Anyone done any testing with 2.7 and VR?

[captainHelmet]

I just did a couple of quick flights in the f5 around Nevada and The Caucasus using a g2 and a rtx2070.

I ran into many of the issues that others have reported.  Clouds were very low detail, aliased at their lower edges, and bounced a bit on the horizon.

I briefly turned on SSAO and didn't see any visual differences but did see a performance hit, so it was doing something.

 

Prior to the 2.7 update I was running a cockpit shadow mod, flat shadow removal, the modified version of the experimental VR shaders, and well as some visual mods that had no impact on performance.  For my quick flights I did a clean install and left all of my mods disabled.  I feel like my typical modded 2.5 fps range was around 60-45fps.  Running vanilla 2.7 at the same settings that has now dropped to 45-35fps. 

 

The 2.7 performance  is really similar to the performance hit that I saw when I had previously disabled the simplified glass material with 2.5.  Which makes sense, because with no mods in 2.7 I was running the high quality glass again and this time with the new cockpit reflections.  I bet if I were able to switch back to the old simplified glass shader while in 2.7 that I would see similar performance to what I was getting in 2.5.  That said, I always felt like you lost a lot of the feeling of being confined in a cockpit with the old simplified glass shader, and it appears there are a lot of other little visual improvements that come with 2.7 as well.  The water in lakes looks a lot better, for example.

 

Even with the performance hit and the visual issues that came with the clouds in VR they were game changing.  The shadowing on the ground, flying through different cloud levels, the necessity of using your gauges to maintain situational awareness.  They really tie the whole world together.  It is still a beta and there are some issues to work out, but wow.

Edited April 15, 2021 by captainHelmet

[Svsmokey]

45 minutes ago, uri_ba said:

 

Only folks with 3090 seem to report increased performance, so I wonder if it's a VRAM issue.

You may be on to something...i'm seeing increased perf with a 6800xt .

[uri_ba]

7 hours ago, Svsmokey said:

You may be on to something...i'm seeing increased perf with a 6800xt .

Same-ish performance on "normal" cards, and better utilization of cards with 12gb+? That is a possibility

[Lurker]

Thanks for all the replies people. It's really strange that a some are reporting an increase (or at least no noticable degradation in performance) while others are reporting a significant decrease in performance compared to 2.5 

This is baffling. Could be so many things too. I wonder if it's related to graphics drivers? I'm using a driver that is at least a month or so old (can't check which version as Im at work currently) The VRAM idea is also very interesting.

Though why would more efficient VRAM usage lead to lower performance on cards with less VRAM? 

[Lurker]

5 minutes ago, Malakhit said:

 

I'm using a 3090, and my performance is about 10-15 fps worse than it was previously. I think it might be settings related? I haven't changed anything other than putting clouds to Ultra, which seems to make no difference in VR.

 

 

If you haven't done so already, try disabling hotplug. 

[Lurker]

I wonder if people who are experiencing a big loss of frames have done major tweaking of their graphics settings in their Nvidia\ATI driver profile, and now with the release of the patch these "tweaks" are having an opposite effect. 

 

In any case, what I would definitely do If I'm experiencing much lower FPS than usual is do a completely clean driver install (and remove all saved driver profiles). So back to Nvidia defaults. The only thing I have changed in my Nvidia drivers is to set the power levels to maximum performance. 

[ShaunX]

1 hour ago, Lurker said:

Thanks for all the replies people. It's really strange that a some are reporting an increase (or at least no noticable degradation in performance) while others are reporting a significant decrease in performance compared to 2.5 

This is baffling. Could be so many things too. I wonder if it's related to graphics drivers? I'm using a driver that is at least a month or so old (can't check which version as Im at work currently) The VRAM idea is also very interesting.

Though why would more efficient VRAM usage lead to lower performance on cards with less VRAM? 

 

Might be relevant, I happened to be doing some benchmark tests to see if ReBAR could be turned on for DCS on Tuesday (still debatable). I repeated them following 2.7 and saw that my average FPS rates were pretty much unchanged. However, I did notice GPU percentage utilisation consistantly up by 8-9%. Not sure if that means it's more GPU intensive or if the engine is now better utilizing the GPU, mabye both.

 

Here's an extract from my test results. They were all taken using the same track file which was a 2 minute, high speed, NOE, high G turning circle in the Viper over the city of Damascus - Syria NOE Tight Turn Benchmark.trk

 

 

Edited April 16, 2021 by ShaunX

[speed-of-heat]

i think a lot depends on how it is measured, most people will run this game in VR with Motion Smoothing on, and maybe forced, and if they do they are never going to notice any difference unless they are right on the border of performance. 

 

What i think it does is enough of a boost to mitigate edge cases, a bit like the shader mod if you are on high end hardware, it helps with the lows and maybe a little bit with the highs but, in those edge conditions it either delays when you go into reprojection or mitigates it...

 

my 0.02c    

[Lurker]

29 minutes ago, speed-of-heat said:

i think a lot depends on how it is measured, most people will run this game in VR with Motion Smoothing on, and maybe forced, and if they do they are never going to notice any difference unless they are right on the border of performance. 

 

What i think it does is enough of a boost to mitigate edge cases, a bit like the shader mod if you are on high end hardware, it helps with the lows and maybe a little bit with the highs but, in those edge conditions it either delays when you go into reprojection or mitigates it...

 

my 0.02c    

 

Leaning towards this view as well. I'm too lazy to do proper testing, or rather my DCS flight time is "limited", so I spend most of it just enjoying myself in the sim. So that is the reason for this forum thread, it might very well be that I've actually lost max frames, but my average/min frametimes have improved, which is in the end a win, in my book.

[PicklePicklePickle]

3090 here, I saw a marked performance improvement, and was even able to bump up the clouds to Ultra and shadows from low to the max setting, and still have ~90fps most of the time. I did a few online flights on servers that supported it and it was noticeable smoother, even in MP.

 

That said, the new clouds in VR(I have Index, 200% SteamVR PD 1.0) look almost the same as before to me (except for the jumping bug). In fact, I reverted DCS to get back on the 162nd server and they had an overcast mission running, honestly they looked almost the same as on 2.7. I don't know what the deal is with that, the clouds in the 2D videos look amazing.

[Lurker]

On 4/16/2021 at 4:14 PM, PicklePicklePickle said:

3090 here, I saw a marked performance improvement, and was even able to bump up the clouds to Ultra and shadows from low to the max setting, and still have ~90fps most of the time. I did a few online flights on servers that supported it and it was noticeable smoother, even in MP.

 

That said, the new clouds in VR(I have Index, 200% SteamVR PD 1.0) look almost the same as before to me (except for the jumping bug). In fact, I reverted DCS to get back on the 162nd server and they had an overcast mission running, honestly they looked almost the same as on 2.7. I don't know what the deal is with that, the clouds in the 2D videos look amazing.

 

The clouds in VR look much less defined and lacking any color variation other than light/dark compared to the new clouds in 2d, however I wouldn't say they look worse than before, not sure what presets you've tried or seen but in all the ones I tried they still look much better than they ever did in 2.5.

[Twwhitey]

I will say - as far as 2.7 goes on my system ( ASUS Hero XI Wi-Fi MB, i9900K OC’d 5GHz, ASUS Tuf 3090 OC, Reverb G2) - I have noticed that densely populated areas on many maps (e.g. Beirut, Damascus, areas around Ramat David on the Syria map for instance) now absolutely choke/bottleneck the 3090 whereas same settings/drivers with 2.5.6 I could pretty comfortably maintain 90fps w/o needing to run motion smoothing.   Now, in 2.7 I 100% need to run motion smoothing in order to negate stutters... despite the claim in the patch notes about perf improvements on Syria I’m definitely seeing the opposite... bumping the new scenery details and forest details sliders down to 0.1 don’t appear to alleviate the issues so I’m wondering if they wholesale increased the density of objects or something?  I’ve lost just enough GPU headroom to cover those areas.  Kind of a bummer because I was running pretty lean settings in 2.5.6 in order to run motion smoothing off (no shadows, no illumination, no lens flare/blur,  no traffic, no ground clutter, medium distance, etc. just 2x MSAA, 50% SS, 1.0 PD, w/ Kegetys VR shaders) not really too much else I could dial down.... the good news is I think since I stopped using Steam Motion smoothing in the past they’ve definitely improved the algorithm quality... it’s much better in my limited experience so far than a year+ ago I think (less really bothersome artifacts). 
 

ive also noticed (again flying around places like Beirut, and this free flight with no other vehicles on the map, etc) that the CPU core DCS is running on is almost completely pegged the whole time... don’t think I noticed that before on 2.5.6.  Clouds on or off don’t seem to make a difference so I guess kudos to ED for that but unfortunately my experience is that 2.7 doesn’t perform “better” than before in VR. Enabling ReBAR didn’t net any noticeable improvements so maybe a clean/reinstall is next...   The never ending tweaking continues....

[mazex]

I'm a glass half full guy and it feels like the FPS is up 20 in 2.7... So smooth and beautiful. Like a new game. Specs in sig. 

[Carbon715]

10700k , 3090 FE, g2...I been playing pre 2.7 at about 55 to 60 fps avg...on 2.7 its closer to 45....need to turn motion smoothing on again as its a jittery mess...not the clouds but everything as a whole. Reinstalled windows and dcs hoping to smooth things over but no joy. Ah well at least motion smoothing (wmr one disabled and using steams) has gotten better, pretty shaky on the ground or carrier but once in the sky its nice

[fylzz]

On 4/16/2021 at 11:41 AM, ShaunX said:

 

Might be relevant, I happened to be doing some benchmark tests to see if ReBAR could be turned on for DCS on Tuesday (still debatable). I repeated them following 2.7 and saw that my average FPS rates were pretty much unchanged. However, I did notice GPU percentage utilisation consistantly up by 8-9%. Not sure if that means it's more GPU intensive or if the engine is now better utilizing the GPU, mabye both.

 

Here's an extract from my test results. They were all taken using the same track file which was a 2 minute, high speed, NOE, high G turning circle in the Viper over the city of Damascus - Syria NOE Tight Turn Benchmark.trk

 

 

 

@ShaunX which tool did you use to get this data ? By the way the data you are showing is not in VR isn'it ? I get about 60 FPS with a fully optimized new install with that track

[ShaunX]

48 minutes ago, fylzz said:

@ShaunX which tool did you use to get this data ? By the way the data you are showing is not in VR isn'it ? I get about 60 FPS with a fully optimized new install with that track

 

No it's just 2D. I used Nvidia FrameView - get it from the Nvidia site free.

[Viciam1]

On 4/15/2021 at 12:25 PM, dburne said:

I have continued flying a campaign with the Hornet in 2.7 and not noticed any performance degradation. However I fly with Motion Smoothing on and forced at 45 fps. Still runs great for me at some pretty high graphics settings.

Hey how do you force an FPS?

[speed-of-heat]

Motion Smoothing: Forced in steamvr app settings video, will force a behaviour that looks like 45fps up until a cpu or gpu frame time exceeds 20ish ms, where it will show the actual frame rate.  I believe asw has a similar capability.

Edited April 21, 2021 by speed-of-heat

[Lurker]

There have been reports of several Windows 10 forced cumulative patches that came out in the previous week or so causing significant performance loss. Have any of you tried uninstalling them? (Not sure if I managed to avoid them, I think I did get "forced" to download one last week) 

[speed-of-heat]

I am on all of the latest updates for windows. 

 

my observation is that DCS 2.7 seems to need some bedding in time on some devices ... I noted for a while increased CPU utilisation that i couldn't explain after 2.7 , and went around several loops trying to "fix it" and then it just sort of stopped...  whilst its not very scientific it is true.

Edited April 21, 2021 by speed-of-heat

[TAW_Impalor]

Check out your log files guys. There are 100 lines of clouds-related errors and warnings produced at each game launch. Could explain increased load time of 2.7? That's in addition to other errors and warnings on missing sounds and objects that been there for ages. Noice showcase of ED's programming skills!

[freehand]

4 hours ago, speed-of-heat said:

I am on all of the latest updates for windows. 

 

my observation is that DCS 2.7 seems to need some bedding in time on some devices ... I noted for a while increased CPU utilisation that i couldn't explain after 2.7 , and went around several loops trying to "fix it" and then it just sort of stopped...  whilst its not very scientific it is true.

 

so your using 20H2 build: 19042.928 & installed or pending (KB4023057) 

[Sr.]

7 hours ago, speed-of-heat said:

I am on all of the latest updates for windows. 

 

my observation is that DCS 2.7 seems to need some bedding in time on some devices ... I noted for a while increased CPU utilisation that i couldn't explain after 2.7 , and went around several loops trying to "fix it" and then it just sort of stopped...  whilst its not very scientific it is true.

 

https://www.pcmag.com/news/windows-10-april-update-is-causing-games-to-randomly-stutter

[joca133]

5 crashes on MP after updating to 2.7 and the clouds look blurry and even on super. Performance has not changed noticeably and it is still abysmal on a 3080. Not happy.

[freehand]

 

 

2 hours ago, Sr. said:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/windows-10-april-update-is-causing-games-to-randomly-stutter

I am on H2 with no problems.

 

Edited April 21, 2021 by freehand