Hunting for the stutter-free VR experience.

[Qcumber]

1 hour ago, Dogmanbird said:

I love DLAA for it's terrific anti aliasing look, and it seems to retain very good fps, but I appreciate that it creates some ghosting/trails on some of the gfx which some folk don't like. 

DLAA/DLSS is great for sightseeing low over cities but crap for close dogfighting. Too much smearing and ghosting. Even with 3.8.10 and preset E/F. 

[Moxica]

No AA for me.
But there are two kinds of stutter.
One performance/setting dependent that is affected by settings.
Then there is that micro-stutter visible in cockpit when moving head horisontally,or looking out to the sides. So fast at times that it turn into a tiny blur.
Last one was gone for a while. But now it is back and annoying as frack!

[WipeUout]

Another cause of stutter that I experienced was very difficult to pinpoint as it would not happen all the time on all maps:  Too much overclocking on the GPU.

Although I was very careful in setting the overclock, way below when I would see artifacts or crash, it may cause problems anyway.

Turns out I only had 150mhz overclocking but it did cause stutters at time.  As soon as I got rid of it, butter smooth again.  If you are overclocking your GPU, even so lightly, test without it and validate it is not causing stutters.

[Panzerlang]

2 hours ago, WipeUout said:

Another cause of stutter that I experienced was very difficult to pinpoint as it would not happen all the time on all maps:  Too much overclocking on the GPU.

Although I was very careful in setting the overclock, way below when I would see artifacts or crash, it may cause problems anyway.

Turns out I only had 150mhz overclocking but it did cause stutters at time.  As soon as I got rid of it, butter smooth again.  If you are overclocking your GPU, even so lightly, test without it and validate it is not causing stutters.

I had it for a bit (the NVidia App did it) but I saw no impact from it in the game for good or bad.

[ischicopter]

1 hour ago, Panzerlang said:

I had it for a bit (the NVidia App did it) but I saw no impact from it in the game for good or bad.

You seem to be ignoring me but I am going to ask you a 3rd time. Have you tried OpenXR Toolkit: Turbo Mode ON ? 

Do it and report back. Thank me later

[Panzerlang]

2 hours ago, ischicopter said:

You seem to be ignoring me but I am going to ask you a 3rd time. Have you tried OpenXR Toolkit: Turbo Mode ON ? 

Do it and report back. Thank me later

Sorry dude, thought I had. No, I'm using the Pimax Play software now. I did previously have MBucchia's software...turbo on or off, no difference (OpenXR Companion).

6 hours ago, Moxica said:

No AA for me.
But there are two kinds of stutter.
One performance/setting dependent that is affected by settings.
Then there is that micro-stutter visible in cockpit when moving head horisontally,or looking out to the sides. So fast at times that it turn into a tiny blur.
Last one was gone for a while. But now it is back and annoying as frack!

I've had that cockpit jitter too but it was tied to overall settings (at 120htz it was very obvious). Maybe try the cockpit jpg settings? (250 vs 1040 or something).

[MarkyMarkUK]

I'm on the Pimax Crystal Light with the new client version v1.36.01.01 and found that putting the PCL to 120Hz, QuadViews on Balanced, Render quality to Medium and throttling FPS in DCS down to 80 solved my jitters when flying over towns.

Previously, I had to have the quality down to Low and 90Hz, but this new update seems to have changed things for me. This is the first time since 'upgrading' from PICO4 + VD to PCL that I've been able to actually fly again!

PS. @ischicopter, don't be disheartened that @Panzerlang ignored you, he did the same to me at the start of the thread and I went to all the trouble a detailed description and screenshot too 

 

Fly Safe! 

[Moxica]

24 minutes ago, MarkyMarkUK said:

I'm on the Pimax Crystal Light with the new client version v1.36.01.01 and found that putting the PCL to 120Hz, QuadViews on Balanced, Render quality to Medium and throttling FPS in DCS down to 80 solved my jitters when flying over towns.

Previously, I had to have the quality down to Low and 90Hz, but this new update seems to have changed things for me. This is the first time since 'upgrading' from PICO4 + VD to PCL that I've been able to actually fly again!

PS. @ischicopter, don't be disheartened that @Panzerlang ignored you, he did the same to me at the start of the thread and I went to all the trouble a detailed description and screenshot too 

 

Fly Safe! 

I use mbuccia's Quadviews.
And I could read the following:
"support for Pimax OpenXR runtime (requires Pimax Play QuadViews to be unchecked, mbucchia's QuadViews Foveated to be installed)."

null

[Panzerlang]

36 minutes ago, MarkyMarkUK said:

I'm on the Pimax Crystal Light with the new client version v1.36.01.01 and found that putting the PCL to 120Hz, QuadViews on Balanced, Render quality to Medium and throttling FPS in DCS down to 80 solved my jitters when flying over towns.

Previously, I had to have the quality down to Low and 90Hz, but this new update seems to have changed things for me. This is the first time since 'upgrading' from PICO4 + VD to PCL that I've been able to actually fly again!

PS. @ischicopter, don't be disheartened that @Panzerlang ignored you, he did the same to me at the start of the thread and I went to all the trouble a detailed description and screenshot too 

 

Fly Safe! 

 

Sorry dude, age is my only excuse. 

Video, to give a baseline for my definition of The Stutter. It's hard to visualize each person's experience but here's mine for comparison. In actual fact this run was a fair bit worse than usual, but hey ho, it's in the ballpark of what I generally get.
 

 

13 minutes ago, Moxica said:

I use mbuccia's Quadviews.
And I could read the following:
"support for Pimax OpenXR runtime (requires Pimax Play QuadViews to be unchecked, mbucchia's QuadViews Foveated to be installed)."

null

Yes. If Quadviews in Pimax Play is enabled it takes over from MBuccia's one.

[Peedee]

On 1/2/2025 at 12:01 PM, Panzerlang said:

Is it not possible to swap the lenses?

Maybe. I have not checked it. I would not do it anyway   The light is for me so much more comfortable, and I can use it for hours and hours without thinking about the batteries.  

[Ready]

1 hour ago, Panzerlang said:

 

Sorry dude, age is my only excuse. 

Video, to give a baseline for my definition of The Stutter. It's hard to visualize each person's experience but here's mine for comparison. In actual fact this run was a fair bit worse than usual, but hey ho, it's in the ballpark of what I generally get.
 

 

Yes. If Quadviews in Pimax Play is enabled it takes over from MBuccia's one.

Am watching your video. Do you have that stutter also on other maps? What if you fly over water and look sideways without trees? What do you see when you fly over desert, look over your wing and rock your wings?

What settings do you have in DCS for shadows, scenery, trees etc? 

Did you always have this experience?

What do you use for recording? Can you maybe record your desktop, including a VR mirror on your desktop and have Frametools open next to it to see what it does?  

 

[Panzerlang]

6 minutes ago, Ready said:

Am watching your video. Do you have that stutter also on other maps? What if you fly over water and look sideways without trees? What do you see when you fly over desert, look over your wing and rock your wings?

What settings do you have in DCS for shadows, scenery, trees etc? 

Did you always have this experience?

What do you use for recording? Can you maybe record your desktop, including a VR mirror on your desktop and have Frametools open next to it to see what it does?  

 

Mariannas, absolute stutter/jerk fest, even out to sea and looking at the island from a distance. Look away to sea and it goes smooth.

I record live, Game Bar, it records the monitor VR mirror.

Pimax Play at native render (1.0), DCS VR PD at 1.5.

Settings:

 

Edited January 3 by Panzerlang

[Ready]

20 minutes ago, Panzerlang said:

Mariannas, absolute stutter/jerk fest, even out to sea and looking at the island from a distance. Look away to sea and it goes smooth.

I record live, Game Bar, it records the monitor VR mirror.

Pimax Play at native render (1.0), DCS VR PD at 1.5.

Settings:

 

Your settings are quite high for Marianas if you put PD 1.5, sharpening .5 on top and no DLSS/MSAA tbh.

Did you check lowering PD to 1.0, lowering sharpening a bit lower? I currently fly with PD1.0, MSAA/DLSS Quality, sharpening .3 and it looks pretty decent.

Reducing trees also makes some difference. You can play with the sliders for details factor and visibility while you are on active pause and just look to the side, to see their impact.

What performance is your recording tool pulling? I changed to OBS, which costed me less CPU. Marianas is the worst map, so I am not surprised. But I don't know what else your cpu is doing at the same moment. 

I also see you have Heat Blur on High. Not sure if it is a factor in the cockpit, but I am not using it.  

Edited January 3 by Ready

[WipeUout]

3 hours ago, Panzerlang said:

Yes. If Quadviews in Pimax Play is enabled it takes over from MBuccia's one.

Was not aware of this, so I decided to give a go to PimaxPlay 1.36 and the results are very bad.

I used same settings as before with quadviews disabled in PimaxPlay to ensure mbuccia's quadviews api layer is running and I am losing 14.8% performance when using Pimax's integrated OpenXR runtime compared to mbuccia's PimaxXR standalone runtime implementation.  Using pimax integrated quadviews is even worse losing 15.2% at "performance" setting.

This is like dropping to 4080 performance with my very expensive 4090.  My average GPU frametime went up by 1.34 ms !  

If you can run PimaxPlay 1.29 with no big problem, then stick to it and continue to use mbuccia's runtime instead.

[Qcumber]

4 hours ago, Panzerlang said:

Mariannas, absolute stutter/jerk fest, even out to sea and looking at the island from a distance. Look away to sea and it goes smooth.

I record live, Game Bar, it records the monitor VR mirror.

Pimax Play at native render (1.0), DCS VR PD at 1.5.

Settings:

 

Not sure if you have tried this but turn off Cockpit Global Illumination and Anisotropic Filtering, set Terrain Object Shadows to flat and set Water to Medium. 

[sleighzy]

7 hours ago, Panzerlang said:

Yes. If Quadviews in Pimax Play is enabled it takes over from MBuccia's one.

Mbuccias QVF API layer still needs to be uninstalled though if you were previously using it otherwise it will use that. 

[Moxica]

46 minutes ago, sleighzy said:

Mbuccias QVF API layer still needs to be uninstalled though if you were previously using it otherwise it will use that. 

I don't think so.
Maybe I dont recognize/identify the API name correctly, but you want Mbuccia.s api over Pimax. Because its better.
Pimax should hire Mbuccia.
 

[sleighzy]

25 minutes ago, Moxica said:

I don't think so.
Maybe I dont recognize/identify the API name correctly, but you want Mbuccia.s api over Pimax. Because its better.
Pimax should hire Mbuccia.
 

Check what I was responding to. If Mbucchia's Quad-Views-Foveated layer is still installed, and you enable Quad Views in PimaxPlay, it will still use Quad-Views-Foveated. It doesn't "take over from it".

[Panzerlang]

1 hour ago, sleighzy said:

Check what I was responding to. If Mbucchia's Quad-Views-Foveated layer is still installed, and you enable Quad Views in PimaxPlay, it will still use Quad-Views-Foveated. It doesn't "take over from it".

It very clearly did on my setup. I had MBuccia's set up with a very small and easily visible focus window. When I enabled Pimax' Quadviews the focus window was a lot bigger.

The Pimax one also ran the game a tiny bit better (less micro-stutter). I assumed this was because the CPU wasn't having to run an external app (native software vs external) but who knows. I certainly would have noticed a 15% degradation in performance! (as mentioned by WipeUout).

I'll play around with the settings mentioned above but won't expect anything major, I've previously run the game with potato settings and it made next to no difference. Since then, with all the incremental hardware and Windows tweaking, that's where the difference was slowly made. But, new build so worth a new punt.

8 hours ago, Ready said:

Your settings are quite high for Marianas if you put PD 1.5, sharpening .5 on top and no DLSS/MSAA tbh.

Did you check lowering PD to 1.0, lowering sharpening a bit lower? I currently fly with PD1.0, MSAA/DLSS Quality, sharpening .3 and it looks pretty decent.

Reducing trees also makes some difference. You can play with the sliders for details factor and visibility while you are on active pause and just look to the side, to see their impact.

What performance is your recording tool pulling? I changed to OBS, which costed me less CPU. Marianas is the worst map, so I am not surprised. But I don't know what else your cpu is doing at the same moment. 

I also see you have Heat Blur on High. Not sure if it is a factor in the cockpit, but I am not using it.  

Game Bar Capture is the only software that has zero noticeable performance impact. Before that I tried NVidia's stuff, Bandicam, FRAPS and OBS, all those hit performance very badly.

Edited January 3 by Panzerlang

[Panzerlang]

5 hours ago, WipeUout said:

Was not aware of this, so I decided to give a go to PimaxPlay 1.36 and the results are very bad.

I used same settings as before with quadviews disabled in PimaxPlay to ensure mbuccia's quadviews api layer is running and I am losing 14.8% performance when using Pimax's integrated OpenXR runtime compared to mbuccia's PimaxXR standalone runtime implementation.  Using pimax integrated quadviews is even worse losing 15.2% at "performance" setting.

This is like dropping to 4080 performance with my very expensive 4090.  My average GPU frametime went up by 1.34 ms !  

If you can run PimaxPlay 1.29 with no big problem, then stick to it and continue to use mbuccia's runtime instead.

Very weird. 

[Panzerlang]

6 hours ago, WipeUout said:

Was not aware of this, so I decided to give a go to PimaxPlay 1.36 and the results are very bad.

I used same settings as before with quadviews disabled in PimaxPlay to ensure mbuccia's quadviews api layer is running and I am losing 14.8% performance when using Pimax's integrated OpenXR runtime compared to mbuccia's PimaxXR standalone runtime implementation.  Using pimax integrated quadviews is even worse losing 15.2% at "performance" setting.

This is like dropping to 4080 performance with my very expensive 4090.  My average GPU frametime went up by 1.34 ms !  

If you can run PimaxPlay 1.29 with no big problem, then stick to it and continue to use mbuccia's runtime instead.

I'm going to have a go with Pimax 1.29 and MBuccia's stuff and see what happens. 

[Moxica]

Also, there IS a tracking issue. Pimax need good light to track properly. Due to the lack of daylight outside today I learned that the (40W) light in my roof was insufficient, and resulted in "out-of cockpit" experience, but most of all, stutter was extreme.
So I set up some very bright photo/studiolights behind my seat, and stutter in menus appeared to be (much better) gone.
But then again, with DCS one can never be quite sure.

 

[Panzerlang]

1 hour ago, Panzerlang said:

I'm going to have a go with Pimax 1.29 and MBuccia's stuff and see what happens. 

Absolute clusterfk. Using Revo Uninstaller Pro which removes everything, including registry stuff etc. Removed Pimax Play and installed 1.29. Installed all the MBuccia stuff, used Focus to confirm Quad is working in game, NO frame-capping stuff set up anywhere but in the game can no longer get anything above 60fps and the frame-time window is a constant flow of green spikes. Image quality is trash too.

Oh well, hopefully I can get rid of it all with Revo and go back to how it was before without issues.

[sleighzy]

2 hours ago, Panzerlang said:

It very clearly did on my setup. I had MBuccia's set up with a very small and easily visible focus window. When I enabled Pimax' Quadviews the focus window was a lot bigger

Interesting. Potentially the request from PimaxPlay will state the resolution and focal area it requires. The QVF API layer sits between DCS and the runtime, so in theory will be converting the 4 views per frame back to the stereo 2 views prior to it hitting the runtime, in which case the conversion occurs in the API layer and not the Pimax runtime. I can edit this comment later with a link to a good diagram from Mbucchia on this topic. QVF and DCS logs would indicate more.

23 minutes ago, Panzerlang said:

Absolute clusterfk. Using Revo Uninstaller Pro which removes everything, including registry stuff etc. Removed Pimax Play and installed 1.29. Installed all the MBuccia stuff, used Focus to confirm Quad is working in game, NO frame-capping stuff set up anywhere but in the game can no longer get anything above 60fps and the frame-time window is a constant flow of green spikes. Image quality is trash too.

Oh well, hopefully I can get rid of it all with Revo and go back to how it was before without issues.

Don't know if you tried with turbo mode turned off in QVF as well?

[Panzerlang]

38 minutes ago, sleighzy said:

Interesting. Potentially the request from PimaxPlay will state the resolution and focal area it requires. The QVF API layer sits between DCS and the runtime, so in theory will be converting the 4 views per frame back to the stereo 2 views prior to it hitting the runtime, in which case the conversion occurs in the API layer and not the Pimax runtime. I can edit this comment later with a link to a good diagram from Mbucchia on this topic. QVF and DCS logs would indicate more.

Don't know if you tried with turbo mode turned off in QVF as well?

Yeah, I tried all the known settings. Back to the latest Pimax Play and its own software, all good again. PD down to 1.0, DLSS back on and looking peachy with stutter/jerk noticeable only if I look for it. I've also bumped some other stuff back up with no ill effects (on Caucasus at least).

I think the combos of hardware and software are so complex there will never be a perfect setup for everyone across the board, excepting max hardware as being an axiomatically obvious requirement for the best possible foundation upon which to erect the shakey edifice of individual settings. Lol, that was a mouthful.