Pico 4: how to set it up for DCS?

[Qcumber]

21 minutes ago, Danzig said:

spacewarp setting give you weird visual artifacts, when you rotate your plane on its own axis?

I find this too. 72 Hz without SSW works much better. 

[Danzig]

need to find a way to get Spacewarp looking good

[Qcumber]

3 minutes ago, Danzig said:

need to find a way to get Spacewarp looking good

Yes. It looks OK, but just some annoying ghosting artefacts sometimes, when moving rapidly. I see this with my rift s too so not just a Pico 4 or VD problem. 

[MIghtymoo]

5 hours ago, Danzig said:

doesnt the spacewarp setting give you weird visual artifacts, when you rotate your plane on its own axis?  ( like when you have a 2d screen but no vsync on )

 

It is a little better with real frames, but I think it is just a minor thing. The increased quality of the graphics and visuals and clarity in general outweighs it.  

[Lange_666]

2 hours ago, Danzig said:

need to find a way to get Spacewarp looking good

I searched and tried all i could find for 30 days in a row, no joy.
Only solution was turn everything down so i could keep that 72 FPS steady on my 3080ti.
But then visual quality suffered to a point that my Rift-S was simply better (and dealed a lot better with space warp).
Moving visual quality up mend dipping below 72 FPS and then stutter came lurking around the corner.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Lange_666

[MIghtymoo]

2 hours ago, Lange_666 said:

I searched and tried all i could find for 30 days in a row, no joy.
Only solution was turn everything down so i could keep that 72 FPS steady on my 3080ti.
But then visual quality suffered to a point that my Rift-S was simply better (and dealed a lot better with space warp).
Moving visual quality up mend dipping below 72 FPS and then stutter came lurking around the corner.

 

DCS in VR seem to be all about compromise, even on the top end PCs.

It is hard to run a CPU intense module like the the Apache in a decent mission with steady 72fps without sacrificing a lot of the visuals. I have to go potato mode to be able to fly the Apache on a steady 72fps, at least in anything like "Apache Hunting ground"-mission and similar.

I can't stand the stutters when dropping below 72fps. I'll take spacewarp any day.

Todays CPUs are simply not up to the task today.

The day we can run solid 90fps with hig/ultra settings is the day

Edited August 11, 2023 by MIghtymoo

[Mr_sukebe]

13 hours ago, MIghtymoo said:

DCS in VR seem to be all about compromise, even on the top end PCs.

It is hard to run a CPU intense module like the the Apache in a decent mission with steady 72fps without sacrificing a lot of the visuals. I have to go potato mode to be able to fly the Apache on a steady 72fps, at least in anything like "Apache Hunting ground"-mission and similar.

I can't stand the stutters when dropping below 72fps. I'll take spacewarp any day.

Todays CPUs are simply not up to the task today.

The day we can run solid 90fps with hig/ultra settings is the day

 

Are you mistaking CPUs for GPUs?

I found that MT has very much made my GPU the bottleneck in VR.

I’m hoping the Vulkan and being able to use DLAA instead of MSAA Will both help performance

[Hammer3246]

I'm trying QVFR right now but my headset picks up every tiny movement.  Its so sensitive that I have to unplug my simshaker because the cockpit vibrates.

 

Any ideas? 

[Qcumber]

5 minutes ago, Hammer3246 said:

I'm trying QVFR right now but my headset picks up every tiny movement.  Its so sensitive that I have to unplug my simshaker because the cockpit vibrates.

 

Any ideas? 

Sorry if this is obvious but have you disabled bloom and lens effects? 

[Hammer3246]

1 hour ago, Qcumber said:

Sorry if this is obvious but have you disabled bloom and lens effects? 

No problem, I have.

[Hammer3246]

2 hours ago, Hammer3246 said:

I'm trying QVFR right now but my headset picks up every tiny movement.  Its so sensitive that I have to unplug my simshaker because the cockpit vibrates.

 

Any ideas? 

Figured it out.

I had Openxr toolkit running, even though I hadn't changed or turned anything on, disabling it cured the problem.

[Gryzor]

On 8/11/2023 at 9:11 AM, Qcumber said:

Try using QVFR. According to the discord channel many users are seeing a big improvement even with a 4090. I think you will get 72 fps without reprojection. Also 72hz is easier on your CPU/GPU than 90hz so you should see lower game latency. 

https://discord.gg/yjxZd2Rs

 

Any bench with QVFR would be appreciated. Its necessary to mantain OpenXR toolkit with QVFR? what are your settings if you mantain both?

[Qcumber]

8 hours ago, Gryzor said:

Any bench with QVFR would be appreciated. Its necessary to mantain OpenXR toolkit with QVFR? what are your settings if you mantain both?

I tried running without OXRTK last night as I now feel I don't really need it except for colour/contrast control. My gut feeling is that it runs a bit better without OXRTK but this is purely subjective. I haven't done any proper benchmarks yet but that does make sense. I'll try to do some later today. I did post a simple fps comparison earlier in this thread and got 72fps with QVFR enabled versus 58 fps without. 109 on the Normandy 2 map flying low over the same town. I also tried FFR from OXRTK and this gave about 62 fps over the same town (quality-balanced).

 

Edited August 13, 2023 by Qcumber

[MIghtymoo]

23 hours ago, Mr_sukebe said:

Are you mistaking CPUs for GPUs?

I found that MT has very much made my GPU the bottleneck in VR.

I’m hoping the Vulkan and being able to use DLAA instead of MSAA Will both help performance

Absolutely not .

The 4090 is a beast compared to my current CPU.

[Danzig]

22 hours ago, Qcumber said:

I tried running without OXRTK last night as I now feel I don't really need it except for colour/contrast control. My gut feeling is that it runs a bit better without OXRTK but this is purely subjective. I haven't done any proper benchmarks yet but that does make sense. I'll try to do some later today. I did post a simple fps comparison earlier in this thread and got 72fps with QVFR enabled versus 58 fps without. 109 on the Normandy 2 map flying low over the same town. I also tried FFR from OXRTK and this gave about 62 fps over the same town (quality-balanced).

 

 

is there a way to change parameters in QVFR ?   Or is it simply on/off?

[MIghtymoo]

Short update after reading through hundreds of posts and hours of playing around. The setup/solution for me was in the end pretty simple (if you don’t mind REPROJECTION…)

I now manage to run DCS in VR with pretty much maxed out graphics settings, very good detail level and pretty smooth experience with a 45 fps with SSW (reprojection).

The main take here is to get the FPS locked on 45, so the CPU can run without getting CPU-bound. Then you can unleash the full potential of a powerful GPU (in my case an RTX4090). Same principle for e.g 4080 or a 3090. Push for 72 or 90 real frames and the CPU will struggle. Now I can run the Apache in a proper mission with a pretty smooth experience.

Use the following:

1. Virtual Desktop (VD) on PC and Pico.

2. SteamVR (automatic via VD)

3. You start DCS from the Virtual desktop as you would on your PC.

 

My VD settings:

1. Godlike mode

2. Syncronous Spacewarp (SSW) is set to "Always enabled"

That is all you need to adjust here

 

My SteamVR settings:

 

I choose Resolution pr eye to 150% (don't change pixel density in DCS (leave that to default 1.0))

 

My DCS settings (attached):

Note: I choose flat shadows, because I like them better than default. Did not choose 4X MSAA due to less smooth experience with minimal image quality gains. Otherwise I have enabled all I like (even extreme visibility range).

 

My Nvidia Control Panel settings:

Edited August 15, 2023 by MIghtymoo

[Qcumber]

6 hours ago, Danzig said:

is there a way to change parameters in QVFR ?   Or is it simply on/off?

Yes. You can set the QVFR settings in a user config file. Details are on the wiki site. 

https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki/Advanced-Configuration#instructions-for-advanced-configuration

[Qcumber]

6 hours ago, MIghtymoo said:

I now manage to run DCS in VR with pretty much maxed out graphics settings, very good detail level and smooth experience with a 45 fps with SSW

Do you not get ghosting when using SSW, and strange movement artifacts when looking at 90 degrees to you movement access and rolling? I can't get rid of these even when I lock the fps. I get a much better experience running at 72hz without SSW. 

I'm not convinced that SSAA does anything. Similar with anisotropic filtering; it just impacts performance with no noticable difference. 

Extreme texture range has a massive impact on performance but does make low level city immersion amazing. A benefit of a 4090! 

High water is important but I can't see a huge difference between high, medium and low shadows, although this might be cockpit dependent. 

Edited August 14, 2023 by Qcumber

[MIghtymoo]

1 hour ago, Qcumber said:

Do you not get ghosting when using SSW, and strange movement artifacts when looking at 90 degrees to you movement access and rolling? I can't get rid of these even when I lock the fps. I get a much better experience running at 72hz without SSW. 

I'm not convinced that SSAA does anything. Similar with anisotropic filtering; it just impacts performance with no noticable difference. 

Extreme texture range has a massive impact on performance but does make low level city immersion amazing. A benefit of a 4090! 

High water is important but I can't see a huge difference between high, medium and low shadows, although this might be cockpit dependent. 

 

I flew a two hour mission yesterday in the Hind with a flying buddy and I think the ghosting is very acceptable. It looks a little better running pure 72fps, but very hard to do for me on multiplayer or with CPU intense modules. I am not willing to sacrifice the high graphics quality to remove the occational ghosting effect. Fly really low and fast, it is noticable looking out the side windows, but that not how I fly most missions.
 

Regarding the SSAA, I have enough overhead on the GPU and it ran better with 2xMSAA and 1.5xSSAA, compared to 4xMSAA and no SSAA.

My goal is to remove as much of the shimmering as possible. Pretty happy the way it looks now.

Any tips are appreciated.

 

Edited August 14, 2023 by MIghtymoo

[MIghtymoo]

OK, after flying Persian Gulf at night yesterday I am officially crawling into the non-SSW 72fps rabbit hole…

Reprojection is OK in a helicopter during the day, but I did not like it at night due to city lights «vibrating/shaking» when rolling and turning.

After tweaking the DCS settings, I seem to be getting 72fps for most normal modules like the A-10C II, F-16, Hind on low level city in Syria on a non scripted mission. But I pretty much don’t have hope for running stable 72fps on any bigger MP servers.

My CPU is running OC on 4.8GHz, so probably not to much to gain to upgrade CPU right now.

Any tips to maps/modules to avoid?

Other tips to squeeze the extra frames out of the CPU?

Edited August 15, 2023 by MIghtymoo

[Qcumber]

1 hour ago, MIghtymoo said:

OK, after flying Persian Gulf at night yesterday I am officially crawling into the non-SSW 72fps rabbit hole…

Sorry to hear that. It's so frustrating optimizing VR. I keep trying to get it to work with SSW but I can't ignore the strange movement artifacts and there seems to be extra latency which creates some lag. 

I did manage to get a smoother ground experience with SSW off at 72 fps by turning HAGS off. Much less in the way of microstutters. 

1 hour ago, MIghtymoo said:

Other tips to squeeze the extra frames out of the CPU?

Can't remember if you have said that you have tried this but how about Quad View Foveated Rendering. You should be able to get an extra 10-20%, maybe more. 

[MIghtymoo]

1 hour ago, Qcumber said:

I did manage to get a smoother ground experience with SSW off at 72 fps by turning HAGS off. Much less in the way of microstutters. 

Will test that out.

1 hour ago, Qcumber said:

Can't remember if you have said that you have tried this but how about Quad View Foveated Rendering. You should be able to get an extra 10-20%, maybe more. 

Will try it out. Any benefits compared to using the FOV rendering option in OpenXR tool kit?

 

[Qcumber]

Just now, MIghtymoo said:

Will try it out. Any benefits compared to using the FOV rendering option in OpenXR tool kit?

Yes. It is much better. It works alongside OXRTK but you will need to disable FFR. 

[Gryzor]

On 8/7/2023 at 2:32 PM, SebastianR said:

When I can't keep 72, I limit to 45 with rtss (1/2 x 90hz). it's pretty fluid (although not like full 72). The image quality is the same, with streaming assistant you hardly notice the compression at 150

Do you have ASW (motion smoothing) at 45 fps by using RTSS? any ghosting?

[MIghtymoo]

On 8/15/2023 at 10:40 AM, Qcumber said:

Yes. It is much better. It works alongside OXRTK but you will need to disable FFR. 

I tried Quad View Foveated rendering and I am not sure if it was working properly. No increase in FPS during my testing. Was activated in the OpenXR plug-ins in SteamVR. Settings in OXRTK were reset as pr instruction.

I have just activated Fixed Foveated rendering in OXRTK (performance/balanced) and it works very well with Pico 4, so I will probably just keep it this way.

———
Have been experimenting and have succeded to get with clear, smooth and stable real 72fps across:

-Most modules (except the Apache)

-All maps (including Marianas and South Atlantic). Low level Marianas in SU-25 was great.

- Also in rain (no rain droplets!) and sunset/sunrise.

-When doing single player (and not with heavily scripted missions and/or tons of active units).

Limitations:

- Above is for «VR friendly» SP missions and MP servers (as a mission builder I have learned alot lately about optimizing missions for performance and still keep the good experience).

- I do not expect good performance (ever…) on populated MP servers with lots of scripting and units. 

- Heavily scripted SP campaigns og missions (can’t even always run them smooth on pancake screen).
 

There is no magic settings and is just a carefull balance of in-game settings and settings in VD, SteamVR and OXRTK.

There is an occational drop, but I even had that on pancake screen with same PC-rig locked on 60fps (due to TrackIR) so that is expected.

My settings should work good for anyone with PC specs i  the approximate range of mine (see signature).

A little busy at work, so will post how I managed it this weekend.

 

 

 

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by MIghtymoo