What is "VR mask"?

[Donglr]

I found this option in the VR options page and in the patch notes, however no info on it in the general DCS docs (which are from 2020 as it looks).

So what does this feature do?

I ask because after a bit of a break from flying my DCS is basically unflyable since 2.8. I usually smirked at people calling their DCS unplayable, but this time I am affected myself. Where in 2D I get 80+ fps in the Apache on a heavily populated server in 3D I am in the 20-30 fps range. I has never been that bad.

[v2tec]

Good question.

I tried to figure out by myself and recognized a little change in the (shadow) brightness. But I don't know, if more is effected and how.

I don't want to put all my VR settings here. But you definitly have more fps in 2D as in vr. I am playing in VR with around 40 - 45 fps - that's ok. I recognized some performance killers in VR. The highes cloud complexity settings, looks great in VR but causes a huge performance lost, also MSAA higher than 2...

[MadKreator]

17 hours ago, Donglr said:

I found this option in the VR options page and in the patch notes, however no info on it in the general DCS docs (which are from 2020 as it looks).

So what does this feature do?

I ask because after a bit of a break from flying my DCS is basically unflyable since 2.8. I usually smirked at people calling their DCS unplayable, but this time I am affected myself. Where in 2D I get 80+ fps in the Apache on a heavily populated server in 3D I am in the 20-30 fps range. I has never been that bad.

Are you talking about msaa mask? If so its the amount of anti aliasing relative to the FOV. With the slider all the up , anti-aliasing will be in effect across the entire field of view. As you mover the slider left( value down)  it will produce anti-aliasing closer to the center point of your view and not in your peripheral vision. You would notice it if looking around with your eyes in your headset. The idea being that since most headsets only have a small “ sweet spot” you have to move your head to look at what you want clearly anyway, so you can tune the anti-aliasing mask to give you smoother view in your sweet spot, if you don’t want it to affect the entire FOV.  I leave it all the way up, but I think its there as just a way to inch out a little more rendering performance with the effect of the areas outside of that mask zone being a little less quality. Just as turning msaa off in 2d, compared to having it on.

[HoBGoBLiNzx3]

10 hours ago, MadKreator said:

Are you talking about msaa mask? If so its the amount of anti aliasing relative to the FOV. With the slider all the up , anti-aliasing will be in effect across the entire field of view. As you mover the slider left( value down)  it will produce anti-aliasing closer to the center point of your view and not in your peripheral vision. You would notice it if looking around with your eyes in your headset. The idea being that since most headsets only have a small “ sweet spot” you have to move your head to look at what you want clearly anyway, so you can tune the anti-aliasing mask to give you smoother view in your sweet spot, if you don’t want it to affect the entire FOV.  I leave it all the way up, but I think its there as just a way to inch out a little more rendering performance with the effect of the areas outside of that mask zone being a little less quality. Just as turning msaa off in 2d, compared to having it on.

Thanks, I've always wondered what it did and prior it definitely effected my performance so I turned it down as I didn't notice much of a difference. Definitely have to mess around with it now. Does this apply to NVCP MSAA features like MFAA as well? 

[MadKreator]

46 minutes ago, HoBGoBLiNzx3 said:

Thanks, I've always wondered what it did and prior it definitely effected my performance so I turned it down as I didn't notice much of a difference. Definitely have to mess around with it now. Does this apply to NVCP MSAA features like MFAA as well? 

I’m not really sure, honestly 

[Hippo]

Bumping this as I have never seen (and don't now see) any difference when changing it: no matter how I set it I can't see any part of my image that is not anti-aliased.  I haven't tried restarting the game between changes when testing as it doesn't tell me in the options that this is necessary.

Is there anyone out there that is using it, sees that it definitely works, and sees a perfomance benefit from it?

Some time ago I used to use Kegetys's mod which offered this feature, which very evidently did work, and gave me a noticeable perfomance improvement.

EDIT: I've just run the same mission twice, with mask at 0.1 and 1.0, and not only can I see no difference, measuring performance shows no difference either.  AFAICT, for me this setting does absolutely nothing.

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by Hippo

[shrimpy_dikdik]

I read somewhere that the mask isnt applied until later on in the rendering process thus is in fact useless at the moment. If true, hopefully it gets fixed soon.

[Hippo]

I wish to complain about the long-standing and continued lack of any proper explanation from ED as to what these mask settings do.  They've been in the options for ages, but there's no tooltips* and no explanation in the manual.  I have been unable to discern whether they do anything at all, and can only conclude that they don't.  It is unacceptable to have to come to the forums to try to get answers on this and only find speculations from other users.

Please, with relation to the following settings in the VR options

• MSAA Mask Size
• enable HMD Mask

Could someone from ED please provide an official explanation?

• What exactly do the settings do?
• Are they active / do they work / require specific hardware to work / etc?

If there is an official explanation somewhere, then please accept my apologies for the above and kindly point me to it.

Perhaps ED could consider putting up a locked post that has a detailed explanation of all the options which is updated immediately every time a change is made.

Thanks for listening.

* There are no tooltips for any of the options in the VR section.

EDIT:  Apologies, MSAA Mask Size is explained in the manual

Quote

Limits the application of MSAA (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) to a circle from the center of the eye with a specified radius, which is called a mask. By default,
MSAA mask is applied to about 2/3 of the image.

It does no such thing on my system: whatever I set it to my entire image has AA applied to it.  So the question remains, has it even been implemented?  Does it work for anyone else?  I've been through 3 GPUs, 2 motherboards and 2 headsets this year and this option has never worked for me.

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by Hippo

[DayGlow]

HMD mask basically stops rendering of the edge of screen where the physical edges  of VR headsets cover part of the screens in the headset. Since you can't see these parts of the screen it prevents wasting resources rendering pixels there. 

It works depending on your headset. If you click it on and notice a portion of the top/ bottom or sides of your view go black, then it covers more than what your headset needs. 

With my Quest Pro I notice it so I keep it off. 

[Hippo]

4 hours ago, DayGlow said:

HMD mask basically stops rendering of the edge of screen where the physical edges  of VR headsets cover part of the screens in the headset. Since you can't see these parts of the screen it prevents wasting resources rendering pixels there. 

It works depending on your headset. If you click it on and notice a portion of the top/ bottom or sides of your view go black, then it covers more than what your headset needs. 

With my Quest Pro I notice it so I keep it off. 

Thanks for that.  Do you have a link to an official explanation / description from ED or is this an educated (and very reasonable) guess?  I don't want to appear ungrateful, but you shouldn't have to be coming here to explain and ED shouldn't be putting options in place without explaining what they do; especially if they don't work properly.

Edited June 23, 2023 by Hippo

[DayGlow]

The HMD Mask and AA Mask were originally part of Keyetys VR shader mod and ED adopted them into the main sim

https://www.kegetys.fi

the mod is no longer relevant and isn’t supported. I believe major shader changes occurred when the sim went from 2.7 to 2.8 making most of the performance increases from the mod redundant. 
 

if you turn on the HMD Mask and don’t see any reduction in fov around your peripheral vision then it’s a free performance increase without any effect on visual quality. 

[dburne]

Anyone know what values can be input and recognized there? Default is 1 so is it like .9, .8, etc?

[Hippo]

9 hours ago, DayGlow said:

The HMD Mask and AA Mask were originally part of Keyetys VR shader mod and ED adopted them into the main sim

https://www.kegetys.fi

the mod is no longer relevant and isn’t supported. I believe major shader changes occurred when the sim went from 2.7 to 2.8 making most of the performance increases from the mod redundant. 
 

if you turn on the HMD Mask and don’t see any reduction in fov around your peripheral vision then it’s a free performance increase without any effect on visual quality. 

Thank you again.  I'd never noticed this before (I'd always assumed it turned on the AA mask and always had it ticked on), but the following images are PrintScreen screenshots: mask off, mask on (QP), and mask on (Q2).

So, it does appear to make a difference, and the mask from the QP is different to the Q2 (although that screenshot is from May I don't suppose the difference is due to a version change).  However, I am seeing no improvement in performance whatsoever from having it turned on.  I also don't think I see any difference in the headset.  Could it be that it's only changing what is seen on the monitor?

This could all be cleared up by an explanation from ED, instead all we have is uncertainty.

Regarding the AA mask, I used to rely on Kegetys's mod back in the day but I would be surprised if it were adopted by ED "as is", since it used to cause minor graphical problems.  Whatever the case, if it is doing nothing now, why on earth does it remain in the options?

EDIT:  On further testing, I think might be a small performance improvement.

EDIT: Does anyone on QP think it reduces thesize of the image they see in the headset?  I can't say I noticed any difference, but I find it hard to test for.

 

Edited June 24, 2023 by Hippo