How can VR possibly be so bad?

[shadowborn]

Hey.

I bought a HP Reverb G2 Rev. B specifically for flying DCS. I can't get it to work. I have a fresh Windows 11 install with DCS beta. Here's what happens:

- 70% of the time I get the DCS menu to launch in VR. About half of the time then, the menu is waaaay down in VR (like, the floor is meters below me). Half of the time, I have no mouse control in VR in the menu.

- 90% of the time, the menu and the loading screens flicker like crazy

- I have managed ONCE to get into a cockpit in VR. Every other time, like 30 attempts, the VR view turns black, Windows makes that "ding dong, the witch is dead ... I mean, the USB device is dead" sound. I got a DCS error reporter once, but most of the time it just crashes with no message whatsoever. I once got a "tasklist.exe has crashed" dialog. Often, it reports SteamVR has crashed also.

I tried SteamVR regular and beta, Windows Mixed Reality for Steam lkr_release branch, and something called "OpenComposite", all with no luck.

So ... is VR with DCS really THAT fickle at this time, or is my experience "special"?

Thanks!

 

p.s. also when VR just for once doesn't crash, when I exit and shut down the VR headset, Windows Mixed Reality takes over and makes it so my regular screen is all black, and I can not get out of that. No alt-tab, no ctrl-alt-del, nothing works short of rebooting.

Edited December 26, 2022 by shadowborn

[Tepnox]

I think most people with Reverb Headsets were not very satisfied with WMR and switched possibly to OpenXR and got better results with that API.

So it really depends on the API the headset is using i suppose.

I am really pleased with the VR performance in DCS for years - but I only used Oculus (Meta) with Rift S, Quest 2 and Quest Pro so far. Compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator in VR i think DCS is miles ahead in terms of better frametimes and overall performance. The visual fidelity for terrain and weather goes to MSFS for sure.

Hope you figure something out and get some better flight times in VR.

[BIGNEWY]

8 hours ago, shadowborn said:

Hey.

I bought a HP Reverb G2 Rev. B specifically for flying DCS. I can't get it to work. I have a fresh Windows 11 install with DCS beta. Here's what happens:

- 70% of the time I get the DCS menu to launch in VR. About half of the time then, the menu is waaaay down in VR (like, the floor is meters below me). Half of the time, I have no mouse control in VR in the menu.

- 90% of the time, the menu and the loading screens flicker like crazy

- I have managed ONCE to get into a cockpit in VR. Every other time, like 30 attempts, the VR view turns black, Windows makes that "ding dong, the witch is dead ... I mean, the USB device is dead" sound. I got a DCS error reporter once, but most of the time it just crashes with no message whatsoever. I once got a "tasklist.exe has crashed" dialog. Often, it reports SteamVR has crashed also.

I tried SteamVR regular and beta, Windows Mixed Reality for Steam lkr_release branch, and something called "OpenComposite", all with no luck.

So ... is VR with DCS really THAT fickle at this time, or is my experience "special"?

Thanks!

 

p.s. also when VR just for once doesn't crash, when I exit and shut down the VR headset, Windows Mixed Reality takes over and makes it so my regular screen is all black, and I can not get out of that. No alt-tab, no ctrl-alt-del, nothing works short of rebooting.

 

Hi, I run a reverb G2 using openXR and get 45 - 60 fps in MP which is great. 

please include your system spec, and a screenshot of your DCS settings. 

Chances are you have a bottle neck somewhere and need to tune your settings, hopefully we can help

Use numpad 5 by default to centre your view

[Pikey]

Sounds like my old one when the cable went. If you hear the ding dong like a USB connect its the headset intermittently connecting. I'd humbly suggest you began troubleshooting on the headset without DCS, get it setup correctly first with the accompanying WMR software.

[Naj-Treg]

9 hours ago, shadowborn said:

Hey.

- 70% of the time I get the DCS menu to launch in VR. About half of the time then, the menu is waaaay down in VR (like, the floor is meters below me). Half of the time, I have no mouse control in VR in the menu.

 

 

Hi,

Welcome in the wonderfull of VR Wich at the moment is not really plug and play...... 

I own a HP reverb G2 too and i really enjoy it. For the problem you have when your "center view" is way down, you can do the following thing:

- Start DCS in Desktop mode and go to settings in the main menu.

- in the settings menu go to the "control" tab and instead of selecting a aircraft profile, select UI layer.

- In UI layer assign a button or key for " recenter VR headset" (I set it on my stick so i can recenter it during flight)

- Not necessary but i find it kind of handy.... i also set the controls " toggle VR spy-glass zoom and toggle VR zoom" to my stick to zoom in while in flight.

Now Start DCS in VR mode and when de screen is off.... hit the " recenter VR headset" button and BANG! it hits you in the face 

 

 As for the part where you dont have mouse control.

- Do you have multi monitor? if yes.... then your mouse is probably on an other screen and not active on the DCS Screen.

To solve this:

- Go to settings again and go to system settings.

- In here select the option "cursor confined to game window" This way the mouse stays inside the DCS game window

 

I also have flickering like you mentioned, but i only have it when i am in loading screens.

Since a year i fly in VR and still trying to get things smoother or visually better. Just google thing and fiddle around.

For me there's no way back to monitor flying and VR has really improved my flying skills.

one more thing....Does your usb 3.0 port has sufficient power? At first i had the problem that my HMD would not work..I solved this bij placing an additional usb 3.0 pci card wich has also a power cable to the power supply.

 

I hope you will soon enjoy the VR experience!

 

Greetings Naj-Treg

 

 

Edited December 26, 2022 by Naj-Treg

[Eugel]

The flickering is annoying, but I didn´t have that with the Vive and Vive Pro before, so I assume that is a WMR/HP thing.
You should have a keybinding for centering your VR Headset anyway. Just press that after DCS has started and the "problem" with the menu way down is gone !

The rest, I´m sorry to say, but sounds like problems with your system. If you hear the "USB-Sound" or a crash after shutting down your headset ... I fail to see what that has to do with DCS.

I´m no fan of the Reverb G2, cost me a lot of nerves to set everything up, but once I did, it works 100% of the time (I use Steam VR)

Edited December 26, 2022 by Eugel

[shadowborn]

Thanks for the many helpful replies!

It will take me a few days until I have time to dabble with this again, but there is already a lot of useful info here, especially with the re-centering. I will report back in time!

If I don't manage before, have a great new year fellow pilots!

[shadowborn]

Hm. There is something iffy with this headset. I got it to load into DCS twice tonight, and once it runs, it's great. But then I select "fly again" and DCS crashes (as do other VR apps, too). For what it's worth, for one crash I got this:

I also got a Blue Screen and OTHER programs crashing (e.g. Wargaming game center crashed over an attempt to start VR, which is really puzzling as the only explanation for this would be WMR or Steam gobbling up all the RAM). I have also seen browser pages and Steam pages (which are browser pages, too) fail to render after such VR crash, so I currently suspect there's an unchecked memory allocation running wild in the VR chain somewhere, somehow.

Puzzled. Still trying things, will run a RAM test and (again) a video RAM test. Will report back again.

Edited December 27, 2022 by shadowborn

[shadowborn]

As for the question about hardware specs, here goes:

ASRock Z690M Phantom Gaming RIPTIDE/D5

Intel Core i5-13600K

MSI GeForce RTX 3080 VENTUS 3X PLUS 10G

GIGABYTE AORUS 32GB DDR5 (2x16GB) 5200-40

Kingston SSD NV2 NVMe 2TB

EVGA 750 GQ 80+ Gold

[Pikey]

5 hours ago, shadowborn said:

I have also seen browser pages and Steam pages (which are browser pages, too) fail to render after such VR crash, so I currently suspect there's an unchecked memory allocation running wild in the VR chain somewhere, somehow.

Thats a display driver crash and partial recovery and you will see it in your System Event Viewer. This might be a driver issue, I think a while back there was some talk on a certain Nvidia driver version being bad and people rewinding version. Try the most obvious like updating that. Elsewise read out the event view system errors at the time it happens and it will give you enough to chase through to conclusion. GL.

[shadowborn]

> Thats a display driver crash and partial recovery and you will see it in your System Event Viewer.

Thanks!

I just had a call with HP, to talk about returning the headset within the EU mandated 14 days, or else.

They assure me that the problems will be solved with a new cable, and that these days, many customers call in with issues and a new cable is always the solution. This is EVEN THOUGH I specifically ordered the "Revision B" of the Reverb, while reportedly only the Rev. A's cable had problems (and to my knowledge only with ATI graphics cards though). Also, I found that while the box says "Rev. B", a tiny sticker on the cable itself actually says "Rev. A". So maybe HP is shipping "Rev. B" glasses with "Rev. A" cables? Exciting.

I shall receive a new cable within three working days, we'll see how what goes.

[shadowborn]

As for graphics driver, I'm already on 527.56, which is the latest.

And for event log, there's all sorts of crashes (WUDFHost.exe, vrwebhelper.exe, svchost.exe_wlidsvc, Microsoft Sign-In Assistant,  dwm.exe, OpenVRSettingsUX.exe). They can't all crash due to the actual root cause, so I'm still betting on either RAM exhaustion or something central like, yes, a graphics driver crash.

There's also:

"A problem has occurred with one or more user-mode drivers and the hosting process has been terminated.  This may temporarily interrupt your ability to access the devices."

and

"The device HP Reverb Virtual Reality Headset G2 (location 0004.0000.0000.001.002.001.000.000.000) is offline due to a user-mode driver crash.  Windows will attempt to restart the device 5 more times.  Please contact the device manufacturer for more information about this problem."

But I'll try the new cable first before digging further into this.

Edited December 28, 2022 by shadowborn

[Naj-Treg]

2 hours ago, shadowborn said:

As for graphics driver, I'm already on 527.56, which is the latest.

And for event log, there's all sorts of crashes (WUDFHost.exe, vrwebhelper.exe, svchost.exe_wlidsvc, Microsoft Sign-In Assistant,  dwm.exe, OpenVRSettingsUX.exe). They can't all crash due to the actual root cause, so I'm still betting on either RAM exhaustion or something central like, yes, a graphics driver crash.

There's also:

"A problem has occurred with one or more user-mode drivers and the hosting process has been terminated.  This may temporarily interrupt your ability to access the devices."

and

"The device HP Reverb Virtual Reality Headset G2 (location 0004.0000.0000.001.002.001.000.000.000) is offline due to a user-mode driver crash.  Windows will attempt to restart the device 5 more times.  Please contact the device manufacturer for more information about this problem."

But I'll try the new cable first before digging further into this.

 

I Still wondering if your usb output has enough power... maybe you can try an additional usb card (see picture) make sure it has additional power. This Solved all my problems 

[shadowborn]

> Still wondering if your usb output has enough power... maybe you can try an additional usb card (see picture) make sure it has additional power. This Solved all my problems 

Thanks - I will consider this if the new cable doesn't work. But I have it connected to an USB 3.0 port directly on the back plate of a (rather recent) main board, I would (carefully) assume that this should provide sufficient power, if anything does?

[Naj-Treg]

14 hours ago, shadowborn said:

> Still wondering if your usb output has enough power... maybe you can try an additional usb card (see picture) make sure it has additional power. This Solved all my problems 

Thanks - I will consider this if the new cable doesn't work. But I have it connected to an USB 3.0 port directly on the back plate of a (rather recent) main board, I would (carefully) assume that this should provide sufficient power, if anything does?

I hope the new cable will solve all the problems for you. I am still on the original one. Some squad mates have their cable replaced by the new one and it solved issues they had.

The problem with the motherboard usb is..... when other components ask more power (depends on how hard they have  to work). It is possible that there is just not enough left for HMD usb, because this one needs alot. Therefore is the pci usb with its own power source so it can deliver the power when its needed.

All the best.

Naj-Treg

 

[trevoC]

Definitely something with your setup. I'm running a G2 and don't think I've ever had a single crash or problem starting it in 2 years.

The only issue I've ever experienced is the sound garbled. I need to power cycle the headset for it to go away. This may happen 1 in 100 launches. Hope you can find a resolution to this. I realize I didn't provide any help, but hopefully some insight that VR and the G2 in general are not necessarily bad or complex to setup. 

That being said, I did realize that on my G2 I needed to use a usb-c to usb adapter to work properly.

[MadKreator]

 

Check out the videos in this post. Goes over some good tip with WMR, open XR toolkit etc, and some tuning.. granted he’s doing it on MSFS but the idea is the same. The OP also figured out that part of his issue was in fact the usb not supplying enough power and added the usb pcie card and fixed his connection issues. I use Quest 2 so none of this applies to me but I watched them and seems to give a decent rundown of setting up the headset, windows, WMR, and open XR properly.

[Glide]

VR is working great for me with my G2 and 3080ti.  The right speaker of the headset has a poor connection, and I have to jiggle it sometimes.   If you have sound issues, try uninstalling the Nvidia HD Audio driver or just disabling the devices on your monitors, assuming you don't need them.

Edited December 29, 2022 by Glide

[shadowborn]

Hey. OP here with some new findings, confirming some sort of memory leak it appears.

HP shipped me the new cable. It looks JUST like the "old" cable that came with the Rev. B. headset, and also has the little "Rev. A" flag/sticker on it. But lo behold, it appears (pending further scientific testing) to resolve a lot of issues EXCEPT, sadly, for those with DCS

I don't own many VR titles. But the following worked flawlessly (apart from occasional view centering issues) now, and didn't before:

- IL2 Sturmovik
- Titanic VR Experience
- Elite: Dangerous

Currently still downloading Skyrim VR, which I just bought for more testing.

HOWEVER DCS still crashes, and it is, as I suspected, seemingly a memory leak. Many times there is nothing at all in the event log, but one time I got this:

Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: DCS.exe (9808) consumed 20684664832 bytes, dwm.exe (10372) consumed 1494360064 bytes, and vrcompositor.exe (3436) consumed 648605696 bytes.

That's 20GB of RAM for dcs.exe, 15GB for dwm (Windows Display Manager), and negligible for vrcompositor.exe. My machine has 32GB, but this confirms to me that the Out-of-Memory killer mechanism is responsible for killing the various processes I observed being killed over the last days whenever DCS VR initializes.

This is with DCS Open Beta 2.8.1.34667 and AH-64D. I have at times loaded successfully into the Viggen (twice), the KA-50 V3 (once) and the F-18 (once), but with various crashes in between. I will now keep trying with other aircraft to see if the new cable helps and maybe this is an AH-64 problem now.

Edited December 30, 2022 by shadowborn

[aceviper]

Just now, shadowborn said:

Hey. OP here with some new findings, confirming some sort of memory leak it appears.

HP shipped me the new cable. It looks JUST like the "old" cable that came with the Rev. B. headset, and also has the little "Rev. A" flag/sticker on it. But lo behold, it appears (pending further scientific testing) to resolve a lot of issues EXCEPT, sadly, for those with DCS

I don't own many VR titles. But the following worked flawlessly (apart from occasional view centering issues) now, and didn't before:

- IL2 Sturmovik
- Titanic VR Experience

Currently still downloading Skyrim VR, which I just bought for more testing.

HOWEVER DCS still crashes, and it is, as I suspected, seemingly a memory leak. Many times there is nothing at all in the event log, but one time I got this:

Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: DCS.exe (9808) consumed 20684664832 bytes, dwm.exe (10372) consumed 1494360064 bytes, and vrcompositor.exe (3436) consumed 648605696 bytes.

That's 20GB of RAM for dcs.exe, 15GB for dwm (Windows Display Manager), and negligible for vrcompositor.exe. My machine has 32GB, but this confirms to me that the Out-of-Memory killer mechanism is responsible for killing the various processes I observed being killed over the last days whenever DCS VR initializes.

This is with DCS Open Beta 2.8.1.34667 and AH-64D. I have at times loaded successfully into the Viggen (twice), the KA-50 V3 (once) and the F-18 (once), but with various crashes in between. I will now keep trying with other aircraft to see if the new cable helps and maybe this is an AH-64 problem now.

That dwm.exe is a known intel 630 memory leak.

Certain version drivers are meant to fix that.

Moved to win 11 recently and havent noticed it.

[shadowborn]

Nah. It's not just beta AH-64. I tried the MI-24, got a crash during loading, and this:

"The Windows Error Reporting Service service terminated with the following error: 
The paging file is too small for this operation to complete."

I tried the KA-50 V3 again and this time:

Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: DCS.exe (12232) consumed 15559917568 bytes, dwm.exe (18200) consumed 2276089856 bytes, and WUDFHost.exe (5680) consumed 571375616 bytes.

Further evidence of a memory leak in VR? It would seem so to me.

The KA-50 V2 worked once (but crashed on ending the flight).

Another, minor finding that can be worked around for now: The mouse (with "mouse enabled" in settings) works about 50% of the time inside VR, i.e. I can move the "little white ball". The other 50% I can use the mouse to make menu selections on my screen when I take the headset off. It appears "wear detection" has to report that I am not wearing the headset for the mouse to work on screen in those cases, if I wear the headset, the mouse cursor won't move even a single pixel ...

Edited December 30, 2022 by shadowborn

[shadowborn]

> Moved to win 11 recently and havent noticed it.

Thanks for the input! I am however on Windows 11 already

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22621.963]

Plus, that seems to happen with Intel HD Graphics. I have an Nvidia 3080 though.

[Naj-Treg]

I find this a good starting  point (see link) https://vr4dcs.com/2020/12/24/how-to-nail-reverb-setup/

Also did you try to kill all sources that uses your VRAM? For example... When you plugin/startup your HMD, Do you see the beach house? if yes...this uses alot of memory that is not neccesery. I use SkySpaces program for this and load an empty room. (See video in link) 

 

Greetings

Naj-Treg

 

[shadowborn]

Hey.

Okay, I can now say with confidence after some Skyrim VR, The Forest etc. that the new cable (from HP) fixed all my VR problems except the memory leak with DCS.

I don't believe the beach house is causing that, but yes, I was running the bare-bones "space platform" that Microsoft offers as well. But no way does the beach house (or the space  platform) consume that much excess RAM.

[M1Combat]

What's your page file setup like?