Tweaking VR settings for smooth DCS Supercarrier experience.

[sambucca]

Interesting...

 

Your settings are very different from all the other "guides".

They all recommend turning off MSAA and tweaking the rest, including PD (in oculus/steam, not DCS)

Luckily, dcs has several user settings options now, so I can try or your settings.

Will report.

 

9700k@4.9 ,32gb@3733, 1080ti, ssd, reverb pro v2

[speed-of-heat]

Yep this

[Mnemonic]

Just for illustration purposes, here are some of my measurements with MSI Afterburner.

 

With PD=1, I have VRAM usage stabilized around 7.2 GB, with some headroom for new units that can appear in sight.

 

 

Same level, same scene PD=1.4 - VRAM fully clogs at 8GB and jumps a little as GPU offloads and downloads textures from RAM. Witch leads to stuttering in VR.

The progression is actually should be non-linear but square, so 11GB would not help, 16GB or more could help a bit.

 

 

So here is a reason, MSAA which is computationally expensive, actually works well, because GPU has resources to render them, but PD that increases all render buffers doesn't let any room to VRAM.

Edited May 24, 2020 by Mnemonic

[Svsmokey]

Nicely done !

[Redshift]

Yeah, another vote for MSAAx4 (with the default mask in my case) and PD=1

[Svsmokey]

How does texture quality impact performance with >1 pd ? Do lower textures free up gpu resources to allow higher pd's ?

 

[Edit] found the answer in the OP .

 

I'm running low textures (can't really tell the diff in vr) and am getting great performance in 2.56

Edited May 24, 2020 by Svsmokey

[Mnemonic]

How does texture quality impact performance with >1 pd ? Do lower textures free up gpu resources to allow higher pd's ?

 

[Edit] found the answer in the OP .

 

I'm running low textures (can't really tell the diff in vr) and am getting great performance in 2.56

 

Theoretically if you can fit textures + all the buffers with PD>1 into your’s GPU VRAM then you’re good to go! Actually it works for me with default empty carrier just fine.

 

But I like to fly with Supercarrier, loaded with other Tomcats, Hornets and equipment, so didn’t really worked out. I didn’t try to go for Low textures though, it might work.

[Svsmokey]

Yeah , will be looking at more msaa , pd and Vulkan when i select my next gpu . Likely whoever has most vram wins....

[theGozr]

msaa 2x 4x ??

[Mnemonic]

msaa 2x 4x ??

All settings are in first post.

On your discretion, in my case with all the rest of the settings 4x produced less jugged lines, and didn’t impact performance.

I use MSAA Radius = 30%

[bni]

So MSAAx4 can finally be used without horrible performance degradation, that is great news

 

Interesting finding about PD and VRAM, and that you would need 16GB (almost no one has) or more to really crank it up.

 

So I have 11GB VRAM, would PD 1.1 fit in VRAM? 1.2? Or would you leave it at 1.0 anyway to avoid stutters?

[Mnemonic]

Interesting finding about PD and VRAM, and that you would need 16GB (almost no one has) or more to really crank it up.

Yes, but not sure for how much, you see if you crank up PD VRAM consumption for render buffers might have a square grow.

It's like when you enlarge square side X times, it's surface doesn't grow linearly.

Such VRAM utilisation is atypical for "games" usually.

 

But because we have a sim at hand - a collection of various modules, each to painstaking detail and with 8K textures, consumption grows fast.

 

So I have 11GB VRAM, would PD 1.1 fit in VRAM? 1.2? Or would you leave it at 1.0 anyway to avoid stutters?

To be honest I would live it at 1 and crank shadows up, to me it's important to have rich and interesting missions on Supercarrier, and that tend to have many things on screen. I'm afraid 11Gb is not a panacea here.

However feel free to experiment, and see if you have tearing. Would be nice if you could measure VRAM consumption too with various PD.

 

By the way I don't notice any visual difference between PD=1 and PD=1.1 but consumption is higher. PD=1.2 is very marginally better. It's starts to change at PD=1.4, and really shines ad PD=1.8 sharpness wise.

But I'm happy with PD=1 for now, with butter smooth performance in my favourite jet :D

[theGozr]

:thumbup:

[parxuk]

 

- Set the shadow setting, it comes with performance hit, however it alleviates a lot of artifacts on screen, especially in the cockpit,

so I would strongly recommend to enable shadows. I found that Medium setting shadows do look fairly good in DCS

(better than I remembered them before) and significantly faster to render than High setting shadows.

 

Hi Mnemonic

 

I'm not much of a fan of shadows and found them to be very resource hungry so have them set to off, but wondered what the artifacts are that you mention as a consequence of not having them enabled. Are you saying overall my cockpit would look better with them on?

 

Thanks in advance

[VirusAM]

For me...msaa 4x (with mask at 30%) gives a big impact....

In the sim menu i have 45fps (instead of the usual 90)...of course in the sim its unplayable...when in normal complexity missions.

 

Reverb with pd 1.0 steam ss 100%...

All as your first post settings but shadows on low instead of medium.

Unfortunately or this mask settings does impact the performance or something is wrong with my video card (1080ti)

 

Probably with the Rift S (which is lower res and 10 fps less - 5 with ASW) things would be better...

[speed-of-heat]

No I have the same on 4x msaa

[theGozr]

Cockpit 512 yeas good boost for no much difference in vr you are right

[bear.is.flying]

Cockpit 512 yeas good boost for no much difference in vr you are right

 

 

That setting only affects the MFDs and mirror resolution.

[Svsmokey]

That setting only affects the MFDs and mirror resolution.

 

True , but as all those are viewports , it does make a significant difference .

[Mnemonic]

Reverb with pd 1.0 steam ss 100%...

All as your first post settings but shadows on low instead of medium.

Unfortunately or this mask settings does impact the performance or something is wrong with my video card (1080ti)

 

Probably with the Rift S (which is lower res and 10 fps less - 5 with ASW) things would be better...

Oh yeah Reverb has much higher rez, you need to measure your VRAM might be you are out of bounds even with PD=1. Maybe you need to put PD=0.8 or something.

 

But of course with such high rez display just disable MSAA

[Mnemonic]

Cockpit 512 yeas good boost for no much difference in vr you are right

 

And if you use mirrors put “512 every frame” otherwise if it’s not every frame - ASW goes crazy and doesn’t smooth out properly

[speed-of-heat]

I can see no difference in VRAM usage between 512 every frame and 1024, both come in at about 10.5 at a PD of 1

[Mnemonic]

I can see no difference in VRAM usage between 512 every frame and 1024, both come in at about 10.5

Be careful that you are not in fact capped at 11 at the moment, it could look like 10.5

because every frame driver will offload something from VRAM and put there textures again, and polled value might not reflect it precisely. It's quite high though.

 

Try to put PD below 1, like 0.5 or 0.8, for measurements (drop your VRAM below 9 just to be sure that you have headroom), and then change " screens resolution" to see if that affects VRAM.

also for the mirrors (512 every frame) will look better than (1024 not every frame)

Edited May 26, 2020 by Mnemonic

[theGozr]

:thumbup: Thx

[Mnemonic]

What I noticed - main contributing factor to VRAM is PD and Textures