AMD 6900xt tuning and settings for VR in dcs. My optimal recipe.

[nikoel]

44 minutes ago, WipeUout said:

Same here, I used to have to turn MSAA off as soon as things were getting busy but now, I can keep it.  I also find myself not using reprojection as often as before, my rig is keeping up with 80+ FPS even in MP most of the time.  The pimax 5kS has a minimum 90hz refresh rate and if FPS goes below 80, then it becomes very stuttery.

What is see now is my CPU being the bottleneck.  I am considering switching to a Rysen 5900X or i7-12700KF.  If only I knew when the multi-core engine will be available, that would help in deciding which one to pick.  I have the impression that Rysen will still be a better choice for the 6900XT in a multi-core engine compared to an intel setup.

Dude, just wait 2 weeks for 5800X3D unless you're hell bent on purchasing a new motherboard, CPU cooler mount. I am expecting the performance to be at very least on par, but hopefully significantly better than anything else on the market due to insane L3 cache size (pure speculation on my part)

[WipeUout]

22 minutes ago, nikoel said:

Dude, just wait 2 weeks for 5800X3D unless you're hell bent on purchasing a new motherboard, CPU cooler mount. I am expecting the performance to be at very least on par, but hopefully significantly better than anything else on the market due to insane L3 cache size (pure speculation on my part)

Until there are some positive reviews and relevant benchmarks, difficult to assess if this chip will be very good.  For now I tend to look at single thread performance for an instant gain but how much can a bigger cache impact it? Time will tell.   I will nevertheless wait until the end of March before switching mobo and cpu.  

[DeltaMike]

On 3/7/2022 at 6:51 AM, nikoel said:

Dude, just wait 2 weeks for 5800X3D unless you're hell bent on purchasing a new motherboard, CPU cooler mount. I am expecting the performance to be at very least on par, but hopefully significantly better than anything else on the market due to insane L3 cache size (pure speculation on my part)

ooooo I may need to get that.  Good to see AM4 is still alive, otherwise I might have been pissed off

RE: latest OB, yeah I thought things all of a sudden got easier.  Been out of the game for a while but I remember for a while there ED was in the habit of slipping VR improvements in there without announcing them. Guess we must be a tough crowd.  See?   We love you ED!   

[WipeUout]

So I finally pulled the trigger on an i7-12700KF.  Very good match for the 6900XT.  The first few benchmarks I did showed a decrease of 2.5 milliseconds in CPU frametime.  The improvement is most noticeable in multiplayer, not needing anymore to decrease my settings.  Overall stability also much better in busy scenario with lots of smoke, AI around and scripts running in background.  Having a 12th gen CPU gave breathing room to the AMD card and a pleasing stable 90 FPS in my Pimax 5ks HMD.  I have to update my hardware description bellow now...

Edited March 24, 2022 by WipeUout
Typo

[DeltaMike]

90fps?  Wow!!!

Just goes to show what a dog WMR4SVR is

[CybrSlydr]

16 hours ago, WipeUout said:

So I finally pulled the trigger on an i7-12700KF.  Very good match for the 6900XT.  The first few benchmarks I did showed a decrease of 2.5 milliseconds in CPU frametime.  The improvement is most noticeable in multiplayer, not needing anymore to decrease my settings.  Overall stability also much better in busy scenario with lots of smoke, AI around and scripts running in background.  Having a 12th gen CPU gave breathing room to the AMD card and a pleasing stable 90 FPS in my Pimax 5ks HMD.  I have to update my hardware description bellow now...

 

Sounds like my 8700k might be holding me back a bit.

[Thanatos31]

First off - thank you for a dedicated AMD gpu thread. Seems like Nvidia is always so much better documented than the RXs. 
I have a rx6700xt with a 5600x, 32gb ; so not entire the same but comparable!
 

I’ll need to explore what I’m doing wrong / missing. I’ve followed the standard VR optimization guide from Thud ; but I feel like the system is still running poorly. 
even with the new hype around OpenXR and a decent performance improvement, I’ll have FPS drops from 35/40 to 4 in MP games ; or the complete black screen. 
(Maybe this is due to the Apache module?) 

Can someone point me to an easy tutorial to optimize the CPU affinity ? I have downloaded the lasso, but can't figure out how to change the CORE distribution / correlation specific to the DCS process. 

Also- 
as per above:

ReverbG2
Ryzen 5600x 
AMD RX6700XT 
32GB
SSD install. 

My current settings - and with OXR, without FSR , I am roughly 40 FPS in a jet , closer to constat 30/35ish within the apache close to ground. (Locking to 45FPS per OXR tools) 

The thing that is really annoying are spikes/lags- in which I see a drop down to 20-14FPS, sometimes then leading into a black screen on the reverb for 1-5 seconds. 

Where do I start if I've looked at most of the other points outlined here as well as elsewhere.
I feel like I should be running this with better results...

Edited March 28, 2022 by Thanatos31

[WipeUout]

I am no expert on G2 but as for your DCS settings, some changes could improve your FPS.  Lowering the clouds will not change much the visuals in VR.  You may also put terrain object shadows to off, this will give you a good increase in FPS.  Anisotropic Filtering does not improve much the image quality but could give you more FPS at lower setting.  Civilian traffic also impact your FPS, consider turning it off.

You may also get more performance by using a shader.  I use "DCS VR Shaders mod for 2.7.11.21408.1" which improves a bit the performance.

A lot of factor will cause a drop in FPS such as background scripts and smoke/explosions, flying over/towards dense sceneries.  Reducing your scenery details factor might help too.  

[Thanatos31]

Thanks will try - I'm not necessarily hunting the highest FPS , rather a smooth expreience and really trying to kill these spikes that cause massive drops and blackscreens for up to 10 seconds. 
I'll search for that shader mod !

[edmuss]

The VR shader mods no longer make much difference, I think most of the changes that had been made by the mods have been implemented or worked around by ED.  You may get minor improvements in clarity and perhaps a couple more fps but it's not going to amount to much i'm afraid.

[Thanatos31]

Gotcha - I've set textures to medium now , and will set shadows to off; the AF seems to make the picture nicer and I'd love to keep it as long as possible. 
 

Worth a try probably 


Though I do get a very weird issue now : the sea is rendered as a basic ground texture : 

[edmuss]

Have you deleted the contents fxo and metashaders folders from c:\users\____\saved games?  It could be that a shader has corrupted and needs to be recompiled.

[DeltaMike]

@Thanatos31

Nothing wrong with your CPU, your GPU is probably not gonna push G2 at native resolution using the standard setup. Up until recently the answer would have been undersampling but you should at least look at the openxr mod

Still unclear why you're gagging on MP.  You have a strong cpu.  Maybe check background processes? How are your thermals.? Is your RAM running at the right speed?

[Sr.]

Anyone have any luck with enabling RSR (driver level) from the Radeon software?

[Thanatos31]

7 hours ago, DeltaMike said:

@Thanatos31

Nothing wrong with your CPU, your GPU is probably not gonna push G2 at native resolution using the standard setup. Up until recently the answer would have been undersampling but you should at least look at the openxr mod

Still unclear why you're gagging on MP.  You have a strong cpu.  Maybe check background processes? How are your thermals.? Is your RAM running at the right speed?

It’s so weird - and I cannot find resources to further investigate these bad CPU frames. CPU should be much stronger. 
GPU is def the linchpin overall - but I am ok with constant 45fps that seem smooth  

what’s killing me (figuratively and in Game literally) are spikes and drops in performance of CPU timings  in case my game needs to load anything- FPS drop to low doubles - but mostly just a complete blckscreen for 3-10seconds  - and is then just back to full 45fps and smoothness   

background processes - checked - there’s a few but non that eat up CPU power visible to task manager. Is there any other strategy to figure this out? 
mit just seems like the CPU never really goes full speed. It can though when tested via CPUZ or ryzen master test. 

thermals are in the green- pushing 65-70 max. 
ram has profile 2 x-amp enabled via bios. 

[WipeUout]

On 3/29/2022 at 8:56 AM, Thanatos31 said:

spikes and drops in performance of CPU timings  in case my game needs to load anything- FPS drop to low doubles - but mostly just a complete blckscreen for 3-10seconds

What are you running DCS from?  SSD or M.2? and what is the size of your page file also?  It sounds like you are getting out of memory or you have a bottleneck in your storage system.  Might want to check the health/performance of your drive or how much space is left on it.  Having a dedicated M.2 drive for DCS only helps a lot. 

On 3/29/2022 at 1:46 AM, Sr. said:

Anyone have any luck with enabling RSR (driver level) from the Radeon software?

Tried all possible resolutions and no luck.  I can't get RSR to activate.  Seems that DCS is not running in a full screen mode to allow RSR to activate.

[Sr.]

1 hour ago, WipeUout said:

What are you running DCS from?  SSD or M.2? and what is the size of your page file also?  It sounds like you are getting out of memory or you have a bottleneck in your storage system.  Might want to check the health/performance of your drive or how much space is left on it.  Having a dedicated M.2 drive for DCS only helps a lot. 

Tried all possible resolutions and no luck.  I can't get RSR to activate.  Seems that DCS is not running in a full screen mode to allow RSR to activate.

I actually saw the notification bar that comes up under the RSR setting toggle by pressing Alt+R. But it said something to the effect that DCS "screen" resolution should be reduced Height as well as Width.  Shows green and active with DCS in 2D mode.

This was after lowering the res levels under the OXRTools and the in game overlay produced by the tool kit.

I will try it this evening in SVR mode.

[Sr.]

On 3/28/2022 at 6:33 AM, Thanatos31 said:

Thanks will try - I'm not necessarily hunting the highest FPS , rather a smooth expreience and really trying to kill these spikes that cause massive drops and blackscreens for up to 10 seconds. 
I'll search for that shader mod !

Black screens...

You sure your G2 cable is sound?

I've had the blackscreens before on my first Vive and my first G2 cable. Turns out the Vive was from my grandaughter playing HL Alyx, twisting the cable too much, the I jacked up the G2 cable from continually raising the halo portion to 90* to take off the headset. Both had developed a short. Several of the wires in the cable are the smallest gauge I've seen.

 

 

 

Edited March 30, 2022 by Sr.

[DeltaMike]

@TED -- what settings are you running on the Syria map these days?  Here's mine

I just started flying on Syria (gorgeous map) and had to adjust something...

Following a tip I lowered my textures.  Put terrain textures to low and put the detail sliders in the middle and that did the trick for me.  Which surprised me a little, we aren't exactly short on VRAM or TMU's but it works

[TED]

23 hours ago, DeltaMike said:

@TED -- what settings are you running on the Syria map these days?  Here's mine

I just started flying on Syria (gorgeous map) and had to adjust something...

Following a tip I lowered my textures.  Put terrain textures to low and put the detail sliders in the middle and that did the trick for me.  Which surprised me a little, we aren't exactly short on VRAM or TMU's but it works

@DeltaMike I’m  actually using very similar setting ps to those you posted. I think the forest and scenery details are a little higher but all in all very similar. I’m all in on openxr now as I believe you are too, so I do use the fsr on the toolkit and set 75-80% with 100% in dev tools resolution. This allows me to use msaa x2 without much difficulty in sp. 

on my 6900xt I get great results using Radeon chill and locking 45fps. I know some others don’t but for me it irons out almost all micro jitters. I hate the motion smoothing so this is almost as good in terms of smoothness. I do set mr to auto in openxr dev tools. For some reason using chill and also locking 45fps in openxr toolkit works best. I was under the impression locking fps had no effect unless mr was enabled. I’m also still a big fan of process lasso where I separate dcs from wmr on the cpu and set dcs performance to real-time and ultimate performance. Let me know if you try PL and I’ll screenshot my settings. 
 

Taking off from Beirut, early evening with few clouds looks absolutely amazing. I’ve never experienced dcs so good as I have in the last few weeks since I got openxr working well for me. 

Edited April 15, 2022 by TED

[DeltaMike]

Thanks.

Agree with your thoughts re: MR.  I've been flying the F18 mostly and have my head down in the cockpit most of the time; under those circumstances all I really notice is the artifact.  

Edited April 15, 2022 by DeltaMike

[WipeUout]

Anyone tried the new AMD preview driver? They advertise double digits improvement in DX11 games... 

[Sr.]

2 hours ago, WipeUout said:

Anyone tried the new AMD preview driver? They advertise double digits improvement in DX11 games... 

About to.

 

edit: that might be a fail.... I get no image in headset now, OpenXR or SteamVR

Edited May 12, 2022 by Sr.

[WipeUout]

I will be back home in an hour or so and will try then.

[Sr.]

1 hour ago, WipeUout said:

I will be back home in an hour or so and will try then.

Got it working... though, no noticeable improvement. Haven't picked through Radeon software to see if I need to enable something.

Prior to, I was seeing 14403xx in the OXR tool GPU counter. After, relatively same flying same trk file.

 

I recommend NOT upgrading the driver. Instead, I had to remove using DDU(in safe mode) then run the installer for the Preview Driver.
I also recommend disconnection your internet before starting in safe mode to run DDU, to prevent Windows from auto installing the driver on reboot.

 

 

I doubt we'll see any help from this on the GPU side simply because DCS is so CPU limited as it is.

Edited May 12, 2022 by Sr.