Patch notes discussion 10th March - 12th April 2023

[Marco Schaap]

7 hours ago, St4rgun said:

I also did a full repair before my test. Nominately the fps numbers are a bit better in MT than the ST version (5-10%), but the stuttering is much worse. It's even horrendous when looking sideways. I only tried quick take offs and free flights with the built in instant action missions on Caucasus, Nevada, Marianas maps.

Interestingly the F-5E Caucasus winter take off mission with the snow became even much worse az the buildings of newar Batumi airport despite the fps counter says 25-30 fps but it is so stuttered that it's a max of 3-4 fps in reality. If I only look straight then it's much better.

Even the menu produces 60-75 fps maximum (!!! with a 3090 NO WAY), while in ST version it's locked at 90 fps. Something is really bad with this build for VR...

I think the fact you render your picture @300% and then downgrade with 40% with FSR is one of the possible culprits. Try setting OpenXR to 100% and disable FSR and test again. 

I also have a G2, but then with a 6900XT. Running @100% resolution with 45FPS agl, and 60-85fps in the air.

[St4rgun]

44 minutes ago, Marco Schaap said:

I think the fact you render your picture @300% and then downgrade with 40% with FSR is one of the possible culprits. Try setting OpenXR to 100% and disable FSR and test again. 

I also have a G2, but then with a 6900XT. Running @100% resolution with 45FPS agl, and 60-85fps in the air.

 

You would be right as you saw my signature. But with the MT beta I had to turn off the 300% upscale because it was terrible (I came to the conclusion that FSR simply does not work well), so the results I wrote were already based on "only" 120% OpenXR settings without FSR.

But let me repeat: 60-75 fps in the menu screen is ridicuolus. Something is really seriously wrong with this version, because the ST version menu is locked to 90 fps.

[dutchili]

This pathc is going in the right direction. MP much more stable, improved my graphic settings (MSAA on in VR now :D). Keep up the good work ED. Looking forward to more threads and Vulcan so we can work towards 'max settings' in VR without hardware upgrades.

[pimp]

On 3/17/2023 at 5:33 PM, rob10 said:

I don't believe anything has changed with today's update in regards to this other than that it's now a known issue because it was figured out and reported in the forum a couple of days ago.  If you're already on the MT beta you might as well update because it's not going to change whether you see this or not (it was already and issue in MT beta and they haven't fixed it).  At least that's how I read it.

 

This is not true in my case. I cannot start/load any mission with this new patch in VR/MT. After you click fly->start, it just hangs. When I revert back to the previous version I can start missions again. The ST version works fine tho.

Edited March 19, 2023 by pimp

[Marco Schaap]

23 hours ago, St4rgun said:

You would be right as you saw my signature. But with the MT beta I had to turn off the 300% upscale because it was terrible (I came to the conclusion that FSR simply does not work well), so the results I wrote were already based on "only" 120% OpenXR settings without FSR.

But let me repeat: 60-75 fps in the menu screen is ridicuolus. Something is really seriously wrong with this version, because the ST version menu is locked to 90 fps.

Don't get me wrong on this, but I still think 120% is a fairly high rendering resolution with a G2 and a 10700K. In that scenario you'd probably be CPU limited all the way, assuming your 3090 has some headroom, both GPU and VRAM wise. You might try this, to see if it brings any difference in menu: 

I find switching to F10 map especially more smooth. My menu does run with 90FPS, be it with or without this " mod". That is with 100% resolution and 1.0 PD in-game. The menu is actually rendering the hangar with the flanker in main menu and F10 map. Your mileage may vary tho. Kind regards.

[draconus]

1 hour ago, Marco Schaap said:

Don't get me wrong on this, but I still think 120% is a fairly high rendering resolution with a G2 and a 10700K.

FYI: CPU has nothing to do with rendering resoluion.

[Marco Schaap]

57 minutes ago, draconus said:

FYI: CPU has nothing to do with rendering resoluion.

I disagree, the CPU handles all the draw calls. In case of VR these draw calls can be doubled, because they are drawn for each eye (or use a technique called single pass stereo, which is not available for DCS). Upping the resolution gives a greater mesh to render and thus increasing load on CPU. There are several other factors which can lead to being CPU limited, such as physics calculations, game logic etc. But that is not a factor in the main menu as far as I can imagine.

 

[draconus]

2 minutes ago, Marco Schaap said:

Upping the resolution gives a greater mesh to render and thus increasing load on CPU

And here you're wrong - the mesh is the same.

[5ephir0th]

48 minutes ago, Marco Schaap said:

I disagree, the CPU handles all the draw calls. In case of VR these draw calls can be doubled, because they are drawn for each eye (or use a technique called single pass stereo, which is not available for DCS). Upping the resolution gives a greater mesh to render and thus increasing load on CPU. There are several other factors which can lead to being CPU limited, such as physics calculations, game logic etc. But that is not a factor in the main menu as far as I can imagine.

 

As said, mesh in the same, resolution makes no difference about it, and Single Stereo Parser its avalible for DCS, but not on by default as are still on test, you can activate it via autoexec

[Recluse]

I hesitate to call this an MT issue, more likely a LOCAL issue of some kind, but wondering if anyone else has seen this.

Ever since the MT patch, all was working well, and it continued to work well for a ~2.5 h session on Friday after the hotfix. (with several long trips to the F10 map throughout the session)

Today, on two different servers I had an issue where when I went into the F10 map for an "extended" period, say 5 min or more,  my frame rates plummeted upon return to the Cockpit or any other view and never recovered.

45-60 in cockpit down to a stuttery 11-16.  Exiting out and restarting DCS returned to normal, but going back into the map killed the frames again.

 

Quest 2, running MT exe and OpenXR. 

RTX 3070, i7-10700K 32 GB RAM.

 

[St4rgun]

Dear @BIGNEWY, it turned out that maybe all my bad experience related to the mindless following of the MT FAQ which says "Currently, users with more than 32 threads should disable HT/SMT, but for everyone else we recommend enabling HT/SMT."

For me (10700k) enabling hyperthreading caused massive stutter and worse performance than the ST version, while switching off hyperthreaing solved these kind of problems. Maybe you should correct this FAQ item because it's not true for VR at the moment! Thanks.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

3 hours ago, St4rgun said:

while switching off hyperthreaing solved these kind of problems

Great if that worked for you, but for me it didn’t make a single bit of difference: I still have the same microstutters and thus a frame rate that jumps up and down like mad.

[Sr.]

17 hours ago, Marco Schaap said:

I disagree, the CPU handles all the draw calls. In case of VR these draw calls can be doubled, because they are drawn for each eye (or use a technique called single pass stereo, which is not available for DCS). Upping the resolution gives a greater mesh to render and thus increasing load on CPU. There are several other factors which can lead to being CPU limited, such as physics calculations, game logic etc. But that is not a factor in the main menu as far as I can imagine.

 

I can't say either way. But what I can report is, yesterday I changed my options from Texture High to Medium, and Terrain Texture from High to Low and saw 0 change in frame rate or fps. Barely noticeable differences visually.

Left me wondering if any actually changed.

[Beirut]

An update question, if I may:

 

After the small patch (500MB?) the other day I thought my install read out as "37854.1", now it's just "37854", with no ".1" at the end. Am I having a brain fart or did this show up and then not show up?

 

Also, I updated my Steam install and the MT works fine, but I'm not sure if the small patch in question installed as I can't see the ".1" at the end of the version numbers.

 

Thanks for any help. 

[jnr4817]

1 hour ago, Sr. said:

I can't say either way. But what I can report is, yesterday I changed my options from Texture High to Medium, and Terrain Texture from High to Low and saw 0 change in frame rate or fps. Barely noticeable differences visually.

Left me wondering if any actually changed.

This is interesting. Did you restart DCS and or your computer after, incase the changes got "hung" up. Also, do shaders different when changing textures of any kind?

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Find a minor "bug" and it is due to the F-15E -- the top left icon shows I have 4 modules left to download:

But there are actually only 3

And obviously, it is due to the F-15E...

[Sr.]

13 minutes ago, jnr4817 said:

This is interesting. Did you restart DCS and or your computer after, incase the changes got "hung" up. Also, do shaders different when changing textures of any kind?

Did yes... I even cleared the SavedGames shader folders and reset the shader cache on my GPU.

[Hillman]

14 hours ago, Recluse said:

I hesitate to call this an MT issue, more likely a LOCAL issue of some kind, but wondering if anyone else has seen this.

Ever since the MT patch, all was working well, and it continued to work well for a ~2.5 h session on Friday after the hotfix. (with several long trips to the F10 map throughout the session)

Today, on two different servers I had an issue where when I went into the F10 map for an "extended" period, say 5 min or more,  my frame rates plummeted upon return to the Cockpit or any other view and never recovered.

45-60 in cockpit down to a stuttery 11-16.  Exiting out and restarting DCS returned to normal, but going back into the map killed the frames again.

 

Quest 2, running MT exe and OpenXR. 

RTX 3070, i7-10700K 32 GB RAM.

 

I have also had a couple of crashes/freeze in VR MT when going to the F10. Never had problems here earlier.

[draconus]

18 minutes ago, VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants said:

Find a minor "bug" and it is due to the F-15E -- the top left icon shows I have 4 modules left to download:

Known MT bug, most probably for NS430 users.

[Recluse]

9 minutes ago, Hillman said:

I have also had a couple of crashes/freeze in VR MT when going to the F10. Never had problems here earlier.

 

Thanks for the confirmation!

[St4rgun]

20 hours ago, Marco Schaap said:

Don't get me wrong on this, but I still think 120% is a fairly high rendering resolution with a G2 and a 10700K. In that scenario you'd probably be CPU limited all the way, assuming your 3090 has some headroom, both GPU and VRAM wise. You might try this, to see if it brings any difference in menu: 

As I had to switch OFF the hyperthreading (which was normally OFF for me always, but because of the MT FAQ I switched it on on recommendation - it was a bad move) now I'm back to OpenXR 300% and FSR 60% in OpenXR toolkit which works flawlessly. With FSR I suppose DCS "thinks" that my G2 has about 3200x3200 resolution per eye, that's the rendering target.  Then FSR scales this up to the much higher resolution for display, but that uses only the GPU (at least I hope so).

[Sr.]

6 minutes ago, St4rgun said:

As I had to switch OFF the hyperthreading (which was normally OFF for me always, but because of the MT FAQ I switched it on on recommendation - it was a bad move) now I'm back to OpenXR 300% and FSR 60% in OpenXR toolkit which works flawlessly. With FSR I suppose DCS "thinks" that my G2 has about 3200x3200 resolution per eye, that's the rendering target.  Then FSR scales this up to the much higher resolution for display, but that uses only the GPU (at least I hope so).

Just so I'm clear... you had to switch hyperthreading to OFF for an 8 core processor?

[St4rgun]

6 minutes ago, Sr. said:

Just so I'm clear... you had to switch hyperthreading to OFF for an 8 core processor?

Yes. It was always off for me, but switched on before first testing the MT version (tried to act as written in the MT FAQ), but experienced bad stutter with MT. After that I read in another topic that hyperthreading was a bad idea for other users as well, so I tried to switch it OFF again, which indeed made MT version much better than before.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

52 minutes ago, St4rgun said:

OFF again, which indeed made MT version much better than before.

This is so weird. I take it your BIOS and chipset drivers are up-to-date?

Good luck to ED trying to make DCS run properly for as many users as possible when those users report such wildly different results…

Am I glad to not be in their shoes…

[St4rgun]

What I simply can't understand that which part of the EDGE resuilts in 2D that only my 3090 GPU is the limit (GPU bottlenecked with 120 fps), while in VR (OpenXR) it becomes CPU bottlenecked on the MAIN THREAD (not the rendering thread) in a simple SP mission?!