Reverb G2 refresh rate and refresh rate questions in general

[Richard amo]

Hi guys 

1st time poster here

I have been playing DCS now for around 3 years ,mostly in vr,my previous system was an i712900k ,z690 mobo,rtx3080,32gb 3600 ram., i am now the proud owner of a i913900k,z790 gaming wifi mobo,and an RTX4090 with 64gb 5600 ram,reverb G2.

So initially with a clean install of DCS and windows 10 pro , results were not so good, i went down the usual rabbit hole of turning off HAGS,adjusting power configurations,game bar off ,nvidia control panel settings , running MT or single thread etc etc, after 3 days i noticed something i believe may be rudimentary to you guys but would like some clarification from someone way wiser than myself.

So with the usual ctrl pause break to bring up fps and frame time i was noticing the the awful slide show when looking out of the cockpit ,even on single player missions with low numbers off assets /Targets.

This brings me to my question

When holding 90fps, i.e refresh rate of my headset all is well ,green and white lines fairly flat in the fps overlay, as soon as i get say down to varying fps figures of say 3/5 fps, i.e 85 fps the slide show starts ,usually as we know during a roll, looking out the cockpit or flying low, so every frame spike i see on the frame counter corresponds to a stutter however small the spike is, i sort of understand the correlation between refresh rate and frame timing....sort of, the one thing that really gets me is this, i see videos of guys on you tube ,especially flight sim guy having varying fps all over the place and his green and white lines are spiking consistently and he says its super smooth... if that were my system it would just be a non stop slide show , i see many vids where the frame time is spiking all the time and they don't seem to have the slide show effect ,i maybe missing something really simple that i have overlooked for years.

Any advise would be gratefully received ,its driving me mad.

 

P.S How do i load my system specs to the bottom of the page as you guys have ,to help with future topics

Thanks to all in advance.

[Baldrick33]

I also find anything dropping below 90fps stutters. Some seem ok with it

To resolve it for me I use motion reprojection which runs at 45fps and fills in the gaps, I find it very smooth. It can create some graphical artefacts and also ghosting when passing fast moving aircraft, these don’t really bother me compared with the benefits of smoothness. The instructions to enable motion reprojection are towards the bottom of this article:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/enthusiast-guide/using-steamvr-with-windows-mixed-reality#:~:text=Open the SteamVR dashboard.,to enable automatic motion reprojection.

You can enable the signature under Profile, Account Settings

Edited October 8, 2023 by Baldrick33

[Dangerzone]

Motion Reprojection user here too. Normally locked in at 45fps, and it's smooth. Can be blury/ghosting when looking out at 90 degrees while flying slow to the ground, but that's the price we pay unfortunately. Much better than it used to be though. 

That plus starting off with conservative settings until things are working smooth, and then upping those settings. This helps to make sure there's not something 'very' wrong in the system such as an individual / particular setting that could cause quality issues.

Search here and you should be able to find other threads that go through the whole tweaking for VR including the NVIDIA profile settings, BIOS settings and windows settings. 

[Guyamn]

17 hours ago, Dangerzone said:

Motion Reprojection user here too. Normally locked in at 45fps, and it's smooth. Can be blury/ghosting when looking out at 90 degrees while flying slow to the ground, but that's the price we pay unfortunately. Much better than it used to be though. 

That plus starting off with conservative settings until things are working smooth, and then upping those settings. This helps to make sure there's not something 'very' wrong in the system such as an individual / particular setting that could cause quality issues.

Search here and you should be able to find other threads that go through the whole tweaking for VR including the NVIDIA profile settings, BIOS settings and windows settings. 

+1 ^^

[Taterbootz]

If you cant deal with the frames jumping, you either need to set it to hold 90FPS, downgrade it to 60 and set your graphics to hold that if you can deal with the flicker (I cant), or get used to MR and get it smooth with that locked at 45. 

Eventually I got used to the slight frame jumps from less than 90 with no MR to where I dont even like how MR warps the image to get me steady picture a lot of the time and I'd rather have it frame jump (I'm not calling it stuttering because stuttering to me is different, this is just you seeing the sub 90 frames vs it actually framerate spiking and stuttering).

I have a 13900k, 4090, 64gb@6400CL30

[j9murphy]

now is that stutter or judder???

(for those of you not laughing, don't answer that.. it was said in jest only and not intended to start a terminology war)

[Richard amo]

Great guys thanks for all the replies, is there anyway of clarifying why i constantly see guys with the dcs overlay with random fps figures i.e not locked to half refresh rate, and they say its so smooth.. and the frame times are all over the place, just makes me wonder if there's more to it than i am seeing.

 

Cheers Baldrick33 i will add my specs now

[some1]

I think it's just some people less susceptible to visual stutter. 

A headset is like a monitor with fixed refresh rate (vsync on). If it is set to 90Hz, then it cannot display 85 fps, 67 fps, or any other number generated by the game below 90. If it doesn't get a new frame every 1/90th of a second, it will display the previous frame for the next refresh cycle, another 1/90th second. So it's dropping from 90 to 45 and back to 90 fps, the result is visible stutter. 

Some people claim that locking the game to 45 fps fixes it, but then you're looking at low framerate all the time. Maybe that removes the stutter, but it isn't very smooth either.

[Baldrick33]

8 minutes ago, some1 said:

I think it's just some people less susceptible to visual stutter. 

It is strange how different we seem to be wired!

I can’t stand any stuttering in VR, it kills the immersion of being there. Even if the resolution isn’t close to what I see and the textures are limited to approximations of terrain and buildings it still allows my brain to feel I am inside an aircraft. Others get immersion in different ways I guess.

Back in my younger days I used to play Indycar on PC, it had a minimum frame rate setting which I recall I set at 12, hard to imagine playing that now, so I guess we get used to things!

[eFirehawk]

Similar specs here. I switched my G2 from 90FPS to 60FPS. Much smoother experience overall as well.

Is there any way to lock it to 45FPS without motion reprojection? NVidia control panel max FPS setting does not help.

[Sile]

vor einer Stunde schrieb eFirehawk:

Similar specs here. I switched my G2 from 90FPS to 60FPS. Much smoother experience overall as well.

Is there any way to lock it to 45FPS without motion reprojection? NVidia control panel max FPS setting does not help.

AFAICT OpenXR Toolkit has an option to limit FPS.
And Rivatuner might work as well. At least it worked for me some months ago when i still had a G2.

Edited October 10, 2023 by Sile

[j9murphy]

As long as there as a difference between HMD refresh rate and fps (eg 60hz HMD / 45fps DCS) you only have two alternatives...

- keep the same frame in the HMD until a new one arrives (which causes stutter)

- motion reprojection to fill in the gaps (which adds GPU load, and a little blurring - and still stutters sometimes unless you keep some overhead in your system to keep the fps from dropping too low or varying a lot)

AFAIK, them are the only choices. My choice is smoothness (motion repro) over clarity, although I'll tolerate occasional judder when looking at the 3/9). As said above, capping your fps (nvidia/riva/openxtk) can help prevent stutter/judder. I've had mixed results although riva seems to work the best, and does work quite well with msfs.

Edited October 10, 2023 by j9murphy

[oz555]

I dropped to 60hz 6 months ago. Took me a few days to adjust to the flicker, but with the right use of the XR toolkit you can eliminate it almost entirely. Providing you can make a minimum of 60 FPS in most scenarios it is definitely worth an extended period of testing. I'm now very reluctant to purchase a different headset that can't run at 60 as the headroom it gives you is better than a generational GPU upgrade and I sure don't want to go back to reprojection.  

[Taterbootz]

21 hours ago, j9murphy said:

now is that stutter or judder???

(for those of you not laughing, don't answer that.. it was said in jest only and not intended to start a terminology war)

No idea.  I just dont consider seeing individual frames or the change in frames stuttering, I consider a frametime spike to be a stutter.  One is an issue with the computation to be displayed, one is just how its displayed IMO.   Thats strictly my terminology and was only used to describe what was happening easier for people to understand.  Frametime spikes stutters arent the same as sub 90fps stutters on motion from what I've seen.

I'm not here to argue semantics, just trying to give an accurate account of what I mean and what I dont in easy to understand terms (which is the point of communication...not the actual definition of the term, but the understanding of the message conveyed using the means of the conversation).

4 minutes ago, oz555 said:

I dropped to 60hz 6 months ago. Took me a few days to adjust to the flicker, but with the right use of the XR toolkit you can eliminate it almost entirely. Providing you can make a minimum of 60 FPS in most scenarios it is definitely worth an extended period of testing. I'm now very reluctant to purchase a different headset that can't run at 60 as the headroom it gives you is better than a generational GPU upgrade and I sure don't want to go back to reprojection.  

What did you do to remove the flicker?

Edited October 10, 2023 by Taterbootz

[oz555]

38 minutes ago, Taterbootz said:

No idea.  I just dont consider seeing individual frames or the change in frames stuttering, I consider a frametime spike to be a stutter.  One is an issue with the computation to be displayed, one is just how its displayed IMO.   Thats strictly my terminology and was only used to describe what was happening easier for people to understand.  Frametime spikes stutters arent the same as sub 90fps stutters on motion from what I've seen.

I'm not here to argue semantics, just trying to give an accurate account of what I mean and what I dont in easy to understand terms (which is the point of communication...not the actual definition of the term, but the understanding of the message conveyed using the means of the conversation).

What did you do to remove the flicker?

 

I use Post Processing Sunglasses dark in most situations. This does a great job reducing the flicker. 

Edit- I should add, alongside an extended period of use at 60hz. I soon got used to it. 

Edited October 10, 2023 by oz555

[gwizdek]

On 10/10/2023 at 11:37 AM, Sile said:

AFAICT OpenXR Toolkit has an option to limit FPS.
And Rivatuner might work as well. At least it worked for me some months ago when i still had a G2.

Agreed.

Rivatuner does better job than Toolkit in my experience with G2.

Set HMD to 90Hz and cap frames to 45 which is 1/2 refresh rate.

You will see double image while translating left/right in cockpit and looking to the sides on fast moving objects on the ground, but frames will be delivered consistently.
This option is less demanding on gpu than reprojection as for reprojection to work you would need to be able to render about 60fps normally.

If you can maintain 60fps, for smooth experience you can either:

- run in 60Hz mode with panel flicker

- run with reprojection , but you will loose some image sharpness (if you are after max sharpness don't use reprojection in general)

Edited October 11, 2023 by gwizdek
typo

[Taterbootz]

On 10/10/2023 at 3:09 PM, oz555 said:

I use Post Processing Sunglasses dark in most situations. This does a great job reducing the flicker. 

Edit- I should add, alongside an extended period of use at 60hz. I soon got used to it. 

 

Ah, I cant do with darker screens.  My low light vision is fading more and more with each passing year, and I tend to not like it really dark.  I've heard of people getting used to it, but I honestly cant get used to it enough to spend enough time to try and "get used to it" actually lol.   

But I think VR is a way more personal experience thats hard to translate like 2d gaming is too honestly.

[TAIPAN_]

On 10/9/2023 at 4:26 AM, Richard amo said:

Hi guys 

1st time poster here

I have been playing DCS now for around 3 years ,mostly in vr,my previous system was an i712900k ,z690 mobo,rtx3080,32gb 3600 ram., i am now the proud owner of a i913900k,z790 gaming wifi mobo,and an RTX4090 with 64gb 5600 ram,reverb G2.

So initially with a clean install of DCS and windows 10 pro , results were not so good, i went down the usual rabbit hole of turning off HAGS,adjusting power configurations,game bar off ,nvidia control panel settings , running MT or single thread etc etc, after 3 days i noticed something i believe may be rudimentary to you guys but would like some clarification from someone way wiser than myself.

So with the usual ctrl pause break to bring up fps and frame time i was noticing the the awful slide show when looking out of the cockpit ,even on single player missions with low numbers off assets /Targets.

This brings me to my question

When holding 90fps, i.e refresh rate of my headset all is well ,green and white lines fairly flat in the fps overlay, as soon as i get say down to varying fps figures of say 3/5 fps, i.e 85 fps the slide show starts ,usually as we know during a roll, looking out the cockpit or flying low, so every frame spike i see on the frame counter corresponds to a stutter however small the spike is, i sort of understand the correlation between refresh rate and frame timing....sort of, the one thing that really gets me is this, i see videos of guys on you tube ,especially flight sim guy having varying fps all over the place and his green and white lines are spiking consistently and he says its super smooth... if that were my system it would just be a non stop slide show , i see many vids where the frame time is spiking all the time and they don't seem to have the slide show effect ,i maybe missing something really simple that i have overlooked for years.

Any advise would be gratefully received ,its driving me mad.

 

P.S How do i load my system specs to the bottom of the page as you guys have ,to help with future topics

Thanks to all in advance.

Try nvidia control panel increase virtual reality pre-rendered frames from 1 to 3