Open XR runtime support

[zildac]

So just had another quick "play" with this. One of the benefits is that my G2 can now also have 30FPS with motion repro on as per the "other" flight sim that uses OpenXR natively. I couldn't get the menu for Open XR Toolkit to display, so I need to have a fiddle with that, but I'm not sure DCS is supported. I did notice some odd "wobble" when stationary using the OIpenXR hack but need more time to play, really.

[Supmua]

4 hours ago, Greekbull said:

So by using this you can use Open XR toolkit with DCS?  Do you just run Open XR(instead of Steam VR?) and then DCS?

Nope.  Opencomposite is a reimplementation of OpenVR that bypasses SteamVR.  It has nothing to do with OpenXR.

[zildac]

Nope.  Opencomposite is a reimplementation of OpenVR that bypasses SteamVR.  It has nothing to do with OpenXR.

Er yes you can use Openxr toolkit. There's an interesting conversation going on with the author on Discord right now.

Er yes you can use Openxr toolkit. There's an interesting conversation going on with the author on Discord right now.

Game Engine -> OpenVR API -> OpenXR API -> OpenXR Toolkit -> OpenXR Runtime -> OS API

It's not fully working, but it's certainly looking promising

[dburne]

I think ED would do well by strongly considering adding native Open XR support to DCS.

 

[Supmua]

6 hours ago, zildac said:

Er yes you can use Openxr toolkit. There's an interesting conversation going on with the author on Discord right now. Game Engine -> OpenVR API -> OpenXR API -> OpenXR Toolkit -> OpenXR Runtime -> OS API

It's not fully working, but it's certainly looking promising

Interesting, do you have the discord link? I’d like to join.  

 

Edit: I’m in that OpenXR Toolkit discord now, it seems that it’s not yet working but they’re looking into this.  It would be neat to see OpenXR Toolkit’s fixed foveated rendering—which is my absolute favorite MSFS mod—in DCS, but we might have a better luck with fholger’s OpenVR native VRperformance toolkit since fixed foveated is already in just needed to be better implemented.  Both of these tools are very similar in features and functionality.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Supmua

[zildac]

1 hour ago, Supmua said:

Interesting, do you have the discord link? I’d like to join.  

 

Edit: I’m in that OpenXR Toolkit discord now, it seems that it’s not yet working but they’re looking into this.  It would be neat to see OpenXR Toolkit’s fixed foveated rendering—which is my absolute favorite MSFS mod—in DCS, but we might have a better luck with fholger’s OpenVR native VRperformance toolkit since fixed foveated is already in just needed to be better implemented.  Both of these tools are very similar in features and functionality.

 

Thus far the performance benefits of this route versus VRPerfkit seem minimal, but this is two beta modules OPENXRTK and Open-Comp-Acc. Interesting nevertheless

 

https://discord.com/channels/933220354401398785/953057264695128094

 

 

Oops missed your edit, you found it

Edited March 15, 2022 by zildac

[nikoel]

Hey boys. Just wanted to let you know that Open-Composite alongside OpenXR Toolkit is now working with full FSR upscale support. I haven't tried NIS or any other features

The performance improvements, alongside visual improvements are very substantial for me (3900x/6900xt/G2)

Here is the discord with instructions and screenshots https://discord.gg/Tw3q7fxc

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by nikoel

[Picchio]

Sounds fantastic... forgive the ignorance, but what does it do?

And how to apply it?

Edited March 15, 2022 by Picchio

[nikoel]

It bypasses SteamVR

Why do you want to do this? Because now that I have tried OpenXR, the connection between WMR and SteamVR appears to be either highly inefficient or is unable to utilise resources as well as OpenXR. Which one it is I don't know, but the result is the same regardless

Edited March 15, 2022 by nikoel

[DeltaMike]

About a year ago some windows engineers came out and admitted the handoff from svr to WMR is a bottleneck. You can mitigate that somewhat by disabling virtual monitors, which seems to be default behavior now, but still. Known problem. 

[Lt_Jaeger]

Before I step down this rabbit hole as well, how much gain we are talking here.

 

I'm running a G2 on 3080TI with 5900, tuned with VRperfKit and all that is imaginable.   My benchmark is the F-14 cold start in NTTR which lead to a frame time around 17-18ms looking around.

I know it is all very dependent on a bunch of things, but can someone provide a rough ballpark number, so I would be able to figure out if it's worth it to start digging into this, please.

[Picchio]

Also: a step-by-step guide please, if possibile, so that we're sharing the same process and settings.

[nikoel]

Not going happen for a while as we are currently working out the best settings and edits. I don’t want to publish something that will be superseded in a few days because we have made more improvements. You’re welcome to join us on the discord channel and give it a go. It’s easy to do once you’ve read what we have been doing. There are heaps of very smart guys who already made leaps in the last 24hrs. Eg introduction of FSR/NIS. Next up will be integrated lite reshade with saturation/contrast etc… Hoping to get FOV render and anti shake as well one day

[Picchio]

Already joined, I can't really contribute productively but I love experiments. Will test asap.

[nikoel]

@DeltaMike @edmuss@speed-of-heat

Boys, I think this is really worth your while, I can’t use FPSVR but you don’t need it to see just how big difference it is

The more the merrier, come join us. (Or at least try it and let us know what you think) 

I would love your input (or anyone who is reading this)

Edited March 15, 2022 by nikoel

[edmuss]

Something I'm going to be looking into, currently at work and likely won't be able to start looking at it till at least 10pm tonight because I don't get to play computers till the toddler has taken himself to bed

Given that I get very smooth VR currently, without fpsvr/steamvr perf graph or motion smoothing indicator (as they're all part of steam) how would I best tell what it's doing.  Is motion smoothing handled at all or are we looking at consistently running above refresh rates?

[Digitalvole]

I read something a few months back that said OpenXR was going to become the industry standard for all VR headsets. Even Facebook said they want to use OpenXR for there HMDs.

If this is true it’s a matter of when rather than if DCS will start using it. 
I too am very much looking forward to that day. 

[dburne]

1 hour ago, Digitalvole said:

I read something a few months back that said OpenXR was going to become the industry standard for all VR headsets. Even Facebook said they want to use OpenXR for there HMDs.

If this is true it’s a matter of when rather than if DCS will start using it. 
I too am very much looking forward to that day. 

 

Yeah me too, this news is freakin huge!

[edmuss]

@nikoel

Some rather impressive image clarity there!

Copied the files/folders over to the DCS folder (backed up copies of the originals), WMR running steamvr not running. First boot into DCS and it's all cross eyed and zoomed, restarted DCS and all comes in clear as day.  Left everything else in place - shader mods and vrperfkit (which I don't think is working).

Loaded up A10C easy instant action and immediately things are just that much clearer (and this coming from steamvr 150% fsr 0.75 which for me, up to now has trumped all previous settings for clarity).  Bearing in mind that this is with the G2 running at 100% resolution.  Performance is about on par if not slightly faster than with my previous settings but there's not a huge amount in it, but this is before any upscaling has been applied and image quality is much better.  FPS is measurable using the DCS frame counter.

I did test with turning motion smoothing on using the openxr dev toolkit and I think it works much better than steam/wmr for steam does (either that or it's not working at all!), despite being below refresh rate I still had a smooth image down to about 38 fps below which it started to get a tiny microstutter when looking sideways.  However, if the smoothing was engaged, I witnessed no artifacts at all - the 100% smoothing telltale on the A10C is the right wing probe, the tip of it bends when you roll; with openxr it was completely solid and stable image.

I've not managed to get openxr toolkit to load the menu in the headset, pressing ctrl+F2 doesn't do anything, did you get a resolution for that?  Once I can access the upscaling options then I would imagine that steamvr is permanently shut down for DCS!

Added bonus 1, leap motion works perfectly!

Added bonus 2, the vram overflow bug that happened if you launched back to back missions and tanked the framerate appears to be nonexistent with openxr!

The future of DCS vr is looking very bright if this is direction that is going to be taken

[DeltaMike]

Dying to try it. Probably this weekend. 

Edited March 16, 2022 by DeltaMike

[nikoel]

1 hour ago, edmuss said:

@nikoel

Some rather impressive image clarity there!

Copied the files/folders over to the DCS folder (backed up copies of the originals), WMR running steamvr not running. First boot into DCS and it's all cross eyed and zoomed, restarted DCS and all comes in clear as day.  Left everything else in place - shader mods and vrperfkit (which I don't think is working).

Loaded up A10C easy instant action and immediately things are just that much clearer (and this coming from steamvr 150% fsr 0.75 which for me, up to now has trumped all previous settings for clarity).  Bearing in mind that this is with the G2 running at 100% resolution.  Performance is about on par if not slightly faster than with my previous settings but there's not a huge amount in it, but this is before any upscaling has been applied and image quality is much better.  FPS is measurable using the DCS frame counter.

I did test with turning motion smoothing on using the openxr dev toolkit and I think it works much better than steam/wmr for steam does (either that or it's not working at all!), despite being below refresh rate I still had a smooth image down to about 38 fps below which it started to get a tiny microstutter when looking sideways.  However, if the smoothing was engaged, I witnessed no artifacts at all - the 100% smoothing telltale on the A10C is the right wing probe, the tip of it bends when you roll; with openxr it was completely solid and stable image.

I've not managed to get openxr toolkit to load the menu in the headset, pressing ctrl+F2 doesn't do anything, did you get a resolution for that?  Once I can access the upscaling options then I would imagine that steamvr is permanently shut down for DCS!

Added bonus 1, leap motion works perfectly!

Added bonus 2, the vram overflow bug that happened if you launched back to back missions and tanked the framerate appears to be nonexistent with openxr!

The future of DCS vr is looking very bright if this is direction that is going to be taken

I have FSR working via Toolkit. At the moment you need to edit the Registry to get it to work CTRL+F2 does not work. I have put the instructions on how to do it in the discord here is the direct link to where the instructions start https://discord.com/channels/610534461456777257/953045097207975987/953185200853102632 

When not CPU limited (in the air) With FSR I am getting 90FPS at 150% (3800px per eye) which is a little crazy

Edited March 16, 2022 by nikoel

[DerekSpeare]

Not really sure if they even read these forums to know what us customers want.  If OpenVR gives better performance, than it only makes sense to implement it if it is developmentally feasible. 

[nikoel]

So I've tagged one of the ED Community Managers on their official Discord a couple of days ago. So far we have - *chirp chirp* - crickets

I did however get flamed on there for suggesting that this was possible and had to explain several times it's working on the G2 and had great performance benefits. 'No this is only possible on oculus headsets'. Then they were 100% sure that the performance increases were from FSR mod (even though we got it to work only yesterday) and that it's possible to run VR well with a GTX1060 and a 4600K ()

I closed off by saying I can lead them to water, but I can not make them drink and left a link to the discord for anyone who want's to try. Unfortunately it seems that many on there are so used to giving the same advice that they are closed off to new developments  

Edited March 16, 2022 by nikoel

[Cab]

This is sounding very, very promising. 

I know improvements are moving along kind of quickly on this mod, but when things settle down a little would someone consider posting some layman-oriented download and installation instructions?

It's probably just me but I am pretty confused. I've also been to the Discord but that didn't help.

Thanks in advance for all the effort.

 

[Baldrick33]

This is what i did to get it to work:

Download the file OCXR_WMR_ACC_v0.4.zip from here:

https://gitlab.com/Jabbah/open-composite-acc/-/releases

From the zip file copy the files to your DCS installation bin folder (backup existing files first):

opencomposite.ini
openvr_api.dll
D3DCompiler_47.dll

Note that I already had OpenXR Tools installed on my PC, you can get it from here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/openxr-tools-for-windows-mixed-reality/9n5cvvl23qbt#activetab=pivot:overviewtab

Note that having the display timing overlay on will stop DCS from starting

I just started DCS in VR mode normally - some people say you need to keep DCS in the foreground when loading by clicking on the icon in the status bar, I didn't seem to need to do this but if you get a blank screen try this.