DCS VR Performance Optimization

[Qcumber]

Another comment on latency, and I realise this is different from that discussed in the video. I am adding it here for anyone reviewing the thread.

For anyone using VD I have found that if the decode latency goes above about 12 ms I notice stutter and lag, even if the overall latency is below 40 ms. This latency is dependent on Bitrate. The maximum Bitrate I can get with WiFi is 200 Mbps. If I use an ethernet cable I can manage 400Mbps. 

[speed-of-heat]

depends on the colour... cpu bound in Yellow is "fine" but ... CPU in RED that is an issue 

[Aapje]

13 hours ago, Panzerlang said:

And yeah, from the end of the video, theoretically at least, it looks like Reflex would work wonders in VR. It brings frame-time well under the threshold of visual acuity.

Reflex 2 has copied from VR. The warping of the frame they do seems to be the same thing that Spacewarp does. So the question is whether this is not already done in VR.

[Ready]

Complete reinstall of W10 returned another 5fps and better frametimes. See complete list of changes/settings in the first posting of this thread.

Over the years the system got bloated with all sorts of traces from old hardware that I upgraded (2x GPU and CPU) and software that I tried and not fully removed. The system is snappy and clean again! I considered W11, but there are too many bad stories out there and for GUI modifications with taskbar etc W10 is easier. 

The only thing I still notice is that it seems that when I hit the FPS limit some sort of trouble in FPS and frametimes appears. When I stay a bit below 90, like 88fps, the graph somehow seems more stable. (I run tests on the A-10C default mission Take off from Marianas. Which is quite demanding from the start.) The big disconnect in the chart below is from the reinstall. The last tests with reduced .2%lows are trials to see what visuals can further improve to stay a bit below 90fps. The comings days will spend some more time pulling the .2%'s up by finding the apps/services that are creating the interrupts and disturbing the frames. Will try out Presentmon to hunt and kill those 'transient spikes' that cause the frametimes to drop. 

 

Core Isolation Enabled

Some people recommend turning off core isolation for better performance. I tested and it gives me worse performance. I will keep it on (and it will keep my pc safer in the process).

 

@edmuss I tried your settings with DLSS Performance and 1.2 on the focus multiplier. Looks fine!

 

Edited January 19 by Ready

[yoadknux]

This is a great thread you sure are a dedicated person. 

I'm kinda through with all the min maxing of the settings, I just focus on playing even at lower settings. 

One thing for certain though, I wish I had an x3d processor instead of my 14900k.

[Ready]

18 hours ago, yoadknux said:

This is a great thread you sure are a dedicated person. 

I'm kinda through with all the min maxing of the settings, I just focus on playing even at lower settings. 

One thing for certain though, I wish I had an x3d processor instead of my 14900k.

Thanks, yes I could not stand it that I lost performance somewhere down the line and did not know where that happened. It is like that feeling you have when you can't remember a name or something like that. It keeps eating at you. I now think I found a pretty good sweet spot in my Windows configuration, where I get almost max settings everywhere, except Marianas, for which I have a second preset in DCS with less trees etc. I won't be tweaking as much anymore since I got my 1% lows to come up as well. I will still hunt down the couple of things that are sometimes all of a sudden interrupting DCS's cpu cycles, but that's about it I think. Otherwise I am pretty happy. There were quite a couple of eyeopeners for me in the process. Certain things that were advised by others (even by the DCS online recommendation log) which worked counterproductive in my setup. I think I now pretty much know what each windows setting, service and most of the DCS settings and mods do performance-wise, which gives me peace of mind.

 

Edited January 19 by Ready

[jnr4817]

On 1/18/2025 at 6:34 PM, Ready said:

Thanks, yes I could not stand it that I lost performance somewhere down the line and did not know where that happened. It is like that feeling you have when you can't remember a name or something like that. It keeps eating at you. I now think I found a pretty good sweet spot in my Windows configuration, where I get almost max settings everywhere, except Marianas, for which I have a second preset in DCS with less trees etc. I won't be tweaking as much anymore since I got my 1% lows to come up as well. I will still hunt down the couple of things that are sometimes all of a sudden interrupting DCS's cpu cycles, but that's about it I think. Otherwise I am pretty happy. There were quite a couple of eyeopeners for me in the process. Certain things that were advised by others (even by the DCS online recommendation log) which worked counterproductive in my setup. I think I now pretty much know what each windows setting, service and most of the DCS settings and mods do performance-wise, which gives me peace of mind.

 

That would be an awesome reference material for the community. 

[Simo]

On 1/20/2025 at 11:17 PM, jnr4817 said:

That would be an awesome reference material for the community. 

See first post in this thread - looks like Ready keeps it updated with latest tweaks. It is indeed an awesome resource!

[Ready]

LatencyMon Hard Pagefaults

So I was running a simple mission (A-10C NTTR Target practice with only a handful of stationary targets) to test some performance things. I turned on LatencyMon to look at my interrupts and noticed that DCS was quite heavily using the SSD in a mission where I did not make many miles.

In about 10 minutes there were about 14.000 'Hard Pagefaults' created, because certain info was not in my RAM. I created a swapfile of 64GB, so I would assume most of the stuff is loaded into RAM at the start of the mission.

Some of this SSD-reading is probably the cause of frametime spikes because I sometimes saw a dip when I was looking in a certain direction where there is some stuff on the ground.
My current preload Radius is set to 100.000, will try lower and higher settings to see what it does. Might even move DCS to a faster SSD to see if that helps. It might also be My Process Lasso's SmartTrim trying to clear up parts of the RAM. Added DCS as an exclusion.

Edited January 22 by Ready

[yoadknux]

What is the optimal OS for DCS?

My Win11 has been bad since 24h2, but in general this OS has been through CPU change, RAM change, GPU change... think it's time to move on. But can't decide about 10 vs 11. Any insight?

[speed-of-heat]

I use 11 without issue

[diego999]

2 hours ago, yoadknux said:

What is the optimal OS for DCS?

My Win11 has been bad since 24h2, but in general this OS has been through CPU change, RAM change, GPU change... think it's time to move on. But can't decide about 10 vs 11. Any insight?

 

Installed Win 11 last week. Aside from the new UI I don't like, it's exactly the same for me. Tried the exact same mission looking at the frametimes in different situations. No difference.

[Ready]

7 hours ago, yoadknux said:

What is the optimal OS for DCS?

My Win11 has been bad since 24h2, but in general this OS has been through CPU change, RAM change, GPU change... think it's time to move on. But can't decide about 10 vs 11. Any insight?

As far as I understand there are pros and cons. Without going too much into the ins/outs my main considerations;

I stayed in W10 because I know W10 and I heard and read about possible downsides of W11. I understood performance/latency-wise there would not be a real upside/reason to go W11 with my Ryzen. The only W10-downside for me was the support that is ending somewhere in the coming two years. Until that time comes, for me W10 is what I know and will use. I wanted to reinstall my OS and it took me about a week (IRL time for work/fam considered) to get everything back up and working the way I like it in the new W10 install. I had many apps and configurations to figure out and configure again. I did not want to experiment too much and I did not want to spend this time going the W11 route and somewhere down the line find out that one or more of my apps or GUI tweaks were not working in W11. It might have all gone without any hickups, but I just was not sure enough. I had the certainty that I could get W10 again the way I wanted. I was not sure I could do the same with W11 (which I use on my work pc/laptop and which sometimes gives me weird stuff). Now that I have my new W10 install and some good backups ready, I could also try to put a W11 install on my gaming rig, but to be honest I expect that W12 will be the next OS that I will jump to, because that is also around the corner.

I read somewhere that Microsoft will start rolling out W10 automatic updating to W11, without people's consent, so I disabled all update functionality in my W10. 

[Ready]

Batch start/stop services

There are a bunch of services and apps that I would like to batch disable/stop before playing DCS and restart again after being done with DCS. Have to figure out how that works;

• Notepad tray app
• Google Updater Services
• NVCP tray app
• Microsoft Defender Antivirus and Core Services
• AsusUpdateCheck
• MacriumService
• Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service
• Theme

Nvidia Control Panel Vsync

Read somewhere on the forum that enabling Vsync in NVCP (but disabled in DCS) would somehow magically increase performance. There was a whole discussion about it, so I tried it out. 

Process Lasso

This tool is mighty, but easy to mess up things with. I tried setting the CPU affinity of DCS to the last 5 cores and everything else to the first 3 cores. This indicates better performance, but when I sometimes quickly look around in the headset, it gives me a screwy lag. So I now only have DCS unassigned from Core0 and everything else unasssigned from everything. Will have to circle back to this.

GPU Overclock

I notice that I somehow keep tinkering with MSI Afterburner. It currently is pretty stable in SP. Will have to do further testing in MP. 

Nvidia driver downgrade

I changed my Nvidia driver to 566.14. FSL tested various version and this one seemed to be the fasted one. I lazily just installed this version to see what it does to my system. (without DDU and cleaninstaller).

 

Changelog

For the complete changelog see the additions to the first posting in this thread.

Edited January 26 by Ready

[speed-of-heat]

for the services try this ... its scriptable NET START / STOP / PAUSE / CONTINUE - Windows CMD - SS64.com that will work for most of them, for defender that's more complex and i wouldn't recommend it if you have already excluded DCS folders but try How to Disable Windows Defender in a Single-click without Reboot » Winhelponline there is a command line option there (you need some of NIRSOFT stuff to make it work)... I mean I would disable and google update check and do them manually anyway, but, i suspect apart from those it will make very little difference in terms of perf as they should be idled and on the pagefile if not using them 

[Ready]

54 minutes ago, speed-of-heat said:

for the services try this ... its scriptable NET START / STOP / PAUSE / CONTINUE - Windows CMD - SS64.com that will work for most of them, for defender that's more complex and i wouldn't recommend it if you have already excluded DCS folders but try How to Disable Windows Defender in a Single-click without Reboot » Winhelponline there is a command line option there (you need some of NIRSOFT stuff to make it work)... I mean I would disable and google update check and do them manually anyway, but, i suspect apart from those it will make very little difference in terms of perf as they should be idled and on the pagefile if not using them 

Great thanks I will check it out. For Defender I now manually turn off Real-Time protection, which gets enabled again once I reboot, which is okay. The Google Updater somehow popped up when I was running DCS and it caused some interference it seemed.  

[yoadknux]

I suggest your next test to be around the Cyberpunk dll ("transformer model"). It offers a huge boost to clarity even without increasing PD. Ghosting is still there though: Better than the original profile, worse than MSAA (or DLSS off).  

[speed-of-heat]

23 minutes ago, Ready said:

Great thanks I will check it out. For Defender I now manually turn off Real-Time protection, which gets enabled again once I reboot, which is okay. The Google Updater somehow popped up when I was running DCS and it caused some interference it seemed.  

yeah I dont let ASUS software with GUI near my PC ... I love their hardware .. their software (shudder) . I would just stop the updaters via task manager startup and leave them off 

[Ready]

1 hour ago, yoadknux said:

I suggest your next test to be around the Cyberpunk dll ("transformer model"). It offers a huge boost to clarity even without increasing PD. Ghosting is still there though: Better than the original profile, worse than MSAA (or DLSS off).  

Thanks never heard of it. Will check it out.

Yes! the new DLSS4-thing. Was on my list to take a look at. Will do so soon.

Edited January 26 by Ready

[Ready]

35 minutes ago, speed-of-heat said:

yeah I dont let ASUS software with GUI near my PC ... I love their hardware .. their software (shudder) . I would just stop the updaters via task manager startup and leave them off 

The AsusUpdateCheck service in my system is very annoying. I can disable it and stop it through the services manager, but after reboot it returns. Does not work via task manager startup. Needs some further digging on how to get rid of it. 

[Ready]

The system is calming down. 1% and 0.2% lows are steadily further improving in my testing runs.

Reducing stutters / calming down frametimes 

I sometimes still experience stutters that are not triggered by anything explainable. It seems to happen because DCS itself is doing something that I can not yet fully understand. It sometimes happens when in the menu, or just sitting idle in the pit with the headset on the desk. I am currently digging into this with WPA.

The strange thing is that when I disable the GPU overclock in MSI Afterburner it somehow seems to calm down the spasms. I then enable it again and the frame times stay calm. Maybe it is a fluke or coincidence and I am not sure what is really happening, so needs further testing. Will also start running for a while without overclocks to see if this also reduces the triggering.

 

2. Windows - Features	Various features	Disabled	SMB Direct, Remote Differential Compression API Support, Microsoft XPS Document Writer, Print and Document Services, WCF Services > TCP Port Sharing
2. Windows - Services	Various Services	Disabled	Google Updates, Quality Windows Audio Video Experience, Bluetooth Audio Gateway Service (BTAGService)

Edited January 26 by Ready

[Ready]

DSLSS 4.0

Updated DLSS 3.0 Profile G to DLSS 4.0 Profile J.

Followed nice instructions from @sleighzy 

The visuals look way way sharper, but my fps and frametimes took a 7% hit. Will see what happens when I adjust my Foveated resolution and DLSS settings to get back to the same frames. 

Edited January 26 by Ready

[EightyDuce]

7 hours ago, Ready said:

DSLSS 4.0

Updated DLSS 3.0 Profile G to DLSS 4.0 Profile J.

Followed nice instructions from @sleighzy 

The visuals look way way sharper, but my fps and frametimes took a 7% hit. Will see what happens when I adjust my Foveated resolution and DLSS settings to get back to the same frames. 

 

So I've tried DLSS 4 with a couple if games now, mostly UEVR, and DLSS 4 produced better visuals, however, performance consistently took a bit of a hit when compared to previous version.

Still worth it IMO. 

[Ready]

Nvidia 571.96

Updated to the newest Nvidia driver, which made a huge difference in combination with DLSS 4.0 Profile J.

I was able to readjust my Quads Focus Multiplier back to 1.2 Inside DCS DLSS Performance and Sharpening 30, which probably can be dialed back a bit. Had to reduce some of the GPU overclock to keep it stable in my testcase. Amazingly crisp visuals at no real frame loss. 

 

Edited January 27 by Ready

[GPatricks]

4 hours ago, Ready said:

Nvidia 571.96

Updated to the newest Nvidia driver, which made a huge difference in combination with DLSS 4.0 Profile J.

I was able to readjust my Quads Focus Multiplier back to 1.2 Inside DCS DLSS Performance and Sharpening 30, which probably can be dialed back a bit. Had to reduce some of the GPU overclock to keep it stable in my testcase. Amazingly crisp visuals at no real frame loss. 

 

 

 

Is it a beta driver? NVCleanstall still shows 566.36 as the latest available..