Experimenting with different settings and finding no changes ....

[markturner1960]

Hi, I have been doing some tweaking to see the effects and despite turning motion projection OFF in steam VR , this seems to have zero difference to either the performance, frame rate or graphical quality.....I am wondering why? I have exited DCs and also steam VR after making the changes as well. 

Incidentally, I am also using fpsvr, and despite what I set the app specific SS to, its still shows 100% on the overlay....again, why is this? I have also checked in game using the controller, while DCS is running and its defintely showing 150% SS there. Despite changing this from 100 to 150%, again, I dont seem to notice any discenable change in clarity or performance. I did this just to see what difference it made as I am trying to juggle the sweet spot on clarity and performance. 

I have been tinkering as I updated to the latest nvidia driver as it really makes a big difference in MSFS, but after updating, I noticed visual clarity was not as good in DCS....more shimmering on the edges of objects.

 

Any ideas what may be going on? I am a little frustrated as no matter what settings I use, I cant seem to get my FPS anywhere over 45...

Finally, my CPU frame times seem to be pegged at around 30, with a very noticeable pattern to the readout, bands of Orange, equally interspersed with strips of red, why is that do you think? Its an AMD CPU, 

 

Edited January 18, 2022 by markturner1960

[Brainfreeze]

I know I had to tinker to get reprojection working in steamvr... despite it being on in the steamvr setting and app specific portion of steamvr it would not take effect...eventually had to go force it via OpenVRSettingUX.exe.   So yes it can be temperamental.

Also, for some reason Steamvr was not applying the app specific SS (guess wrong linkage) so was just applying the global setting (100% in my case)... fixed it but not sure how... might be re-adding DCS in the steam app library as a non steam game.

Edited January 18, 2022 by Brainfreeze

[dburne]

With Vive Pro 2 motion reprojection in Steam VR does nothing, need to set it to enabled/disabled in Vive Console software.

[edmuss]

Motion smoothing on the reverb is in the WMR menu in steamvr. Set it to auto and it should just do its thing.

If you enable the smoothing status from the developer tab it will show what the smoothing is doing. Green is above refresh rate and smoothing is off, dark blue is below refresh rate but above threshold, light blue is CPU bound (I think) smoothing, red is smoothing off because you're below 55% of refresh rate.

[markturner1960]

thanks guys will take a look at the weekend...

[markturner1960]

On 1/18/2022 at 6:35 PM, edmuss said:

Motion smoothing on the reverb is in the WMR menu in steamvr. Set it to auto and it should just do its thing.

If you enable the smoothing status from the developer tab it will show what the smoothing is doing. Green is above refresh rate and smoothing is off, dark blue is below refresh rate but above threshold, light blue is CPU bound (I think) smoothing, red is smoothing off because you're below 55% of refresh rate.

Sorry, maybe dumb question, but how do you access the WMR menu in steam VR? And the developer tab? I have tried turning motion reproduction on and off everywhere I can see options, yet seems to make no difference to my FPS, which remains around mid forties in free flight. I have never seen any reading above 50, which I just can’t understand given my PC specs…..

Edited January 23, 2022 by markturner1960

[edmuss]

It's one of the circles on the steamvr dashboard on the bottom left. The motion smoothing is on the graphics tab (I think) and the developer tab is in there.

If you're pegged at 45fps then chances are you have motion smoothing enabled and it's holding at 45 simply because you can't sustain more than 90fps. Check the frametimes in fpsvr, for reference 11.1ms is 90fps, 16.7 is 60fps, 20ms is 50fps. That will show what frametimes your GPU is achieving although you might still be in motion smoothing if your CPU times are above 11ms.

The CPU graph should be fairly consistently green or orange, red is bad. Have you got HAGS enabled and have you got any RGB lighting going on?

[markturner1960]

This is in game ( IE with VR headset operating) and accessed using the controllers, correct? As I don’t see anything like you describe going to the steam VR settings via the desktop……

I do have HAGS enabled, but only last week, as I also fly MSFS and recently it’s been recommended to try having this on, so I am trying that out. Up till now, I have had HAGS off on the machine. Turning it on or off has not made any noticeable difference that I can see……

How to I find if I have RGB lighting?

Currently in the free flight cuacusus mission, I am getting around mid forties FPS, 13 - 15 ms GPU times, 25 -30 ms GPU times. I have steam VR and app specific SS at 100% and pretty c0nservative settings in the game GUI, MSAA x2

thanks!

Edited January 24, 2022 by markturner1960

[edmuss]

No, it's from the steamvr home before you start any games up. But yes it's accessed with the controllers.  It may be possible to get in the WMR menus from the desktop steamvr app but I'm not too sure.

The steamvr dashboard looks like this: -

Third icon at the bottom left is the WMR settings menu.  The graphics menu is where you set the motion smoothing, the developer tab is where you can turn on the status indicator.

HAGS doesn't appear to play nicely with WMR smoothing for DCS but you might not notice if the lack of smoothing is stopping it being smooth.

With the RGB lighting, do you have any of these horrific (in my opinion) multicoloured lights inside your PC that can change colour; the controlling software for them has been reported to sometimes take up unnecessary CPU cycles that are better used elsewhere.

[markturner1960]

Brilliant, thanks, found it, it was hidden behind an icon saying 2 more menus….so, definitely have the motion reproduction ON now and can see how it works. I think I could not before due to my refresh rate being set at 90 ( see separate thread) but at 60, it works just fine. Will check out the lighting! 
 

Thank you Edmuss.

[edmuss]

Good stuff!

I've only got two menu icons there so it hadn't hidden any of them.  When set to 90Hz you need to be able to keep the framerate above 50fps (20ms) to stop it turning off.  The FPS counter in DCS and fpsvr will show either 30 or 60fps @60Hz depending on the smoothing state; check your frametimes in the graph and remember that 11 is 90fps, 16 is 60 fps and 20 is 50 fps then you can more easily judge how things are running on the fly.

I've found that DCS VR performance is incremental gains, there's not one sticking plaster and it's not always possible to bruteforce it with the biggest GPU.  I dare say that there could be a lot of other tweaks that will improve things for you but for now a smooth base is much better to work from.  I suspect you could now smash all ingame settings to high and only gain 1-2ms.  I tune it to run at around 24ms worst case empty mission scenario - rooftop pass over Beirut is my go to. I'm currently getting around 19-24ms rooftop and 14-16ms angels12 with most settings maxed out.

[freehand]

5 hours ago, edmuss said:

No, it's from the steamvr home before you start any games up. But yes it's accessed with the controllers.  It may be possible to get in the WMR menus from the desktop steamvr app but I'm not too sure.

The steamvr dashboard looks like this: -

Third icon at the bottom left is the WMR settings menu.  The graphics menu is where you set the motion smoothing, the developer tab is where you can turn on the status indicator.

HAGS doesn't appear to play nicely with WMR smoothing for DCS but you might not notice if the lack of smoothing is stopping it being smooth.

With the RGB lighting, do you have any of these horrific (in my opinion) multicoloured lights inside your PC that can change colour; the controlling software for them has been reported to sometimes take up unnecessary CPU cycles that are better used elsewhere.

You can find here :

*:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\MixedRealityVRDriver\bin\win64\OpenVRSettingsUX.exe

[eaglecash867]

Yup, the method that Brainfreeze and freehand use is the easiest way to turn the motion reprojection on and off for a WMR headset like the G2.  I just have a shortcut for it on my desktop.  3D Blu-Rays don't play well with reprojection, so I wanted a quick way to get to where I can turn it on and off.  Motion reprojection should work no matter which of the two refresh rates you select.  I have my refresh rate set at 90, because setting it to 60 makes me feel like my eyes are being ripped out of my head.  With refresh rate set to 90, and motion reprojection set to Force On, I get a solid 45 FPS indicated on the DCS frame counter.  What you see is actually double that, its just that FPS counters aren't capable of measuring the interpolated frames.  I select Force On instead of Auto, just because it seems to eliminate the occasional hitches you might see when motion reprojection turns on and off automatically.

Edited January 25, 2022 by eaglecash867

[YMadDog]

@markturner1960 Somehow my performance dropped compared to December last year (I felt it did but never understood why). I tried everything but performance was bad even with the lowest settings possible. Then I checked CPU performance and found out that my CPU was throttled. Check in your BIOS if you have activated your "Turbo Mode" or "Game Mode" (depending on CPU). My CPUs frequency was locked at around 3.7 GHz (I think) and Turbo Mode is 4.7 GHz. I activated it (MSI mainboard > Game Mode) and suddenly got higher fps (50 - 60 fps) and better frame time (around 15-17 ms)