Add Quad Views Foveated Rendering for VR

[Qcumber]

Would it be possible to integrate QVFR into DCS? Mbucchia's development of this tool has made a massive improvement in VR performance for me (and many others judging by the forum discussions). Now support has been discontinued is this an opportunity to bring this directly into DCS? 

[rob10]

 

[YoYo]

On 12/1/2023 at 2:27 PM, Qcumber said:

Would it be possible to integrate QVFR into DCS? Mbucchia's development of this tool has made a massive improvement in VR performance for me (and many others judging by the forum discussions). Now support has been discontinued is this an opportunity to bring this directly into DCS? 

+1

[diamond26]

Quad Views is a really important improvement for VR users either with eye tracking capable headset of in fixed mode for non eye-tracking capable headsets.

It will be great to have it integrated in DCS .

[Marshallman]

+1

 

Frustrating this I cant produce the suggested .CFG file for it...Ive tried everything and in admin mode.

Just beyond my pc skills

 

Edited December 7, 2023 by Marshallman

[diamond26]

2 minutes ago, Marshallman said:

Frustrating this I cant produce the suggested .CFG file for it...Ive tried everything and in admin mode.

What exactly you mean? The custom cfg is not actually needed for QVFR to work. It's only needed if you want to change the default values. For the custom file Mbucchia has provided detailed explanation in advanced configuration part of his github. 

[Uzigunner]

+1

its already there and working - please implement it.

PLUS: it is one of the few techniques for AMD Radeon users to improve VR experience.

[Marshallman]

26 minutes ago, diamond26 said:

What exactly you mean? The custom cfg is not actually needed for QVFR to work. It's only needed if you want to change the default values. For the custom file Mbucchia has provided detailed explanation in advanced configuration part of his github. 

I went into the Advanced config detailed explanation of how to produce the .cfg file... link  https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki/Advanced-Configuration

%LocalAppData%\Quad-Views-Foveated\settings.cfg - This is the file you may edit to add your own settings. Note: You have to create this folder and the file yourself. Do not copy the file from 1), instead create a blank file and only add settings you want to change from the default configuration.
 

This is where my pc skills lack...how do i create this... I have tried in text editor. Do I have to create it?   Are the %  sympols required??

Currently my cockpit is sharp... its the distance thats lacking and so I wanted to increase the furthest views

 

Edited December 7, 2023 by Marshallman

[diamond26]

41 minutes ago, Marshallman said:

I went into the Advanced config detailed explanation of how to produce the .cfg file... link  https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated/wiki/Advanced-Configuration

%LocalAppData%\Quad-Views-Foveated\settings.cfg - This is the file you may edit to add your own settings. Note: You have to create this folder and the file yourself. Do not copy the file from 1), instead create a blank file and only add settings you want to change from the default configuration.
 

This is where my pc skills lack...how do i create this... I have tried in text editor. Do I have to create it?   Are the %  sympols required??

Currently my cockpit is sharp... its the distance thats lacking and so I wanted to increase the furthest views

 

 

You can take the example he provided in a text editor (notepad++), save it as settings.cfg and put it into the folder Quad Views you will create under Users/“your name”/ Appdata/local. I’m not in my PC to give you a screenshot but somebody else can help

[Marshallman]

1 hour ago, diamond26 said:

You can take the example he provided in a text editor (notepad++), save it as settings.cfg and put it into the folder Quad Views you will create under Users/“your name”/ Appdata/local. I’m not in my PC to give you a screenshot but somebody else can help

finally got there and currently trying this... let me know if its a start

# These settings are for all headsets and applications
smoothen_focus_view_edges=0.2
sharpen_focus_view=0.7
peripheral_multiplier=2.0
focus_multiplier=0.7

[WipeUout]

+1

QVFR is providing even more performance than OXRTK's FFR.  Given that VR is demanding so much, this tool should be part of the baseline!

[diamond26]

2 hours ago, Marshallman said:

peripheral_multiplier=2.0
focus_multiplier=0.7

You are actually defeating the purpose of QV with these settings. The idea is to have small number in the peripheral (less than 1) and higher number in the focus (greater than 1) so you can actually see the benefit of sharp image where your eyes are looking while performance is better because of the lower resolution in the periphery.

[Marshallman]

44 minutes ago, diamond26 said:

You are actually defeating the purpose of QV with these settings. The idea is to have small number in the peripheral (less than 1) and higher number in the focus (greater than 1) so you can actually see the benefit of sharp image where your eyes are looking while performance is better because of the lower resolution in the periphery.

Thanks they were suggestions from  another post  so i will amend them....

Edited December 7, 2023 by Marshallman

[Qcumber]

5 hours ago, Marshallman said:

finally got there and currently trying this... let me know if its a start

# These settings are for all headsets and applications
smoothen_focus_view_edges=0.2
sharpen_focus_view=0.7
peripheral_multiplier=2.0
focus_multiplier=0.7

Try these settings:

DCS PD 1.5

DLSS: quality, 0.5 sharp

QVFR:

smoothen_focus_view_edges=0.35

sharpen_focus_view=0.5

peripheral_multiplier=0.4

focus_multiplier=1.0

Horizontal=0.35

Vertical=0.35

Fine tune sharpening with OXRTK CAS. 

They work quite well for me. 

Edit. I messed up. These are what you need. 

Edited December 7, 2023 by Qcumber
Sorry. Messed up sharpen and focus multiplier.

[diamond26]

24 minutes ago, Qcumber said:

Fine tune sharpening with OXRTK CAS. 

Don’t forget that QVFR already uses CAS sharpening 

2 hours ago, Marshallman said:

Thanks they were suggestions from  another post  so i will amend them....

 

I just noticed you have a non eye tracking headset (G2), so keep in mind that in your case the foveated area is fixed. You have to move your head to the area you want the focus 

 

But this thread is not about sorting out QVFR usage. So let’s keep it for what the OP asked for.

 

Edited December 7, 2023 by diamond26

[Qcumber]

22 minutes ago, diamond26 said:

Don’t forget that QVFR already uses CAS sharpening

Yes but OXRTK allows fine tuning on the fly. Some cockpits and maps can be a bit over sharp. 

[Japo32]

+1

Mbucchia's solution is working great, but it has issues with night raids with reflectors lights over WW2 missions, plus others in winter. This is the only solution that made my fps go higher and even see everything better than by default. But if ED don't give official support, that wonder can be lost in future updates of DCS.

Edited December 7, 2023 by Japo32

[Qcumber]

2 hours ago, Japo32 said:

But if ED don't give official support, that wonder can be lost in future updates of DCS.

Yes. If it could be supported through the implementation to Vulkan it would be fantastic. 

[mbucchia]

On 12/1/2023 at 5:27 AM, Qcumber said:

Now support has been discontinued is this an opportunity to bring this directly into DCS? 

There's a big misunderstanding regarding what is done/what needs to be done. Please see my detailed explanation in the other thread. For short: the ball isn't really in ED'S court for the biggest blocking things (point 3 in my comment).

 

5 hours ago, Japo32 said:

Mbucchia's solution is working great, but it has issues with night raids with reflectors lights over WW2 missions, plus others in winter

Those graphic issues aren't related to my implementation, they are bugs in the (existing) quad views support in DCS. They've been reported to ED many times now. I believe the NVG issue was finally fixed in 2.9, but other issues are still present. 

 

3 hours ago, Qcumber said:

Yes. If it could be supported through the implementation to Vulkan it would be fantastic. 

Unless you are a Varjo owner (and use Quad-Views-Foveated's older sibling Varjo-Foveated), it will not work with Vulkan, at all. This isn't really something that would be on ED to fix (see my first point).

The easiest solution for ED to make it work would be to do their drawing in Vulkan and then to submit with DX11, this is what X-Plane 12 does (they don't have QV support, but they have Vulkan support). This won't cost any perfomance, and it will resolve compatibility issues such as working with WMR OpenXR runtime and QVFR for example. Game developers shouldn't have to do this, this is again all a result of platform vendors shortcomings (see first point about 3) in other comment).

[Qcumber]

On 12/8/2023 at 1:41 AM, mbucchia said:

Game developers shouldn't have to do this, this is again all a result of platform vendors shortcomings (see first point about 3) in other comment).

Would it be theoretically possible for QVFR to be integrated into VD? 

[twistking]

How would quad view foveated rendering compare to a hypothetical VRS (variable rate shading) implementation with vulkan?

VRS should also be useful for pancake users, so it might appear more attractive to ED. Has anyone experience with eye-tracked VRS, or general VRS in virtual reality?
I don't want to derail this topic: I'm sure quad view is great, but with vulkan coming soon, it's maybe time to look a bit further. VRS seems more "elegant", but i guess it will give less of a performance gain compared to just dropping resolution (the question is, if quad view rendering has it's own relevant performance overhead)?!

[mbucchia]

15 hours ago, Qcumber said:

Would it be theoretically possible for QVFR to be integrated into VD? 

I might do that yes. For the sake of showing that this is how it needs to be done. Will depend on how much time I find. 

[mbucchia]

13 hours ago, twistking said:

How would quad view foveated rendering compare to a hypothetical VRS (variable rate shading) implementation with vulkan?

VRS should also be useful for pancake users, so it might appear more attractive to ED. Has anyone experience with eye-tracked VRS, or general VRS in virtual reality?
I don't want to derail this topic: I'm sure quad view is great, but with vulkan coming soon, it's maybe time to look a bit further. VRS seems more "elegant", but i guess it will give less of a performance gain compared to just dropping resolution (the question is, if quad view rendering has it's own relevant performance overhead)?!

You can try VRS today with DX11 and OpenXR Toolkit (disable quad views first). You will see that it doesn't help that much in DCS (maybe 1ms or 2ms gain). This is without eye tracking, but that part doesn't matter.

I wouldn't expect it to do any better with Vulkan. The ways quad views saves on rendering is unbeatable by VRS. It saves at all stages of rasterization, especially saving a lot of memory bandwidth. VRS doesn't save you anything there.

But the overhead of quad views is added CPU usage, which can be solved in the game engine by doing the proper optimizations (stereo instanced rendering), which AFAIK DCS doesn't do.

[twistking]

10 hours ago, mbucchia said:

You can try VRS today with DX11 and OpenXR Toolkit (disable quad views first). You will see that it doesn't help that much in DCS (maybe 1ms or 2ms gain). This is without eye tracking, but that part doesn't matter.

I wouldn't expect it to do any better with Vulkan. The ways quad views saves on rendering is unbeatable by VRS. It saves at all stages of rasterization, especially saving a lot of memory bandwidth. VRS doesn't save you anything there.

But the overhead of quad views is added CPU usage, which can be solved in the game engine by doing the proper optimizations (stereo instanced rendering), which AFAIK DCS doesn't do.

i see. thanks for the detailed answer. i was not aware that VRS can be done without a proper integration in the engine.

yes, i'm also quite sure that DCS does not do stereo instanced rendering, which is a shame. i'll probably organize some pitchforks if vulkan comes along without significant vr-optimization on the CPU-side.

[Whirley]

+1