resolved Not acceptable FPS & jitter no matter what / Reverb G2 + RTX 3080ti

[Sir Charcharro]

Hello everyone,

 

I just recently got into using VR and DCS is the only game I am currently using it in. Before I got my HMD, I studied some notable issues and posts by users who are currently using the G2 and I've now been trying all of those setups with no real sweet spot for myself (G2 pun intended as well).

For the 3 days I've had the headset, I've tried some of the trusty ol' setups from late 2020 and early 2021 as well as the more elaborate setups of BIGNEWY and speed-of-heat. I feel that I have got quite close to acceptable graphical quality with a setup close to BIGNEWY's whilst still having 35-50 FPS in singleplayer 'Free Flight' missions with averages around 45 FPS. I had NCP settings focused on Quality and 100% DCS SteamSS as the difference pretty much, no AA. I tried today MP and I initially also had something similar, but then in both darkness and when I was in clouds the frames just went to oblivion with constant frame drops, so ultimately I averaged around 25 FPS.

I don't know if I have some fundamental flaw in my setup or am I doing something wrong, but I don't think 3080ti + 11600K are this handicapped to produce a clean enough graphical experience with acceptable frames. I thought to give my G2 some time to show it's claws, but I already ended up meddling with the settings for 20hrs and mostly got frustrated, so now I am a bit torn, should I continue to explore it further or not. Could anyone have a look at my settings and comment if there is anything I should do differently?

Misc:

HAGS: OFF

 

NCP:

 

WMR:

 

SteamVR + Steam WMR:

 

 

 

 

Edited February 7, 2022 by Sir Charcharro

[speed-of-heat]

I would set motion smoothing to forced... 

[edmuss]

49 minutes ago, speed-of-heat said:

I would set motion smoothing to forced... 

Specifically set the WMR motion smoothing to auto or motion vector, auto will disengage it above refresh rate and motion vector with keep it engaged all the time and lock FPS to half refresh rate.

The steamvr motion smoothing has no effect on WMR smoothing.

It won't necessarily solve your FPS problems but you should be getting far more than you are.

[speed-of-heat]

13 minutes ago, edmuss said:

Specifically set the WMR motion smoothing to auto or motion vector, auto will disengage it above refresh rate and motion vector with keep it engaged all the time and lock FPS to half refresh rate.

The steamvr motion smoothing has no effect on WMR smoothing.

It won't necessarily solve your FPS problems but you should be getting far more than you are.

That’s simply wrong.

steamvr motionsmoothing  works fine for wmr headsets, you will note the op has it configured for per app, which is correct, all he needs to do now is set  his per game setting in steamvr to forced.

[edmuss]

You're right, why on earth did I have it in my head that it that the two weren't compatible?

Just tested both WMR and steamvr smoothing back to back and they do both work, I shall correct any future advice I may give!

Incidentally, I noticed a slight increase in performance with steamvr smoothing over WMR but it seemed a little more jerky when it switches on/off.  Try both

[Sir Charcharro]

Big thanks for the tip! I tested this now and got the following results in a not very busy airport in MP.

1) About 39 fps visib medium

2) About 37 fps visib high + forest detail 100%

Frametimes were more than acceptable (17ms) with no skipped frames, so i actually made also DCS SteamVR 100%.

3) About 36 avg fps.

Lets see if i should tune down the visib to medium and instead increase the SS a bit further, and also how it holds up in a more crowded scenario. Does it actually sound 'normal' that with 3080ti I would only have such FPS? Funny though, im not really bothered by it apparently... 

 

 

 

[edmuss]

These are my current settings (except I run high shadows now) using a 3070.

Additional mods/tweaks I'm running are: -
vrperfkit (with foveated render patch) fsr renderscale 0.77, sharpness 0.2, fixed foveated enabled 0.6/0.8/1.0
Kegetys VR shader mod with  speed-of-heat's clearwater version
Low bit depth normal maps for the A10C by Taz1004
Steamvr 100% PD 1.0

I get between 12-24ms frametimes depending on mission - A10C easy instant action I generally get 14-17ms which equates to 75-58 fps.

edit: don't forget that the fps counter won't be reliable if you're using motion smoothing.  Use the frametimes to judge the performance, divide 1000 by the frametime to get the fps, roughly 11ms = 90fps, 16ms = 60fps, 20ms = 50 fps.

Edited February 8, 2022 by edmuss

[speed-of-heat]

@Sir Charcharroyour settings are not excessive? Have you run fps vr? To get some frame times, is it cpu or gpu bottle necking you?  

[Sir Charcharro]

Im running fpsVR and it is orange and red on the CPU side. I think it might be bottlenecking me a bit - will check this when i get the chance later today, but I think it was somewhere around 24ms. It seems that whatever setup i used lead into CPU being in the orange & red. I have not OCd my 11600K, but the core boost is 4,9 ghz already. It also seemed that some others have this CPU in o&r in their videos, so I thought this is normal.

[speed-of-heat]

If you have a decent cooling solution you should overclock the K series CPU's, depending on your motherboard there are some good guides out there, if you are using an Asus Z Series board then i normally suggest just clicking AI Overclock (follow the instructions)  on the latest firmware release and you should see some improvement.

But i would also have a look at your "default CPU behaviour so reboot windows and give it a few mins to settle down and then have a look to see what processes are running and see which if any are eating CPU cycles, when otherwise idle, my pc runs at  about 1% when idle.  I found that things like LED lighting and its ilk just ate processor cycles.

[Hiob]

Other possible culprits are everything that has a stupid driver overhead like logitech e.g.

If possible, I would always recommend the generic windows drivers for mouse and other generic inputs. The comment from speed-of-heat regarding RGB-lighting is extremely relevant. Get rid of any tool. Same goes for Mainboard-"tools" from gigabyte, asus, msi and so on. Good place to start is the autostart tab of the task manager. Deactivate as much as possible there. Positive side effect: faster start up.

Edit: Roam through your windows settings as well - Things like voice recognition, diagnose telemetric and such should all be deactivated if not needed.

Edit: Pro tip regarding "autostart". Type "services" in the start menu. In the services app you can see what services are running and how they are startet. It's much more complete then the autostart tab. From there you can deactivate some unruly processes and deactivate their autostart behavior. Take notes when you change something, in case you cause instabilities. But it's pretty save to deactivate third party processes that are recognizable by name. (RGB-Stuff e.g.)

Edited February 8, 2022 by Hiob

[Sir Charcharro]

Thanks for the inputs. This overclocking I will try at some point definately. The 11600k is quite crispy however so even if my watercooler can keep it cool, wanna take a slow approach to this. Meanwhile I was checking on whats going on and it doesnt seem to be too bad, I am constantly around 1-2% idle so no big hogs anywhere.

I also had a look at the services, and to be hones, theres nothing extra that is 'Automatic' - Ive tried to keep my PC clean, albeit i have this logitech ghub and nordvpn, which i like to have for some reason.

Soo.. I think it comes down to fiddling with the settings in SVR and DCS, and overclocking sometime soon.

 

 

 

Edited February 8, 2022 by Sir Charcharro

[Hiob]

18 minutes ago, Sir Charcharro said:

Thanks for the inputs. This overclocking I will try at some point definately. The 11600k is quite crispy however so even if my watercooler can keep it cool, wanna take a slow approach to this. Meanwhile I was checking on whats going on and it doesnt seem to be too bad, I am constantly around 1-2% idle so no big hogs anywhere.

I also had a look at the services, and to be hones, theres nothing extra that is 'Automatic' - Ive tried to keep my PC clean, albeit i have this logitech ghub and nordvpn, which i like to have for some reason.

Soo.. I think it comes down to fiddling with the settings in SVR and DCS, and overclocking sometime soon.

 

 

 

 

Nevertheless, I would at least give it a try without ghub and/or nordvpn, just to see if it makes a difference. I got rid of ghub for exactly that reason (and have to live with the stupid default RGB on the mouse now).

[Sir Charcharro]

So that i will do then  

Btw, this is something typical for me in MP: (the frame drops only happen when i tab out to take a pic, but normally the GPU chart is around that level w/o the drops). This CPU frametime tells quite little to me actually, since the usage of CPU is not that high in any core...

[Hiob]

Have you checked your bios settings? XMP profile activated? Everything else on default?

Your CPU is definitely struggling.

[Sir Charcharro]

Ok, so I think this is actually now resolved... I had a look at another similar topic in this bugs section and its a very recent one with similar specs that i have. It was about winwing export LUA. Well, I dont have Winwing, but i had streamdeck and DCS UFC in the export file. I dont know which one it was, but when i cleared the lua, my CPU is now happy.  It also made my FPS much more acceptable, from low 30s to all time 45. I dont understand at all why these exports are so bad for the CPU, but apparently they can harm the VR experience greatly, no matter what specs u have.

[speed-of-heat]

yep exports is great and useful in 2d mostly beats the crap out of your CPU ... each time interval it makes them go of and do work for the CPU usually to refresh control states etc.. its the same thing as wing wing does.  

[Sir Charcharro]

Thank you both very much! Its now been quite joyous to actually enjoy the VR experience in DCS. I also downloaded some shaders to make it a bit more smooth.

 

One thing i noticed and also accidentally fixed is the following:

Sometimes especially in busy airports, the frames just start dropping like crazy -> By alt-tabbing out of DCS and coming back will get rid of the spikes for some time, until it retriggers. I already did switch off smoothing since i thought its from this, but i think its not, as it also occured after. Has sth like this been happening to others as well?

[edmuss]

Yup that's a bug that's been reported by a lot of people, not sure if it's DCS or steamvr but alt tab out does seem to help. Big help for me was to enable HAGS which stopped the sudden dropped frames and associated dive in performance.

Glad it's working out properly now, DCSvr really isn't bad on the whole but it's generally not plug and play unlike the super polished half-life alyx (but that's a completely different kettle of fish).

[pastranario3]

Install HwMonitor, and check the mhz of the microprocessor, I had a problem similar to yours and discovered that when I saturated the use of the cores, the mhz were automatically lowered. The temperature was correct, therefore after trying and trying, I determined that it was windows, some service that had broken, format and install again now taking advantage of windows 11, and I have not had that mhz drop from the micro anymore.

[71st_Mastiff]

if you want even more fps put your Pixel VR density to .09 you will get 90fps/

[lefuneste01]

43 minutes ago, 71st_Mastiff said:

if you want even more fps put your Pixel VR density to .09 you will get 90fps/

Only is case where fps are not tied down by CPU.  Like in this case, for example:

 

[Godric]

On 2/8/2022 at 11:18 AM, Sir Charcharro said:

Ok, so I think this is actually now resolved... I had a look at another similar topic in this bugs section and its a very recent one with similar specs that i have. It was about winwing export LUA. Well, I dont have Winwing, but i had streamdeck and DCS UFC in the export file. I dont know which one it was, but when i cleared the lua, my CPU is now happy.  It also made my FPS much more acceptable, from low 30s to all time 45. I dont understand at all why these exports are so bad for the CPU, but apparently they can harm the VR experience greatly, no matter what specs u have.

Where is this export LUA located?

[Sir Charcharro]

On 2/14/2022 at 10:44 PM, Godric said:

Where is this export LUA located?

C:\Users\(user)\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts

'Export.lua'