Performance Kudos

[wilbur81]

Hey, Mr. Grey, Wags and the Eagle Dynamics Team...

I just wanted to extend to you a hearty, "Thank You" and "Well Done" regarding the current state of DCS Open Beta. You can see in my signature that I'm running DCS on a humble GTX 1070 and not-brand-new 8700K CPU. As slow, gradual improvements are often not noticed or acknowledged by users, it just occurred to me that I'm tooling around in DCS, at full 4K and plenty of new clouds, units, in MP, SP, etc. with the settings below; all the while fluctuating between 30-50 FPS, and remarkably smooth in most cases, even when down in the 30s. There are obviously some challenges with my hardware (read: "Supercarrier with it's tower lights on and rain droplets on the canopy ), but overall - VERY pleased with the performance I'm getting in an era where there's no way I can afford to upgrade my GPU.

This is a testament to all the work you've put in, all the while juggling MANY different modules, demands, etc. Well done! 

- W

 

 

 

Edited March 21, 2022 by wilbur81

[Napa]

Starting, loading times and general stability have certainly improved a lot. 

[wilbur81]

On 3/23/2022 at 4:39 AM, Napa said:

Starting, loading times and general stability have certainly improved a lot. 

indeed. 

[ddc196]

I play exclusively in VR and I'm actually going to agree with you. Even in VR, things are getting better. This last update seems to have improved my overall experience. 

[Gun Jam]

If multi core can do what we all hope Vr users can start looking towards wide FOV HMDs (that really dont exist yet) and sharp images  (next gen 40 series cards are looking impressive) that with some multi core might be the ticket and whatever tricks the next gen hmds can pull to improve performance.

Flat panel guys like the op will likley see improve stability as they likley will be only GPU limited and not both.

we shall see things do seem to be moving in the right direction!

[St4rgun]

I'm also using a GTX1070 right now, but in VR with G2. The VR performance with this hw is only "usable" (22-23 fps) in Apache when using OpenVR FSR, medium textures, noMSAA.

Meanwhile getting the same performance as you mentioned in 2D mode. So yes, the 2D part of the graphics engine is unbelievely good, as the visual quality in 2D. But in VR it's another story, like seeing a totally different software.

Still waiting for the new engine!

Edited March 25, 2022 by St4rgun

[TOViper]

1 hour ago, St4rgun said:

I'm also using a GTX1070 right now, but in VR with G2. The VR performance with this hw is only "usable" (22-23 fps) in Apache when using OpenVR FSR, medium textures, noMSAA.

Meanwhile getting the same performance as you mentioned in 2D mode. So yes, the 2D part of the graphics engine is unbelievely good, as the visual quality in 2D. But in VR it's another story, like seeing a totally different software.

 

Using Rift CV1, I can only underline your statement.
It is:
 - Very difficult to get stable 45 fps in VR > , but
 - Easy to have stable 60 fps on screen (1920x1080) >
Shadows still have greatest impact, and Supercarrier until 2.7.10 simply speaking was *pita* (have to try it with 2.7.11 very soon).
I found no ways of improving fps, except for flying with pixel density set to 1.0 (but not more!); then, I mostly have more than 45.
Problem is, that I cannot read anything on the screens of e.g. Apache, F-18, F-16 etc. without zooming in all the time or bringing the cockpit nearer than in reality it would be.
I am happy that at least the IHADSS is readable ... and for flying this bird this is currently enough information for me, since George (or a human CPG) is doing the clicky-clacky-display-chunky-thingies

The GTX1070 is located on the lower side of the specs. Im not happy about, but that's how it currently is ...

Edited March 25, 2022 by TOViper

[Hiob]

On 3/21/2022 at 10:17 PM, wilbur81 said:

 

You're running higher GFX-stats than I with my 3080/5900X....

If you miss some FPS in certain occasions , I'd recommend water to medium.

But I absolutely agree on your original stement in the first place. Performance has increased noticeable!

Edited March 25, 2022 by Hiob

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

This patch has proven to be very much a step in the right direction, or rather a leap. 

[rayrayblues]

On 3/26/2022 at 8:36 AM, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

This patch has proven to be very much a step in the right direction, or rather a leap. 

I agree. The sad part though is the recent massive hike in GPU prices. 

My 1660Ti was $279.00 US when I bought it 3 years ago. It is now upwards of $1000.

For those of us on limited budgets, it's going to be difficult to keep up with the times.

Anything that ED can do to improve things from their end will be a Godsend.

[Cathnan]

On 3/25/2022 at 8:57 AM, St4rgun said:

I'm also using a GTX1070 right now, but in VR with G2. The VR performance with this hw is only "usable" (22-23 fps) in Apache when using OpenVR FSR, medium textures, noMSAA.

Meanwhile getting the same performance as you mentioned in 2D mode. So yes, the 2D part of the graphics engine is unbelievely good, as the visual quality in 2D. But in VR it's another story, like seeing a totally different software.

Still waiting for the new engine!

 

I have a G2 as well and recently played around with openXR to cut out steamVR. And I must say that's a difference like night and day for me. I had the VRPerfkit running with FFR and resolution at 60% in steamVR. I get the same or more FPS now with openXR at full native resolution and without FFR. DCS settings stayed the same. And that annoying flickering on the loading screen is mostly gone (Don't know if that's a general problem). I have quite a beefy computer, so your mileage may vary, but it's definitley worth a look imo

[St4rgun]

1 hour ago, Cathnan said:

I have a G2 as well and recently played around with openXR to cut out steamVR. And I must say that's a difference like night and day for me. I had the VRPerfkit running with FFR and resolution at 60% in steamVR. I get the same or more FPS now with openXR at full native resolution and without FFR. DCS settings stayed the same. And that annoying flickering on the loading screen is mostly gone (Don't know if that's a general problem). I have quite a beefy computer, so your mileage may vary, but it's definitley worth a look imo

Sounds really interesting. What GPU are you using? If possible, can you give some hints where to start? I'm still using SteamVR as default with DCS standalone. Thanks!

[Cathnan]

2 minutes ago, St4rgun said:

Sounds really interesting. What GPU are you using? If possible, can you give some hints where to start? I'm still using SteamVR as default with DCS standalone. Thanks!

this is the guide I used to set it up. There is also an extension called performance toolkit that gives you control of it from within VR. It's linked at the end of the first post in this thread. I'm not sure what actually works in it, since it seems to be in rather early developement. But I think in this version FFR and FSR do work. I have a RTX3080 Ryzen 7 3700x and 64GB RAM. And as I said, with the same ingame settings I can leave everything else that boosts performance off and get well playable framerates in my tests so far. I have yet to test in really demanding missions to tweek settings, but I won't go back. That's for sure.

[Voyager]

On 3/29/2022 at 9:14 AM, rayrayblues said:

I agree. The sad part though is the recent massive hike in GPU prices. 

My 1660Ti was $279.00 US when I bought it 3 years ago. It is now upwards of $1000.

For those of us on limited budgets, it's going to be difficult to keep up with the times.

Anything that ED can do to improve things from their end will be a Godsend.

They're going to come down this year. Mining is cratering, and Intel and AMD are adding new process nodes to the pile. I think by the end of the year we should see significant too end performance improvements, and enough availability of 30, 40, Arc, RDNA2 and RDNA3 cards that the 10&20 series parts can be replaced by considerably better cards for relatively not insane prices. 

Straight up inflation is going to bite, but we should see a lot of GPU power hitting the table pretty soon. 

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

On 3/29/2022 at 9:14 AM, rayrayblues said:

I agree. The sad part though is the recent massive hike in GPU prices. 

My 1660Ti was $279.00 US when I bought it 3 years ago. It is now upwards of $1000.

For those of us on limited budgets, it's going to be difficult to keep up with the times.

Anything that ED can do to improve things from their end will be a Godsend.

I have not seen a 1660ti go for that much, though I've seen them spike.

My 2060 has retained its value. Kinda funny.

[St4rgun]

22 hours ago, Cathnan said:

this is the guide I used to set it up. There is also an extension called performance toolkit that gives you control of it from within VR. It's linked at the end of the first post in this thread. I'm not sure what actually works in it, since it seems to be in rather early developement. But I think in this version FFR and FSR do work. I have a RTX3080 Ryzen 7 3700x and 64GB RAM. And as I said, with the same ingame settings I can leave everything else that boosts performance off and get well playable framerates in my tests so far. I have yet to test in really demanding missions to tweek settings, but I won't go back. That's for sure.

Now it's the time to say a really big thank you for Cathnan for the recommendation and mainly for the OP of the OpenXR quickstart guide and the whole ED team!

Let me say, that literally EVERYONE who uses WMR headsets (i.e. G2) MUST make the switch to OpenXR from SteamVR. The quality change is so drastic that this recommendation with the quickstart guide should be pinned to the beginning of the VR topic! Simply unbelievable.

As I said I'm using a poor "weak" GTX 1070 with strong CPU (10700k) and adequate RAM (32 GB) with the G2. But now I can set 70% in the OpenXR Tools for custom resolution and without any MSAA and medium textures in DCS the image quality is breathtaking. The crispness, the clarity is like having a used-to-blind to see the light and the world again. It is so good.

The performance is like voodoo magic: without any NIS or FSR I can reach even 45 fps with this hardware (in SP free flight, at altitude with seledted A/C like F/A-18), but it's pretty much very usable even az 23-25 fps. The smoothness is from another planet compared to the previous SteamVR. It feels like if someone secretly changed my GPU to a much stronger one...

I don't know if the last OB patch yesterday contained any performance improvement because of the coincidence with my switch to OpenXR. But the whole DCS performance is really much better now. If only we could have some AA which is hw supported and not so power hungry then this would be perfect. Now I'm looking for the new engine not for the huge performance gain but for the possible AA technology. Well done everyone!

[Paul_Exotic]

10 hours ago, St4rgun said:

Now it's the time to say a really big thank you for Cathnan for the recommendation and mainly for the OP of the OpenXR quickstart guide and the whole ED team!

Let me say, that literally EVERYONE who uses WMR headsets (i.e. G2) MUST make the switch to OpenXR from SteamVR. The quality change is so drastic that this recommendation with the quickstart guide should be pinned to the beginning of the VR topic! Simply unbelievable.

As I said I'm using a poor "weak" GTX 1070 with strong CPU (10700k) and adequate RAM (32 GB) with the G2. But now I can set 70% in the OpenXR Tools for custom resolution and without any MSAA and medium textures in DCS the image quality is breathtaking. The crispness, the clarity is like having a used-to-blind to see the light and the world again. It is so good.

The performance is like voodoo magic: without any NIS or FSR I can reach even 45 fps with this hardware (in SP free flight, at altitude with seledted A/C like F/A-18), but it's pretty much very usable even az 23-25 fps. The smoothness is from another planet compared to the previous SteamVR. It feels like if someone secretly changed my GPU to a much stronger one...

I don't know if the last OB patch yesterday contained any performance improvement because of the coincidence with my switch to OpenXR. But the whole DCS performance is really much better now. If only we could have some AA which is hw supported and not so power hungry then this would be perfect. Now I'm looking for the new engine not for the huge performance gain but for the possible AA technology. Well done everyone!

As a Quest2 user, I'd be extremely interested in a comparison between the OpenXR experience vs running DCS in native Oculus mode(how I currently run DCS).

I've seen some Quest2 users mention trying the OpenXR method but IIRC they were launching DCS I'm SteamVR mode and not the native Oculus mode prior to trying open XR

[5ephir0th]

1 hour ago, Paul_Exotic said:

As a Quest2 user, I'd be extremely interested in a comparison between the OpenXR experience vs running DCS in native Oculus mode(how I currently run DCS).

I've seen some Quest2 users mention trying the OpenXR method but IIRC they were launching DCS I'm SteamVR mode and not the native Oculus mode prior to trying open XR

I did, and not noticed any gain, i thinks it's more a problem related to HP HMD and SteamVR

[rayrayblues]

23 hours ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

I have not seen a 1660ti go for that much, though I've seen them spike.

My 2060 has retained its value. Kinda funny.

Here's a page from New Egg. Amazon doesn't have any Ti's and non Ti's are going for $400.00.

Mine is the EVGA 1660 Ti SC Black The cheapest one on NE is $688.00.

Quite a jump from $279.00.  

 

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

Holy Christmas, does it at least buy you dinner first?

[TOViper]

On 3/26/2022 at 4:36 PM, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

This patch has proven to be very much a step in the right direction, or rather a leap. 

Sorry to work against, but this patch is a nightmare in terms of VR performance. I never had that low fps.
Since days I am figuring out which config works better, but I already have lowered down to in fact low or lowest for each settings.

E.g. F-16 spawn cold in Adana on BuddySpike Blue Flag Syria 80's with about 15-20 people on the server shows 2.7 million triangles in the scene (visibility Medium), which gives me only 30 fps. When flying above 10k feet, the triangles reduce to approx 1.9 million, which gives (more or less stable 45 with ASW).

I hate to say, but it became no joy playing this game. What a mess.


 

[wilbur81]

Sorry...

I retract some of my enthusiasm in my original post from a month ago as, one or two patches ago in O.B., the water apparently must have gotten another 'tweak' of some sort. Now, I'm getting down into the 20s FPS when looking at water, particularly in external views, but it's a tad worse from the 'pit as well. To be fair to ED, a "High" water setting is probably optimistic for my humble 1070 card... Anyone else notice the water giving you a bigger hit?

Edited April 15, 2022 by wilbur81

[TOViper]

Current problem seems to be the amount of VRAM, which for the 1070 is 8GB.
I opened another thread where I am showing weird fps versus GPU utilization versus CPU utilization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abZIOFS9SeI&ab_channel=ToVip

 

Edited April 16, 2022 by TOViper