Valve Index Hands On

[Wicked.-]

The next revision of CPU and GPU might just get you there. Of course, the software complexity probably won't stand still either and ED will likely add extra features to bog down your frame rate once more. With Microsoft and MicroProse returning to the flightsim arena the next few years will be very interesting. I'm hoping the new MS flightsim will support VR as their graphic engine seems pretty incredible.

 

As a twenty year flyer of that other Viper sim I hear Microprose and drool lol. Competition spurs creativity and hopefully that will be the case here. I was very impressed to find that ED had native support for VR when I started flying it. Prior to that my only experiences with ED were Flanker 2.0 (good) and LockOn (no comment). Therefore, even though I miss the dynamic environment of my old sim, I feel ED is the future. If they would only stop putting their foot in their mouth.

[sk000tch]

The next revision of CPU and GPU might just get you there. Of course, the software complexity probably won't stand still either and ED will likely add extra features to bog down your frame rate once more. With Microsoft and MicroProse returning to the flightsim arena the next few years will be very interesting. I'm hoping the new MS flightsim will support VR as their graphic engine seems pretty incredible.

 

More likely the next version of DCS. We aren't getting big gpu upgrades for another year, yet last I heard they had the DX11 -> vulkan engine was done, and they were on to textures and shaders, likely reexporting objects, etc. We know they are doing a lot of mesh work. I have no idea what micropost is up to, but we can be guaranteed MSFT sim is DX12. Both APIs are in their toddler stage (at best), and MSFT will usrelye have more resources, but there is a reason the sim community is favoring vulkan over dx12 thus far. Its demonstrated much improved efficiently in high object court and/or high light source count renders, both of which flight sims with long view distances create.

 

We don't know about what they are choosing to include from the basket of goodies RTX and Vulkan provide. There are some interesting anecdotes -- Outside of games, ray tracing is already used to simulate radar - particularly imagine radar. RTX ray tracing pipeline though new, evidently works quite well with Vulkan. DCS currently is not very good drawing geometry for distant objects. Don't be surprised if we suddenly see rapid work on hornet Air to Ground radar after 3.0? releases.

 

A few things we do know is that we will be less CPU bound. Vulkan doesn't have the driver overhead, and allows developer control/access to physical cores. People have been asking for better multi core performance for a long time, now they will have it, and dev's won't be petrified to use a few cycles on weather or ATC.

 

We also don't know much turing specific tech they will utilize. RT core provides real time, which is cool. There are more advanced anti aliasing tools available, that do not require the brute force of MSAA. Not just tensor core DLSS stuff, but other tech like variable rate shading is a big deal for sims, where again, millions of objects over long distances are drawn. VRS is also precursor tech to foveated rendering, something we all look forward to in the future.

 

As with everything vulkan we've seen it will come down to implementation by the devs but given 1) we aren't getting more GPU HP for a while, 2) we are at the limit of what we can do in DX11, and 3) DCS probably has a higher percentage of their users on turing vs. pascal than almost any other game, but even under pascal, Vulkan should yield significant VR performance improvement.

 

An update would be nice, it would be a nice xmas gift though that's probably optimistic. 1Q probably isn't, however.

[Nagilem]

I've taken to using process lasso to help prioritize the apps running during my sessions. I have a 9900k so I have 8 cores. I use 1 core for all my helper apps (viacomm/VA, SRS, etc), 2 cores for VRCompositor, and the rest to DCS. I know folks say only 2 cores get used, but I can tell you, all my DCS cores light up when I start playing. I leave HT on because I get much smoother and better performance with my chip. Others may have a different experience. Definitely had to watch Process Lasso for a while to make sure no other services started to keep the experience in game smooth.

 

Result - I get smooth gameplay everywhere with consistent FPS @45 and frame times ~12-15ms @90hz.

 

I prioritized smoothness over game looks so I have SS set to 150/138 in Steam with motion smoothing on. In DCS I have only AF on at 8x, textures high, water medium with shadows flat. I had cockpit shadows to low and it worked fine, but was a bit distracting for me. I turned off MSAA as it killed frames bad.

 

Just some additional food for thought / suggestion. YMMV

[Supmua]

Valve Index Hands On

 

Due to recent Labor Day sales, I was able to pull the trigger on better memory sticks, G Skill Trident Z 3600 CL15. I’m hoping it will give an extra boost to the minimum frame rate.

Edited September 3, 2019 by Supmua

[Gearbox]

1) we aren't getting more GPU HP for a while,

 

 

This would be solved tomorrow if they could implement GPU-per-eye rendering with dual GPUs.

[Wicked.-]

I've taken to using process lasso to help prioritize the apps running during my sessions. I have a 9900k so I have 8 cores. I use 1 core for all my helper apps (viacomm/VA, SRS, etc), 2 cores for VRCompositor, and the rest to DCS. I know folks say only 2 cores get used, but I can tell you, all my DCS cores light up when I start playing. I leave HT on because I get much smoother and better performance with my chip. Others may have a different experience. Definitely had to watch Process Lasso for a while to make sure no other services started to keep the experience in game smooth.

 

Result - I get smooth gameplay everywhere with consistent FPS @45 and frame times ~12-15ms @90hz.

 

I prioritized smoothness over game looks so I have SS set to 150/138 in Steam with motion smoothing on. In DCS I have only AF on at 8x, textures high, water medium with shadows flat. I had cockpit shadows to low and it worked fine, but was a bit distracting for me. I turned off MSAA as it killed frames bad.

 

Just some additional food for thought / suggestion. YMMV

 

The most important reason for turning off HT for me was heat. I can't overclock to 5.1 stable without a couple weeks tweaking it. I'm currently using a Corsair 150i pro and Thermal Grizzly Conductanaut which made a 10c difference. Disabling HT made around a 10C difference as well though and I'm hesitant to go back. Like you though, having smooth frames is a bigger priority than eye candy but those damn jaggies drive me nuts lol. I'm surprised your using 150/138. I thought 148/138 got the closest to native resolution? Since I can't help my self I'll try the above settings as well. Can't hurt but it needs a be a noticeable difference in smoothness for me to enable HT.

[Nagilem]

@wicked -

 

On the 150/138, I did set 148 but steam keeps reverting it up to 150 and the app page resolution shows the same so I left it. I went back to stable SteamVR for now since I wasn't happy with all of the changes and such on beta. I may try it again sometime.

 

With AF at 8x, and making some minor adjustments to my nvidia driver for DCS - High performance power, AF Sample optimization on, negative LOD bias set to clamp, TF Quality high perf, and trilinear optimization on, I get a decent balance between smooth and reasonably low shimmer. Its not perfect, and it never will be until we get more CPU and GPU power, but I do get good performance with good visuals and I am happy. Hopefully they work for you.

 

On HT, I have not overclocked because I live in a hot climate (80 here in the house during the summer months) and I want the chip to throttle to stay cooler (I'm one of those who don't believe water and electricity should mix ;)), so leaving the HT on with my current setup leaves me with temps in the low 60s on average with utilization averaging 60-70%. I run scripts in DCS so I think some of that extra CPU load is MOOSE and Airboss.

[Supmua]

Setting max VR prerendered frame to App control or 2-3 can also help reduce stuttering and increase smoothness at the cost of increased latency. But for non-twitched games like DCS you likely will not notice any display latency.

[Icebeat]

More likely the next version of DCS. We aren't getting big gpu upgrades for another year, yet last I heard they had the DX11 -> vulkan engine was done, and they were on to textures and shaders, likely reexporting objects, etc. We know they are doing a lot of mesh work. I have no idea what micropost is up to, but we can be guaranteed MSFT sim is DX12. Both APIs are in their toddler stage (at best), and MSFT will usrelye have more resources, but there is a reason the sim community is favoring vulkan over dx12 thus far. Its demonstrated much improved efficiently in high object court and/or high light source count renders, both of which flight sims with long view distances create.

 

We don't know about what they are choosing to include from the basket of goodies RTX and Vulkan provide. There are some interesting anecdotes -- Outside of games, ray tracing is already used to simulate radar - particularly imagine radar. RTX ray tracing pipeline though new, evidently works quite well with Vulkan. DCS currently is not very good drawing geometry for distant objects. Don't be surprised if we suddenly see rapid work on hornet Air to Ground radar after 3.0? releases.

 

A few things we do know is that we will be less CPU bound. Vulkan doesn't have the driver overhead, and allows developer control/access to physical cores. People have been asking for better multi core performance for a long time, now they will have it, and dev's won't be petrified to use a few cycles on weather or ATC.

 

We also don't know much turing specific tech they will utilize. RT core provides real time, which is cool. There are more advanced anti aliasing tools available, that do not require the brute force of MSAA. Not just tensor core DLSS stuff, but other tech like variable rate shading is a big deal for sims, where again, millions of objects over long distances are drawn. VRS is also precursor tech to foveated rendering, something we all look forward to in the future.

 

As with everything vulkan we've seen it will come down to implementation by the devs but given 1) we aren't getting more GPU HP for a while, 2) we are at the limit of what we can do in DX11, and 3) DCS probably has a higher percentage of their users on turing vs. pascal than almost any other game, but even under pascal, Vulkan should yield significant VR performance improvement.

 

An update would be nice, it would be a nice xmas gift though that's probably optimistic. 1Q probably isn't, however.

 

 

They have made it clear several times that they are not going to implement proprietary technologies. As a user who has spent a lot of money on my computer and sees that the software is not optimized for it, I must say that I am not very happy with this decision.

[Wicked.-]

@wicked -

 

On the 150/138, I did set 148 but steam keeps reverting it up to 150 and the app page resolution shows the same so I left it. I went back to stable SteamVR for now since I wasn't happy with all of the changes and such on beta. I may try it again sometime.

 

With AF at 8x, and making some minor adjustments to my nvidia driver for DCS - High performance power, AF Sample optimization on, negative LOD bias set to clamp, TF Quality high perf, and trilinear optimization on, I get a decent balance between smooth and reasonably low shimmer. Its not perfect, and it never will be until we get more CPU and GPU power, but I do get good performance with good visuals and I am happy. Hopefully they work for you.

 

On HT, I have not overclocked because I live in a hot climate (80 here in the house during the summer months) and I want the chip to throttle to stay cooler (I'm one of those who don't believe water and electricity should mix ;)), so leaving the HT on with my current setup leaves me with temps in the low 60s on average with utilization averaging 60-70%. I run scripts in DCS so I think some of that extra CPU load is MOOSE and Airboss.

 

I live on the Texas Gulf Coast so I feel your pain regarding the heat. Not only do we have heat but 90% humidity as well. Luckily, the man cave has a window AC unit next to the PC so it's no longer a serious problem. I also went to an open concept style case. Actually I would call it a display more so than a case but being open it stays much cooler.

I didn't get a chance to make any changes last night, I decided to que up some Tool, a mixed loadout of A2A and A2G and blow shit up. Sometimes I forget the goal of all the tweaking is to fly and break things! Lol

 

Edited September 4, 2019 by Wicked.-

[Nagilem]

@WIcked - I know what you mean. We tweak, but it should be about dropping planes and breaking stuff on the ground :).

 

My biggest frustration right now is water. When I fly over water with my textures at medium, I get what I call "shimmies" all over the place. The carrier will be rock solid, then just out of no where vibrate back and forth, then settle. Happens to my hud elements too. Almost like a glitch. I also get serious flicker when I see reflected sunlight on water. Happens 70% of the time. Very annoying. Anyone else have these issues?

 

I haven't tried dialing up the textures yet. Water is one of those that kills frame rates. Will do some testing tonight / tomorrow and see what happens. I suspect these are issues that will not get resolved soon.

[RealDCSpilot]

@Nagilem

 

With a 2080ti, there is no reason on not running textures on the highest setting. They won't cost you performance, only VRAM, which you have plenty with 12GB.

[imacken]

@Nagilem

 

With a 2080ti, there is no reason on not running textures on the highest setting. They won't cost you performance, only VRAM, which you have plenty with 12GB.

 

Pretty sure the 2080 Ti has 11Gb VRAM, but your point still stands!

[imacken]

@WIcked - I know what you mean. We tweak, but it should be about dropping planes and breaking stuff on the ground :).

 

My biggest frustration right now is water. When I fly over water with my textures at medium, I get what I call "shimmies" all over the place. The carrier will be rock solid, then just out of no where vibrate back and forth, then settle. Happens to my hud elements too. Almost like a glitch. I also get serious flicker when I see reflected sunlight on water. Happens 70% of the time. Very annoying. Anyone else have these issues?

 

I haven't tried dialing up the textures yet. Water is one of those that kills frame rates. Will do some testing tonight / tomorrow and see what happens. I suspect these are issues that will not get resolved soon.

 

You’re not running Kegetys mod are you? That’s horrible, especially with water.

I really don’t think water is a frame killer at all. Always run high.

[RealDCSpilot]

:) ah damn, one gig slipped through. Yes, its 11264MB GDDR6 to be correct.

[Wicked.-]

Water shouldn't be a frame killer at all. Nor textures, terrain textures or visibility up to high. Visibility past high to ultra or extreme adds much more that needs to be drawn. The guaranteed frame killers are shadows, terrain shadows, MSAA, Trees, Grass Clutter, AF and cockpit global lighting. I simply don't use shadows or terrain shadows; I've just never liked them. MSAA on the other hand I have to have at 2x. The jaggies in the 18 are bad and as of now that's all I'm flying. Hopefully the Viper won't be so bad and I can turn MSAA off. I never used it until the "VR Optimizations" were released. While it improved my framerates in the CV1, it also introduced jaggies which I had previously not noticed.

 

Anyway, water should cost you nothing. Are you running any mods that may be causing it?

[Nagilem]

Thanks guys - I'll push water back up to high.

 

I have a few mods to add equipment and such into the game, a NVG mod to bring NVGs in the cockpit into focus, and one to make the Stennis look more realistic and fix the IFLOS. Nothing that changes the shaders, and definitely NOT Kegetys hack.

 

I decided to move to 148/148 split and have seen "similarish" results with 45 fps over Dubai at 90hz and frame times in the low 18s. Not sure I'll leave it, but it cleaned up more jaggies, and that still performs better than MSAA x2 which blew out the frame times to over 22+ms with 148/138.

 

I'll keep working it :)

 

Thanks again!

[Nagilem]

Oh, and I saw there is a bug report for water reflection shimmer with DCS weather set to dynamic. Will also test that.

[sk000tch]

They have made it clear several times that they are not going to implement proprietary technologies. As a user who has spent a lot of money on my computer and sees that the software is not optimized for it, I must say that I am not very happy with this decision.

 

Ray tracing and variable rate shading are not proprietary technologies. Ray tracing (aka ray casting) is just a rendering technique and has been around forever. Until recently it was limited to CGI but Nvidia turing architecture introduced real time ray tracing using the dedicated RT core but it's not proprietary. Next gen Radeon apparently has improved ray tracing performance. As an open world with hundreds of thousands of light sources where every surface is defined by how it interacts with light, that currently uses a aging deferred shading process that consumes disproportionate resources, they might want to look into it. Doom 2016 pipeline is the most well known vulkan/RT implementation, if you are curious and want to read up

 

Variable Rate Shading is not optional at this point, not for a game with an emphasis on VR. Foveated rendering can't exist without dynamic shading rates. Unless a huge leap in GPU tech shows up in the next 12 months, devs had best be prepared to transition from DX11 style rasterizing.

 

I haven't seen the quote you are referring to, but I assume they are talking APIs like unreal/unity, or to emphasize why they chose vulkan over dx12.

[Wicked.-]

I swapped back to stable steam after the DCS update and got lower frames. I'm on a private server running TTI with not a lot going on and no one else in with me at the time. Launching out of Bandar Abbas and heading a few miles west where about 12 or 13 vehicles were, I was staying at 30 FPS as much as 45. That's a big hit.

[Supmua]

I swapped back to stable steam after the DCS update and got lower frames. I'm on a private server running TTI with not a lot going on and no one else in with me at the time. Launching out of Bandar Abbas and heading a few miles west where about 12 or 13 vehicles were, I was staying at 30 FPS as much as 45. That's a big hit.

 

Did you delete fxo and metashader2 folders? Also try Khasab and see what kind of frame you get. I didn't experience any new frame drop (don't think it could get any worse in Khasab lol) but I also upgraded my memory (3600mhz CL15) just before the OB update.

 

I also find that playing in 80Hz mode with SteamVR SS 200% reduces shimmering significantly (80Hz only). Try and see if you get similar results. The hornet cockpit doesn't look good until SS is around 200%, the harrier cockpit on the other hand looks great/better at even lower SS setting (the UFC panel texts are quite sharp on the harrier).

Edited September 4, 2019 by Supmua

[Wicked.-]

Not long after I posted last, I rebooted into Steam beta and immediately got an update to 1.7.13?? I'd changed my settings to try 148/148 posted earlier and turned off MSAA. Wow. Flying the same server, same area but with other guys getting on and more action, rock solid at 45 again and the shimmer was barely noticeable. In fact after about 10 minutes it didn't draw my attention again. Cockpit is clear and I was seeing ground targets much better. I'm going to chalk it up to the new beta for now but I'm happy and not using MSAA. 148 custom res and 148 on DCS App SS. I also noticed reprojection wasn't on when I'd alt tab but that may be normal behavior. Highly recommend trying the new beta.

[Nagilem]

Ok - some additional testing

 

Goal is flying downtown Dubai with frame times of 18-19ms with good smoothness and good anti-aliasing.

 

Baseline Settings:

SteamVR:1.7.13 beta running 90hz

NVidia Driver: Latest as of 8/30 with NVCP setup with max performance and almost all other settings vanilla.

DCS: All textures high, cockpit at 512, no grass, 50% trees, all shadows flat, preload max, visibility set to high, and no AF.

 

Premise: I wanted to look at the difference between high super sampling via SteamVR (video/app settings) vs using MSAA with MFAA. I tested three scenarios:

 

Scenario 1: SteamVR SS ( 148/138 ) with motion smoothing on with no AA;

Performance: reasonable, vCard maintaining ~80% @ 70c, frame times stay within 14-18ms on average

Experience: smooth with some visible artifacts at the edges; some shimmer with aliasing; no significant stutters even with hard plane maneuvers but the frame times pushed 20ms during these times

 

Scenario 2: SteamVR SS ( 148/148 ) with motion smoothing on:

Performance: pushing the edge, vCard ~90% @ 70-71c, frame times range generally 18-24ms with periods of much higher when the CPU or GPU peg

Experience: mostly smooth with more warping and ghosting; shimmer is low but not very noticeable; a few more noticeable stutters when aggressively moving the plane

 

Scenario 3: moved SteamVR back to default ( 150/100 ) and turned on MSAAx2 AND MFAA in NVCP. MFAA allows more anti-aliasing in MSAA while also lowering performance threshold

Performance: pushing the edge, vCard ~90% @ 70-71c, frame ranges generally 18-24ms

Experience: Smooth with nominal artifacts, shimmer is non existent, distance objects are softer with less super sampling but very playable/recognizable.

 

TL;DR - Performance is about trade offs.

 

If one wants higher clarity and can live with some shimmer, turn MSAA off, increase the SS in Steam, and tune resolution to your card capability. with my card 148/138-148 works, but starts to seriously tax the vCard as I push the app resolution up.

 

If you want to kill shimmer, turn MSAA x2 with MFAA turned on in NVCP and lower the Steam Settings to default. No shimmer, but not quite as clear in the distance. performance seems quite good

 

in my opinion, these two sets have similar performance in terms of frame times in this testing scenario, but experience is at the extremes - more clarity vs less shimmer. More testing in MP and other scenes will be needed.

[Icebeat]

@Nagilem

 

With a 2080ti, there is no reason on not running textures on the highest setting. They won't cost you performance, only VRAM, which you have plenty with 12GB.

 

same goes for cockpit shadows

[Supmua]

The shimmering doesn’t bother me especially in 80Hz mode, the blurriness from MSAA on the other hand makes it hard to spot runways. With 2D setup I run MSAA 2 plus Reshade’s clarity+sharpening filters to mitigate the blurriness, wish there was something similar for VR.