DCS, OpenXR and Motion Reprojection

[RackMonkey]

My question is how do I turn off MR and confirm that it's off?

My FPS counter is always seems to be at 45FPS. It moves up a little and down a lot but always comes back to 45FPS. This is what I expect to see when MR is turned on from what I have read about what it's used for and how it does it. 

I have tweaked out my CPU and GPU and I want to see what kind of FPS I get without MR. I have turned off every option for MR or motion smoothing that I can find but my FPS is still stuck at 45FPS. I have searched for some discussions on OpenXR and MR and found very little to no useful information on the subject.

If somebody can advise me or point me to a useful thread on the subject I would be grateful. 

[edmuss]

Check your appGPU frametimes and see if they correlate with your FPS.

There was some reporting of AMD gpus locking themselves to 45fps for no apparent reason in openxr. This was with reprojection disabled.

Try running the G2 at 60hz and see if you get a different number

[RackMonkey]

Both the tool kit and DCS internal FPS counter say 45FPS after I have set WMR to 60FPS. I'm not quite sure what's going on because these same counter will show 90FPS on other screens within DCS such as the server list page.

I am currently using the Jabbah OCXR_WMR_ACC_v0.6.3 version of OpenXR. Maybe I should look for another implementation to try? 

[edmuss]

1 minute ago, RackMonkey said:

Both the tool kit and DCS internal FPS counter say 45FPS after I have set WMR to 60FPS. I'm not quite sure what's going on because these same counter will show 90FPS on other screens within DCS such as the server list page.

I am currently using the Jabbah OCXR_WMR_ACC_v0.6.3 version of OpenXR. Maybe I should look for another implementation to try? 

That's massively out of date, switch to the global install version.

You need to compare your appGPU frametimes.

[RackMonkey]

Can you provide links? I think I know where it's at on Github, but I can easily get lost on that site.  I also need help with "appGPU", I don't know where to get that number from. 

[edmuss]

https://gitlab.com/znixian/OpenOVR/-/tree/openxr#system-wide-installation

That should be the installation link. Basically save it to a folder and run the executable

AppGPU is the time taken by the gpu to render the image, this is calculated to FPS with 1000/appGPU (in ms) = FPS.

Therefore 1000/11.1ms=90 FPS, 1000/16.6ms=60 FPS and so on so forth.

The openxr toolkit overlay will show you the appGPU frametime and you should be able to check that it correlates with the FPS counter.

 

Edited November 3, 2022 by edmuss

[RackMonkey]

Got it. No difference seen but easier to install and maintain. One question though that is not addressed, or I didn't see it. When DCS does an update or you do a repair should I rerun the OpenXR install again? Since I don't know when the files go I don't know if any of them are replaced by original files.

As for AppGPU, I'm used to it being call "frametime" and DCS is showing me it bouncing between 20ms and 30ms. I'm experimenting with setting to try and get it below 20ms constantly.

[edmuss]

2 hours ago, RackMonkey said:

Got it. No difference seen but easier to install and maintain. One question though that is not addressed, or I didn't see it. When DCS does an update or you do a repair should I rerun the OpenXR install again? Since I don't know when the files go I don't know if any of them are replaced by original files.

As for AppGPU, I'm used to it being call "frametime" and DCS is showing me it bouncing between 20ms and 30ms. I'm experimenting with setting to try and get it below 20ms constantly.

Generally you shouldn't need to reapply the open composite after a DCS update but occasionally it does need to be reset if it starts booting up steamvr.

Consistent framerate will help smoothen things out it shouldn't be bouncing around really. If you can keep it at 18-19ms then you should be able to reproject to 45hz without any problems, that said dropping down to 30hz isn't an issue as it's capable of doing so, unlike steamvr.

[RackMonkey]

Well, I've updated the OpenXR software and I've replaced my CPU in order to get PCIe Gen 4 but it made no difference. It's still acting like MR is on and I seem to be stuck around 45 FPS. So back to my original question. How do I determine if MR is on and how do I turn it off if it is on? 

[TZeer]

When you say it "seems to be stuck", is it stuck, or does it fluctuate?

 

If you have 45 FPS in game, but 90 FPS while in menus. You most likely have MR on, but not locked.

Check the OpenXR settings while on Windows, it's the purple OpenXR icon. See if it's activated. If it is, deactivate.
Then go into game, and hit ctrl + F2 to get up the OpenXR toolkit window.
 

[edmuss]

56 minutes ago, RackMonkey said:

How do I determine if MR is on and how do I turn it off if it is on?

Enable the WMR performance overlay from the openxr tools desktop app, this will then shown a coloured box, green is above refresh rate, red is below refresh rate and blue is reprojecting.
Also expect about 3-4ms postGPU frametime when reprojection is enabled.

[RackMonkey]

I've seen a color coded graph like that in SteamVR developer settings but I only seem to be able to get digital readouts with the OpenXR developer setting. I'm afraid I need step by step instructions.

[edmuss]

There are no step by step instructions, just tick the box that says performance overlay on the desktop openxr app, the overlay will appear in the headset and on the VR mirror

[Burt]

Just a thought but have you got msi afterburner rivatune fps locked at 45 and forgot about it?

[RackMonkey]

@edmuss-I finally found it. I was looking at the wrong piece of software. Dame thing is hard to read high and left in one eye only, but what I can't miss is the solid RED that never seems to change no matter what my setting are.

@Burt-Your question made me thing of something. I had Afterburner installed at one point and maybe I had MR turned on and it was stuck on when I uninstalled. To start fresh I used DDU and cleaned everything up. Reinstall AMD drivers only this time and the latest Afterburner. 

I'm getting 2550 clock speed on 1.125v and it momentarily topped out at 235w draw. I'm still only getting between 35 and 40 FPS while in game. I still can't figure out why it acting as if MR is turned on somewhere.  

[DishDoggie]

Edited November 9, 2022 by DishDoggie

[DishDoggie]

Sorry putting up some things to check to see how you have them set?

[edmuss]

18 minutes ago, RackMonkey said:

I finally found it. I was looking at the wrong piece of software. Dame thing is hard to read high and left in one eye only, but what I can't miss is the solid RED that never seems to change no matter what my setting are.

Yeah, it can be a bit hard to read, especially at higher resolutions!

It will be red any time that you're below refresh rate, the fact that it's not blue at all would indicate that you do have reprojection off.  Generally the only time it will be green in DCS is if you're: -

• running super potato settings on a free flight mission
• running the headset at 60Hz and getting more than 60 fps / less than 16ms appGPU
• running a 4090 with a CPU man enough to keep it going

Try dropping the resolution to pull the frametimes down, MSAA should quell any shimmers at the cost of 2-3ms frametime; in my experience low resolution + MSAA gives better performance and image than high resolution alone.

[RackMonkey]

DishDoggy- The three setting that you circled are how mine are set.

edmuss- I don't really need to use that because I get the same information from HWinfo64, except for the color coding. I turned MR on just to see what would happen and I saw no difference and the overlay never did turn blue. My GPU runs at 99% utilization while my CPU is hanging around asking "what do you want my to do next, I'm bored". I don't think I'll get anything better unless I move to a 7900XTX or DCS gets moved to Vulkan.

[TZeer]

What is your in game settings?

I have the same card, and run some high settings. And I push 70-80 frames consistently in Nevada flying the Apache.

Post your DCS graphic and VR settings please.

[RackMonkey]

[edmuss]

Kill secondary shadows and drop MSAA to 2x, flat terrain shadows have the same hit as default for me, I've currently got them turned off.

If you're running those settings at 100% G2 resolution I'm not surprised it's slow

Edited November 10, 2022 by edmuss

[RackMonkey]

Can you tell me where all the different setting are and what to set them to? Every place I have found a setting I have left it at default except for OpenXR's toolkit where I have FSR enabled and the resolution set to 3160x3088. 
I changed my setting to what you suggested and now I've got a lot of heat blur or you might call it the shimmies. Very hard to read anything on the MFD like this.

[edmuss]

FSR introduces lots of shimmer unfortunately, I've found equal performance and better image quality to simply reduce the resolution in openxr and use MSAA to smooth out the aliasing.

In all honesty I'd leave your settings as is apart from the secondary shadows, terrain shadows and MSAAx4. Turn off FSR, drop the resolution down to 2600-2800 with MSAAx2 and see how you get on

[RackMonkey]

Thanks edmuss, your suggestions and a couple of other minor tweeks got me to an appGPU of 15 and an avg FPS 55.