i would set it to 1 to start with and adjust scaling later through your oracle tool tray, but that is not an area i'm familiar with.

 

Good luck

 

I've been running with the settings attached for the last few versions now, as I said. Shadows are actually flat only, the lowest except for flat, but it looks dull in the pit and makes it nearly impossible to read things, so I bumped it up to low. Displays down to 512 (not every frame), water and heat blur as well down to low. Lowering grass has absolutely no effect at all, so I leave it up there. Probably reducing the visibility range did quite some - again. It made no difference for approx. a year after the Tomcat arrived, but that was with a major loss in fps I had there. I never turned it back down after I regained my performance with one update, until recently. Same with shadows BTW, I cranked them up back then because it made no difference. Might try switching of cockpit global illumn as well though.

 

My PD is always at 1.0. Just had it bumped up once to 1.5 to see if it makes reading the F-16 HUD and MFCDs easier... well, just a liiiiiiiiiiittle bit, not worth the performance hog it comes with. No antialiasing at all, but anisotropic filter at 16x in the drivers. My CPU runs at 4.4GHz since shortly after the Tomcat release, stock clock is 3.4 with single core boost up to 3.8 that wouldn't trigger in DCS though, so it ran at 3.4 before I OCed it. Did nearly double my fps actually.

 

And well, things are strange sometimes. I could now fly the F-16 Aggressive Engagement instant action - I think that's what it's called, the one with a Flanker ahead and another spawning after you splash it -with constantly steady 45fps, just one or two very short drops to 30 in the beginning and later after touchdown. In external view, it went up almost to 90 depending on the view angle. Even with shadows set to low (no difference to flat only), and the same goes for loading up the Jug in Hawkinge where I had just 7fps yesterday. But I read of someone else having issue with inconsistent fps where simply reloading the whole stuff helped. Guess that's just something to be sorted yet. But it might be the case that once you load up the thing with the low fps, it also affects subsequent runs on the other maps. Because that's what I literally did yesterday after I saw the powerpoint on the Channel - just loaded up something in Caucasus instead and it wasn't running well either.

 

In the end, I think it runs quite well now, as long as some issues don't pop up again. Can't say how much is done by the shaders mod, but I think I'd get less performance if I removed it now.

 

Thanks for your help and hints

[ruprecht]

I can't thank Kegetys and speed-of-heat enough for doing this. Essentially DCS is unplayable for me in VR without this mod.

 

Which brings me to a question: if either stop doing what they do, or for whatever reason take a long time to update the shader mods after a patch, the process for modifying the shaders is in their heads and DCS is unplayable again.

 

Is the process for selecting and modifying the shaders (including IC compatibility) documented anywhere, maybe on Github, so that others can do this for themselves if necessary? Or would Kegetys/speed-of-heat consider doing so?

[speed-of-heat]

it's all Kegetys work i just butcher his work ... so it would be up to him to choose to open source it, not even sure that would be allowed as he is modifying copyrighted work... not an expert just a worry.

 

My observation is that you can largely get the same performance effect by dropping about 10% of your current PD value

[ruprecht]

Thanks speed, and I agree putting the files on github would prob not be ok, I'm talking more documenting the process. I'd love to know in detail what you do when you're converting Kegetys package for IC compatibility for instance, so I can do it if you ever decide to stop.

[speed-of-heat]

Thanks speed, and I agree putting the files on github would prob not be ok, I'm talking more documenting the process. I'd love to know in detail what you do when you're converting Kegetys package for IC compatibility for instance, so I can do it if you ever decide to stop.

 

I have put this on on here before, it is simply deleting files for Clear Water its:

 

water.fx

Decoder.hlsl

GBuffer.hlsl

 

have to be deleted from Kegetys mod in order to work.

 

The IC Pass version, delete those and everything except the files in a earlier IC pass version, which to be honest was largely trial and error to work out.

 

It's possible you might be able to add water.fx, Decoder.hlsl and GBuffer back in if you dont want clear water, but you would have to test that yourself.

[TomcatFly]

I have put this on on here before, it is simply deleting files for Clear Water its:

 

water.fx

Decoder.hlsl

GBuffer.hlsl

 

have to be deleted from Kegetys mod in order to work.

 

The IC Pass version, delete those and everything except the files in a earlier IC pass version, which to be honest was largely trial and error to work out.

 

It's possible you might be able to add water.fx, Decoder.hlsl and GBuffer back in if you dont want clear water, but you would have to test that yourself.

 

I'm very happy of basic shaders mod!!

 

Anyway, thinking at those 3 files mentioned above, which is the quickest way to enable/disable clear water?

 

For example, renaming the 3 mentioned files, then cleaning fxo and metashaders2... or I need to do the whole process, this being disable the Mod with the Enabler tool, then adding the other shaders mod ("Clear water" one), then enabling the new mod, then editing _HMD.hlsl with same pars I'm keeping now and finally start DCS waiting for whole recompile?

 

Thank you!

[speed-of-heat]

you have to remove the files before you apply the mod, otherwise you will just break dcs

[TomcatFly]

you have to remove the files before you apply the mod, otherwise you will just break dcs

 

So for example:

1) disable the mod with JSGME

2) remove/rename the 3 files from mod folder

3) enable the mod (same one, but with 3 files removed/renamed and maybe proper _HMD.hlsl)

4) fxo and metashadres2 cleaning and DCS restart

 

Could be?

 

Thanks again!

[ruprecht]

largely trial and error to work out.

 

That must have been fun :) Thanks for everything you do

 

I may just go through Kegetys mod and diff the shaders against the official ones to reverse engineer what’s being done. Good project for a weekend.

[speed-of-heat]

So for example:

1) disable the mod with JSGME

2) remove/rename the 3 files from mod folder

3) enable the mod (same one, but with 3 files removed/renamed and maybe proper _HMD.hlsl)

4) fxo and metashadres2 cleaning and DCS restart

 

Could be?

 

Thanks again!

 

1) disable the mod with JSGME

2) remove/rename the 3 files from mod folder

3) enable the mod

4) fxo and metashadres2 cleaning and DCS restart

 

dont invent steps!

[speed-of-heat]

That must have been fun :) Thanks for everything you do

 

the hard-work is all Kegetys.. the pref difference on the IC pass version is ... much lower

[TomcatFly]

1) disable the mod with JSGME

2) remove/rename the 3 files from mod folder

3) enable the mod

4) fxo and metashadres2 cleaning and DCS restart

 

dont invent steps!

 

Super! Thank you!

[speed-of-heat]

i actually have 3 copies of the mod , native, clear water, and ic pass

[TomcatFly]

i actually have 3 copies of the mod , native, clear water, and ic pass

 

I know and I have all 3.

 

If I'm not wrong, it seems to me to remember that HMD for base and clear water version are slighlty different, any reason for this? I mean, is there a link with between HMD and clear water settings or not?

 

Thanks for the clarification.

Edited June 16, 2020 by DenisFerrari

[speed-of-heat]

no link, likely just me experimenting with different mask sizes and other effects

[TomcatFly]

no link, likely just me experimenting with different mask sizes and other effects

 

I guessed that, thanks for the confirmation.

 

And thank you again for all you great job and support!!

[speed-of-heat]

that said i will go and change mine to make them consistent :)

[squirrelmeister]

Does it work for anybody on the latest Beta 2.5.6.50979? I got a error again with failing to compile some shaders.

 

 

 

 

Cheers

 

 

Edit: deleting shaders folder and verifying files right now. Will test again after that verifying is completed.

Edited June 17, 2020 by squirrelmeister
adding

[squirrelmeister]

Does it work for anybody on the latest Beta 2.5.6.50979? I got a error again with failing to compile some shaders.

 

 

 

 

Cheers

 

 

Edit: deleting shaders folder and verifying files right now. Will test again after that verifying is completed.

 

 

 

 

Tested again and with the clear water and IC-pass version everything works as intended!

 

 

 

 

Cheers

[speed-of-heat]

yep they seem to work fine

[TomcatFly]

yep they seem to work fine

 

 

With this "light" DCS OB update, should we need to disabile/ enable shaders again + fxo and metashaders2 emptying, or not necessary?

 

Thanks

[speed-of-heat]

i always do,. because you dont know if the update will over write files in the mods you use, i did delete fxo and metashaders but it was by pure habit.. try not doing it and see...

[desmoflex]

Hi guys, dumb question: what is a IC-pass? I did a search but couldn't find any explanation....

Thx

[speed-of-heat]

its short for Integrity Check, sometimes required for multiplayer denoted by a server with a Green Shield

[Hammer1-1]

does it still work with todays patch?