Foveated Rendering Support for DCS

[obious]

I’ve skim read the 12ish pages of this thread but am at a loss as to whether or not there is a performance gain to be had for those with 4090 GPUs. is it only mid-tier/older gen cards that benefit from using DFR and mbucchia’s mod?
 

[dburne]

30 minutes ago, obious said:

I’ve skim read the 12ish pages of this thread but am at a loss as to whether or not there is a performance gain to be had for those with 4090 GPUs. is it only mid-tier/older gen cards that benefit from using DFR and mbucchia’s mod?
 

 

I run a 9900k at 5.1 GHz with a 4090 GPU and the gain for me was huge.

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Not only in terms of fps, frame rate has also improved too.

[slughead]

It's huge even for a 4090 as you are pushing something like 58% fewer pixels.

Edited August 10, 2023 by slughead

[mbucchia]

4 hours ago, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

Dunno why this happens as I experience this with MiG-29 and F-14. It also happen quite consistently when I check six.

 

Disable Lens Effects, as indicated in the instructions:

https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki#dcs-world

 

I don't know how many times we're going to have to repeat that one before people start reading the instructions on the website...

[Mr_sukebe]

2 hours ago, obious said:

I’ve skim read the 12ish pages of this thread but am at a loss as to whether or not there is a performance gain to be had for those with 4090 GPUs. is it only mid-tier/older gen cards that benefit from using DFR and mbucchia’s mod?
 

It’s very easy to setup, give it a try

[obious]

Thanks for the replies all, will defo give it a go 

[mbucchia]

There's a new version 1.1 available: https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki#setup

Changelog

- Fix performance issue with OpenXR-OBSMirror.
- Fix crash with Oculus runtime upon taking off the headset.
- Better handling of eye blinking.
- Tweak default settings for Fixed Foveated Rendering mode.
- Fix crash with Vive OpenXR runtime.
- Disable Turbo Mode with SteamVR OpenXR runtime.
- Add debugging/performance tracing (for developer only).

[freehand]

Sweet.

[obious]

7 hours ago, mbucchia said:

There's a new version 1.1 available: https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki#setup

Changelog

- Fix performance issue with OpenXR-OBSMirror.
- Fix crash with Oculus runtime upon taking off the headset.
- Better handling of eye blinking.
- Tweak default settings for Fixed Foveated Rendering mode.
- Fix crash with Vive OpenXR runtime.
- Disable Turbo Mode with SteamVR OpenXR runtime.
- Add debugging/performance tracing (for developer only).

I’m only asking as you mention it your change log but is DVF with the QP compatible with SteamVR, I thought it wasn’t?

[markturner1960]

Quick question....I am NOT using it alongside the toolkit, purely standalone.........Pretty sure I did not do the return to default step as shown in the latest instrcutions....its all working fine, can I assume that I am good and that I should only worry about wiping previous toolkit settings if I want to start running the toolkit with the DFR? 

 

Thanks! 

[slughead]

Just now, markturner1960 said:

Quick question....I am NOT using it alongside the toolkit, purely standalone.........Pretty sure I did not do the return to default step as shown in the latest instrcutions....its all working fine, can I assume that I am good and that I should only worry about wiping previous toolkit settings if I want to start running the toolkit with the DFR? 

 

Thanks! 

Correct.

[markturner1960]

And sorry, another question....I have a separate sim rig for Helos, running off my hand down kit after upgrades, currently a 2080ti and a G2 headset. Am I correct in thinking from reading the instrcutions, that I simply use the fixed foveated rendering via the performance tools in this case? And that this software only works with eyetracking headsets? Or is there a mode within this software that I need to set to use which is better than the original option in the performance toolkit? Pretty sure its the former, but wanted to double check....

Edited August 11, 2023 by markturner1960

[Qcumber]

2 hours ago, markturner1960 said:

And sorry, another question....I have a separate sim rig for Helos, running off my hand down kit after upgrades, currently a 2080ti and a G2 headset. Am I correct in thinking from reading the instrcutions, that I simply use the fixed foveated rendering via the performance tools in this case? And that this software only works with eyetracking headsets? Or is there a mode within this software that I need to set to use which is better than the original option in the performance toolkit? Pretty sure its the former, but wanted to double check....

 

You can use QVFR for fixed-foveated rendering. There are settings for this which can be applied in the user config file.

https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki/Advanced-Configuration#settings-specific-to-fixed-foveated-rendering

It works very well. 

[mbucchia]

6 hours ago, obious said:

I’m only asking as you mention it your change log but is DVF with the QP compatible with SteamVR, I thought it wasn’t?

You can only get eye tracking on Quest Pro via Oculus, not SteamVR. 

If you use SteamVR you will get FFR.

[sea2sky]

The performance gain with Quest Pro is phenomenal! Now I'm able to run it with 1.5 super sampling, and MSAAx4. And that is on 3080.

[freehand]

2 hours ago, sea2sky said:

The performance gain with Quest Pro is phenomenal! Now I'm able to run it with 1.5 super sampling, and MSAAx4. And that is on 3080.

With new version or in general ?

[mbucchia]

1 minute ago, freehand said:

With new version or in general ?

I see no reason the new version would help more with performance than the previous. All the changes were either bug fixes or enabling other headsets to use FFR.

Edited August 11, 2023 by mbucchia

[sea2sky]

1 hour ago, freehand said:

With new version or in general ?

In general. But I've just configured it for a first time, so it is a new version.

Edited August 11, 2023 by sea2sky

[Hammer3246]

I'm trying this to get the ffr on a Pico 4,  but for some reason my hmd is so sensitive now that I have to unplug my simshaker seat because everything shakes.  

 

Anyone with an idea?

[Qcumber]

9 hours ago, Hammer3246 said:

Anyone with an idea?

Not sure if this is the issue but make sure turbo mode is disabled. It causes unstable behavior on the Pico 4 unless you cap the frame rate. 

[Hammer3246]

1 minute ago, Qcumber said:

Not sure if this is the issue but make sure turbo mode is disabled. It causes unstable behavior on the Pico 4 unless you cap the frame rate. 

Thank you, I do have it disabled.

[markturner1960]

17 hours ago, Qcumber said:

You can use QVFR for fixed-foveated rendering. There are settings for this which can be applied in the user config file.

https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki/Advanced-Configuration#settings-specific-to-fixed-foveated-rendering

It works very well. 

OK (and sorry to labour the point on this...) so, two things - 1) Is the FFR via QVFR better than using the FFR via the toolkit ?   And 2) if I want to try the FFR via QVFR, I should follow the wipe all previous settings from the toolkit procedure, turn it all off in toolkit and it will be automatically enabled with QVFR ? 

Thank you! 

[Qcumber]

32 minutes ago, markturner1960 said:

OK (and sorry to labour the point on this...) so, two things - 1) Is the FFR via QVFR better than using the FFR via the toolkit ?   And 2) if I want to try the FFR via QVFR, I should follow the wipe all previous settings from the toolkit procedure, turn it all off in toolkit and it will be automatically enabled with QVFR ? 

Thank you! 

1) Yes, I believe that QVFR is superior to the one in OXRTK. I get about 10-15 fps better with QVFR. 

2) The official advice is to reset OXRTK but the main issues are making sure FFR and turbo are disabled. I accidentally ran these together yesterday after the update and it looked terrible. I would suggest setting OXRTK to baseline and then start reintroducing your normal settings from there. 

QVFR ran straight out of the box for me but you will need to set up a user config file for your headset if you want to tweak anything. It's not as user friendly as OXRTK yet. 

[obious]

Ok, so after playing around with this for the past few hours I thought I'd provide my 2 cents.

1. The performance improvement is immediately apparent. After runnning a simple NTTR F-18 free flight mission (with Broken Clouds 7 on Ultra, 2x MSAA) that struggled, the same mission becomes instantly playable.
2. I'm finding it difficult to dial in my settings (to take account of the additional system resources I now have. Prior to DFR, I was seeing around 30% headroom being reported via the OTT HUD Performance view but when using DFR, that number jumps to 98%. I'm not entirely sure its accurate as after changing some settings to utilize the system headroom (MSAA now at 4x, render scalling in the OTT at 1.2), that 98% headroom figure doesn't really change. The only impact I see is that the Quest Pro I'm using drops down to 45PFS from 90FPS (which I rearly experienced before).
3. After closing DCS and starting it again (to change an OTT setting etc),  DCS hangs (white box; see attached image). Anyone else experienced this?
4. Not sure if this is a DFR thing or not but the sound is very 'choppy'. I'm using an encode resolution of 3664 and an Encode Bitrate of 960 but I'm not entirely sure if these settings are correct?
5. When using DFR, I notice what I can only describe as a 'box' that follows my line of sight/my eyes and is viewable only in the periphery (I'm assuming this is the 'fully' rendered image vs. the lower-res part of the quad-view). Its only noticible when looking at parts of the rendered image that span high brightness/contrast levels (like when I look back at the wings of my F-18 and I can see both the sea and the sky in the saame image. Not sure if I need to tune the settings.cfg here somewhat/somehow.
6. Whilst the instructions are great and perfectly clear, I think using DFR with the Quest Pro may not be for everyone. I had to setup a Meta developer account (which required a credit card and home address) and toggle a bunch of settings deep in the bowls of the Oculus software. 

Edited August 12, 2023 by obious