OpenXR Toolkit Tuning Guide (updated 21/02/23)

[The_Nephilim]

Well in DCS I managed in Single Player mode to get the Rez in OpenXR to 40% with low settings and MSAAx2 and roughly 45fps.. I can get Multiplayer to probally 30% with MSAAx2 as well getting 40FPS at the base and 45FPS further out..

 

I really like what OpenXR has done here with this fix, I just would like to get a better video card like a 2080Ti but those things are at the level price wise of insanity. I keep hearing how the Prices are gonna go down but in reality they never will.. maybe used cards will at some point but after what happened the new cards will never see low pricing like before..

 

Just glad OpenXR Gave me some new life in VR with my 1070GTX. Now we can only hope Vulkan brings more performance for aging gear.

[edmuss]

That's good that it's released a little more use from your gpu

I had a 1070 when I got my G2 with the hope of being able to run it at 50% in DCS but with steamvr it looked terrible at that resolution so last november I picked up a 3070fe.

I got the 3070 direct from nvidia (via scan who are the fulfillment partner here in the UK) for msrp of £469, I then made use of the very bouyant gpu market and slung the 1070 on ebay and it bidded up to £349!  By the time I took out fees and my miscalculation on postage I had £300 which massively offset the cost of the upgrade.

I don't know if the 1070s are still going for good money on ebay but if you can afford the cash up front for a 3070FE or bigger then it's a possibility and may not be much more expensive than buying a 2080ti.  The prices of the 3rd party vendor GPUS are coming down but who knows if they'll get as cheap as the FE cards?

[TED]

I've got everything working nicely with openxr and had zero problems. I've been like a kid with a new toy since I first installed it. 

One thinh is confusing me a bit though and that is the relationship between the between the custom resolution in openxr tools and upscale percentage slider in the toolkit. 

I've been adjusting up and down and seeing various changes. The scale in toolkit appears to raise the amount of pixels as the percentage is decreased. 

Right now I'm running 115% custom resolution in openxr tools for Windows and 85% in the openxr toolkit, with fsr enabled and working and no motion reprojection. This seems to give a very clear, sharp image with no need for msaa and a good performance. It actually looks as though msaax2 is applied even though it is not and there is of course significant performance benefit to not enabling msaa. 

So all works well, but I'd like to understand why and what exactly these settings do. It's absolutely not clear in the toolkit user guide. 

[edmuss]

8 minutes ago, TED said:

I've got everything working nicely with openxr and had zero problems. I've been like a kid with a new toy since I first installed it. 

One thinh is confusing me a bit though and that is the relationship between the between the custom resolution in openxr tools and upscale percentage slider in the toolkit. 

I've been adjusting up and down and seeing various changes. The scale in toolkit appears to raise the amount of pixels as the percentage is decreased. 

Right now I'm running 115% custom resolution in openxr tools for Windows and 85% in the openxr toolkit, with fsr enabled and working and no motion reprojection. This seems to give a very clear, sharp image with no need for msaa and a good performance. It actually looks as though msaax2 is applied even though it is not and there is of course significant performance benefit to not enabling msaa. 

So all works well, but I'd like to understand why and what exactly these settings do. It's absolutely not clear in the toolkit user guide. 

Glad it's working all ok

The OXRDT custom resolution slider is analogous to  SVR supersampling rate so you're running 115% of the G2 native resolution.
The  OXRTK upscale percentage is the size that it will render the original image at and then scale it up with magic and wizards to the target resolution (115% in your case).

So your target render size is nominally 3565x3565 (based on if 100% is 3100x3100), the upscaler is then rendering at 85% of this (3030x3030) and then scaling back up to the target of 3565x3565.  In effect, you're actually rendering an equivalent of slightly below 100%.  My preference in your position would be to turn off the upscaling and just run it at 100% resolution; I see lots of shimmer introduced by any of the upscaling techniques.

I've noticed that OC_ACC / OXR in general has much less aliasing apparent than SVR, I run 75% and without any upscaling I see much less shimmer and aliasing.  With the performance uptick I can afford to turn on MSAAx2 and get a beautiful image and still pull enough frames to keep it smooth without MR.

 

[winghunter]

Very strange, I am seeing the opposite: much more aliasing and shimmer with 80% openXR than with 80% steamVR

[Biggus]

MR always on leaves me with bubbly artifacts and drops my frame rate into the teens on the F-14 Forrestal case 1 recovery instant action even if I set everything to low.  Disabled is also quite unpleasant.  Auto is the only way that I get a good result (and it's a great result even with my settings cranked up to high with 4xMSAA, far better than SVR ever achieved).  My system isn't a bad one, either.  A 5800X with a 3070 and 32gb of some pretty well tuned RAM.  Just an observation, but I wouldn't completely write it off as not worth experimenting with.

[edmuss]

Auto motion reprojection shouldn't do anything, that functionality is written into the openxr dev tools so that automatic game profiling can be applied, however there is currently only one game profiled and that is MSFS2020.  DCS should be either disabled or always on, note that the always on naming is somewhat confusing as with WMR4SVR always on was locked to 45fps reprojection only and wouldn't disengage when you got above refresh rate.

I'll test with it in auto but it shouldn't behave correctly.

I'm certainly not writing off MR, in fact once they have straightened out the bug in it then I may well reinstate it and smash all of the DCS settings up to 11

edit: As expected, auto MR does precisely nothing, as in it's turned off.  Anyone who has it on auto and claims to have the smoothest flight ever?  You've just turned MR off.

Edited March 31, 2022 by edmuss

[A.F.]

Hi edmuss,

Have you already experimented with the "Controller emulation" setting?
And what can you do with it?
Can I use Leap motion to change the settings in the menu?

[edmuss]

22 minutes ago, A.F. said:

Hi edmuss,

Have you already experimented with the "Controller emulation" setting?
And what can you do with it?
Can I use Leap motion to change the settings in the menu?

Did you intend to post this in the leap motion thread?

I have no idea about the controller emulation, everything is on my hotas or controlled in the cockpit via leap.
You can use the leap to control the menus if you have the pointers enabled; I don't use the pointers as I have yet figured out how to reliably achieve a consistent mouse click with them - I much prefer to use the gloves to poke buttons.

[A.F.]

 

I thought I was in the right place.

In the OpenXR toolkit there is a setting called "Controller emulation" (inside the Input menu).
I am a fan of Leap Motion and wonder what it can be used for.

[edmuss]

Oh I have no idea sorry, not something I've looked into

[Ferch]

Hi Guys,

I was running VRPerfKit before, and switched to OpenXR. After setting NIS upscaling, and similar FOVated rendering, I am happy.

Results are quite comparable, and without actually testing the frame rate can't really tell which is better. Will stick to OpenXR for now. (in game Toolkit settings are a plus)

(Ryzen 5800, 3080Ti 12G, 32Gb RAM)

Ferch

[muzica9]

On 3/31/2022 at 4:20 PM, edmuss said:

 

edit: As expected, auto MR does precisely nothing, as in it's turned off.  Anyone who has it on auto and claims to have the smoothest flight ever?  You've just turned MR off.

 

i also have better an stable frame rates with auto than with MR off. tested several times in different scenarios. with MR off is bouncing from high to low fps often.

[edmuss]

Auto currently turns MR off, as stated by the developer who is writing the toolkit

With it set to auto, put all DCS settings to high, 200% render resolution till you get 25-30fps and go fly 500 foot over the top of any or the large cities on the Syria map (Damascus or Beruit), look out of the side of the cockpit at the buildings and tell me if it's smooth with no stuttering.  Also note that you will not see any ghosting artifacts on wings and cockpit with MR set to auto, because it's not reprojecting.

If your fps is bouncing up and down when you have MR off then your fps is bouncing up and down when you have MR on, you're just not seeing it because the fps counter is locked to a refresh rate fraction; if you read the frametimes correctly in the metrics then you should see the same happening.

When you change refresh rate fractions it takes a couple of seconds to make that change, if your framerate is around the right the threshold then you may be switching multiple fractions several times in quick succession - when this happens the framerate displayed is averaged over the transistion time hence why you can sometimes see average fps counts that fall between the refresh fractions (90-45-30-22 for 90Hz).

[Tony86]

hey pilots,

i play with oxr plus the toolkit for few days now with my g2. it is really Nice. i Wonder if there is a difference between changing résolution in oxr directly or leaving it at 100% and then change the résolution in game via the toolkit menu?

at the moment i play 60% oxr and 100% with the toolkit in game menu.

 

thanks for your help

[edmuss]

4 minutes ago, Tony86 said:

hey pilots,

i play with oxr plus the toolkit for few days now with my g2. it is really Nice. i Wonder if there is a difference between changing résolution in oxr directly or leaving it at 100% and then change the résolution in game via the toolkit menu?

at the moment i play 60% oxr and 100% with the toolkit in game menu.

 

thanks for your help

The in-game slider resolution menu is only applicable for setting the upscaling target. If you enable upscaling (nis or fsr) and then set the upscale resolution then you'll gain some performance but with additional shimmer.

For best image quality I would leave it as you have, if you have spare performance overhead then you can increase the resolution to clear up the image a little.

[Tony86]

4 minutes ago, edmuss said:

The in-game slider resolution menu is only applicable for setting the upscaling target. If you enable upscaling (nis or fsr) and then set the upscale resolution then you'll gain some performance but with additional shimmer.

For best image quality I would leave it as you have, if you have spare performance overhead then you can increase the resolution to clear up the image a little.

ok....

i will let my 60 % in oxr and will see if i can upscale a bit in the ingame menu.

if i cant upscale due to my hardware i will leave NIS\FSR to off.

thanks

[edmuss]

The in-game menu is only for if you're using nis/fsr, it will have no effect otherwise.

Enabling nis/fsr and then setting a render resolution of around 75% will give you more FPS but also more shimmer, it makes it easier on your hardware

Edited April 2, 2022 by edmuss

[Tony86]

46 minutes ago, edmuss said:

The in-game menu is only for if you're using nis/fsr, it will have no effect otherwise.

Enabling nis/fsr and then setting a render resolution of around 75% will give you more FPS but also more shimmer, it makes it easier on your hardware

 

understood.

i need to find the good preferences for my hardware.

thanks.

[SkipCarey]

So openxr works alongside AMDs FSR? I dont have to delete its api in my saved games/dcs openbeta/bin?

3 hours ago, edmuss said:

The in-game slider resolution menu is only applicable for setting the upscaling target. If you enable upscaling (nis or fsr) and then set the upscale resolution then you'll gain some performance but with additional shimmer.

For best image quality I would leave it as you have, if you have spare performance overhead then you can increase the resolution to clear up the image a little.

 

 

[edmuss]

FSR is implemented via the OXRTK, you don't need any other files in your bin folder.

[Sr.]

35 minutes ago, SkipCarey said:

So openxr works alongside AMDs FSR? I dont have to delete its api in my saved games/dcs openbeta/bin?

 

 

Which file would that be?

[SkipCarey]

but those files ARE there and what Im wondering is do I HAVE to delete them before I install openxr?

1 hour ago, edmuss said:

FSR is implemented via the OXRTK, you don't need any other files in your bin folder.

 

 

[SkipCarey]

Openvr_api.dll, is the extra file you put into your bin folder alongside your original openVr_api.dll ,which is renamed to original so both are functional this is how you initiate AMD FSR 

1 hour ago, Sr. said:

Which file would that be?

 

[Biggus]

On 4/1/2022 at 12:20 AM, edmuss said:

edit: As expected, auto MR does precisely nothing, as in it's turned off.  Anyone who has it on auto and claims to have the smoothest flight ever?  You've just turned MR off.

 

 

Yesterday you offered a pretty reasonable suggestion on a thread I posted in the VR bugs subforum regarding a large black artifact across the front of my cockpit.  I was able to narrow that down to an OpenXR issue that only occurs when MR is on automatic.  MR auto is definitely doing something.  It might be unintended, but auto is not equal to disabled.  Prior to discovering this issue, I ran the same ~5 minute scenario for hours, testing each state.  I wish that I'd thought to put the OXRDT overlay up while I was testing it to provide you with some solid evidence.  I've since made some substantial changes to my setup so I'm not sure if I'll be able to replicate it again, but it was glorious prior to the shader issue.