My tunings for near constant 72fps on AMD video card and Quest 3 Headset

[windsurfingstew]

When I first got my graphics card and headset, there were so many settings on so many pieces of software I was overwhelmed. Being an AMD grahics card, rather than an Nvdia also may have caused some confusion.

I am posting my complete tuning in the hope that it can help others. This configuration has taken my system from a stuttery 32 fps to a smooth near constant 60-72 fps (single player moderate/dense low altitute), with better image quality (all on the same hardware).

Hopefully my configuration can act as a starting point for anyone with an AMD graphics card and Quest 3 headset.

1) My PC hardware is powerful to begin with, with 64GB RAM, and a moderate overclock on the CPU and RAM. I already run DCS from a solid state M2 drive.

2) My AMD video card is currently top of the range. I chose the safe option of a moderate overclock. I kept all of the graphics settings standard. AMD bundles many tweaks that can be turned on, but my concern was that these would interfere with the other steps. These are all off for now. In summary, this is a powerful GPU, with moderate overclock, but none of the special bells and wistles turned on.

3) My Oculus software and Quest 3 are kept completely vanilla. I also tested my Link cable to ensure it could carry sufficient data. It tested as fast enough.

3) I installed the OpenXR toolkit. After a lot of experimentation, I kept everything here default. My understanding now is that features, such as upscaling etc, should be set in only one place. Setting them in OpenXR seems IMHO to conflict with DCS features that are meant to do the same thing.

4) Here is where things get more interesting. The Oculus Tray Tool MUST be run as administrator otherwise it won't work. I kept everything default here except for the changes shown in red. I have made a DCS profile. It's important to set it to start with windows.

After much messing round with ASW settings, I found much better performance with it off. With any of the ASW settings on, the frame rate would stay stuck on the slowest setting it had been down to, even with clear blue skies and no scenery. It also had stutters, and some weird artifacts occasionally. I now understand what ASW is for, but sadly it doesn't work well for my rig. IMHO it is best to start with this off, and only try playing with it as a last step to see if it helps you or not.

FoV 0.80 x 0.80 works well for my Quest 3. The black boxing is slightly noticable but it did hugely improve the performance. With VR you look at what you want, so the extreme peripheral vision is not that critical.

5) DCS settings have been chosen based on feedback from other users, reading and experimentation. I am using 1.8 pixel density which may seem extreme. For me, I prefer a high resolution and less clutter. I tried various combinations of upscaling but found the combination of MSAA 2x and a very high pixel density worked best. NIS also looks good, but different, compared with MSAA. Pixel density is the one setting I would turn up or down, to keep in the 60-72 fps range. That is I will use it as my master control.

So, there we have it. I'd like to think that if you're a newbie, with an Oculus headset, and perhaps an AMD card, I'd start with these settings. If you're not happy with the frame rate, turn the pixel density down. I'd also then try experimenting with turning AWS on or changing DCS settings.

I'm no expert. I'm quite new. In my attempts to get things running well for VR, I found very few end-to-end configuration examples. I hope you find this helpful.

If you have any further suggestions, or disagreement, I'd love to hear your thoughts below.

FINALLY
Thanks to those in this thread who helped me out on this thread.

 

Edited November 30, 2023 by windsurfingstew

[Phantom711]

vor 3 Stunden schrieb windsurfingstew:

) I installed the OpenXR toolkit. After a lot of experimentation, I kept everything here default. My understanding now is that features, such as upscaling etc, should be set in only one place. Setting them in OpenXR seems IMHO to conflict with DCS features that are meant to do the same thing.

If you leave everything at default anyways…you could as well not install it in the first place. Unless of course, you plan to use it for other software.

As far as I know, supersampling settings don‘t interfere, but they do add up to one another (or multiply for that matter). I have my Quest pro set at 1.3 in the Meta software and another 1.2 or 1.3 in OTT.

As for ASW: I use it at AUTO or ADAPTIVE (don‘t really understand the difference of the two though). This way it will basically be off as long as you can maintain your native refresh rate and only kick in with half-rate FPS if you can‘t. Me personally, if I can‘t maintain native, I prefer the artefacts of ASW over the stuttering and ghosting of lower-than-refresh FPS.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Phantom711

[windsurfingstew]

19 minutes ago, Phantom711 said:

If you leave everything at default anyways…you could as well not install it in the first place. Unless of course, you plan to use it for other software.

As far as I know, supersampling settings don‘t interfere, but they do add up to one another (or multiply for that matter). I have my Quest pro set at 1.3 in the Meta software and another 1.2 or 1.3 in OTT.

As for ASW: I use it at AUTO or ADAPTIVE (don‘t really understand the difference of the two though). This way it will basically be off as long as you can maintain your native refresh rate and only kick in with half-rate FPS if you can‘t. Me personally, if I can‘t maintain native, I prefer the artefacts of ASW over the stuttering and ghosting of lower-than-refresh FPS.

 

Thanks

Of course, if default settings in an app then the user could leave them uninstalled. But, the benefit of them being installed with default settings is it allows single setting experimentation after.

I am hoping my set-up can provide a working base-case for AMD/Quest3 users who want one. From there, they can change settings in Oculus, Oculus Tray Tool, OpenXR Toolkit, or DCS. It's just a starting point that works very well for me. No doubt it could be improved, but I feel it's 90% of the way there (for my preferences). It was a right mess before as there was IMHO too much mixing and matching across tools. It was only when I simplified everything that I started to see massive improvements.

Two questions still on my mind are (1) the shadows from the trees appear a little too late, so when i fly over them, they are quite distracting. Not sure if this is a pre-load radius thing, or to do with the shadows or texture. Will experiment further on this but it's not bothering me much. The second (2) I have pixel density at 1.8. I'm wondering if this could be more than the total resolution of the headset. Eg perhaps the resolution generated by the system, times 1.8x, might be more than the resolution of each eye in the headset (esp given reduced FoV)? It's not clear if we are making the area 1.8 larger, or each of the width and length 1.8x larger. I guess this is something I can play with and work it out for myself.

The main thing is that I now have a very stable base-case I'm happy with. Anyone with a similar spec and AMD/Quest3 will hopefully get a similar result. Any further tweaking is likely to be only a minor improvement, ie icing on the cake
 

Edited November 30, 2023 by windsurfingstew