DCS VR Stutters

[onib89]

Hi. I'm not the first and for sure not the last one with this problem. well i spend 7k on a new pc tobe able to enjoy dcs in vr and flat screens but with no luck...

 

i have terible stutters in game , even worse when looking to the buildings on the ground closely . i tried so many things but nothing helped.. any suggestion that i haven't though of trying yet??? pimax crystal light 90Hz ( i tried 120/ 90upscaled ..72 is awful)

specs

AMD Ryzen 9950X3D 

ROG ASTRAL 5090 OC

64Gb Trident z5 neo rgb 6000Mhz

MB ROG X870E HERO

COOLING ASUS ROG RYUIJIN 360 III EXTREME ARGB

Samsung 9100 Pro 2Tb

Samsung 990 Evo plus 4Tb

Pimax crystal light (local dimming)

Samsung g8 oled 34'' 175hz (+ 2x 8'' monitors 1920x1080 for mfd's) 

 

Windows 11 home (New install)

Edited April 7 by onib89

[speed-of-heat]

Without knowing what you have tried, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-to-optimize-gaming-performance-in-windows-11-a255f612-2949-4373-a566-ff6f3f474613

Make sure you have installed the game bar, or use process lasso to make sure that  dcs is using the ccd with the extra ram cache.

https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/how-to-set-up-your-system-with-a-new-amd-ryzen-9-7950x3d-or/ba-p/589464

And make sure you have hot plug disabled in dcs.

Also be aware that the drivers you need for the 5090 have been causing stutters on 50xx cards and 40xx series cards there are some work arounds in this video:

Hope that helps.

Edited April 7 by speed-of-heat

[sleighzy]

@onib89, please attach your DCS log file after loading into a mission and replicating the issue. The file is C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS\Logs\dcs.log (may just be a text document named "dcs" if your Windows is hiding file extensions).

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

Optimising Windows 11 can make a huge difference. There are plenty of YT guides out there on how to do it.
Obviously, with that setup you bought the problem is not hardware unless you have a faulty component somehow. So check Windows, drivers, BIOS setup, ...

Other than that, I take it you mean 64GB of ram instead of "64Gb"? The latter is far far below the minimum specification for DCS. Also, 6000MHz RAM doesn't exist yet. You probably mean 6000MT/s  

[MAXsenna]

1 hour ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

Other than that, I take it you mean 64GB of ram instead of "64Gb"? The latter is far far below the minimum specification for DCS. Also, 6000MHz RAM doesn't exist yet. You probably mean 6000MT/s  

Units of measurements are biatch!  

[oCMANo]

^{Are you using Quad Views with Fixed Foveated Rendering?  Even though you don't have eye tracking on the Crystal Light, you can still use Fixed rendering to help with FPS.}

 

^{Also, ensure you have SSLR turned off.  It kills FPS and as far as I can see doesn't really add much graphically.}

[sleighzy]

1 hour ago, oCMANo said:

^{Are you using Quad Views with Fixed Foveated Rendering?  Even though you don't have eye tracking on the Crystal Light, you can still use Fixed rendering to help with FPS.}

 

^{Also, ensure you have SSLR turned off.  It kills FPS and as far as I can see doesn't really add much graphically.}

This video doesn't show Quad Views. For Quad Views you want to install the below two items and tick the Quad Views box in DCS:

https://github.com/mbucchia/Quad-Views-Foveated

https://github.com/TallyMouse/QuadViewsCompanion

[oCMANo]

Oh and one more thing to try: 

 

[lefuneste01]

10 hours ago, onib89 said:

i have terible stutters in game , even worse when looking to the buildings on the ground closely . i tried so many things but nothing helped.. any suggestion that i haven't though of trying yet??? pimax crystal light 90Hz ( i tried 120/ 90upscaled ..72 is awful)

 

What are your fps ? If you are not at the frequency of the VR display you will have stutters, especially when looking sideway.

Did you try reprojection/smart smoothing ?

Did you try with low settings ? there is no HW that will provide 90 Hz with insane settings. Some people are stacking supersmapling, MSAA, DCS settings to increase VR resolution and so saturate their hardware. The rule : try with the lowest settings, if no stutter increase settings to try to improve rendering but keep things smooth.

72 Hz is a good compromise to increase settings and keep native frequency. Too bad you did not like it.

Exporting MFD was impacting fps when I used it in the past. You should setup a DCS config for VR only.

And use Quad view if you can.

Edited April 8 by lefuneste01

[Mr_sukebe]

Have you lowered the polling rate of your mouse?  If not, try it.  It made a definite difference to my system.

[Mr_sukebe]

Some additional thoughts:

 

[av8orDave]

On 4/7/2025 at 4:16 PM, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

Optimising Windows 11 can make a huge difference. There are plenty of YT guides out there on how to do it.
Obviously, with that setup you bought the problem is not hardware unless you have a faulty component somehow. So check Windows, drivers, BIOS setup, ...

Other than that, I take it you mean 64GB of ram instead of "64Gb"? The latter is far far below the minimum specification for DCS. Also, 6000MHz RAM doesn't exist yet. You probably mean 6000MT/s  

When you say “optimizing windows 11”, to what are you referring? Genuinely don’t know if my Win 11 is optimized or not.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

9 hours ago, av8orDave said:

When you say “optimizing windows 11”, to what are you referring? Genuinely don’t know if my Win 11 is optimized or not.

It’s a huge subject. As I said, there are plenty of YouTube videos out there with step-by-step guides. Pick one you resonate with and follow it: those people put a lot of time and effort into figuring it out and they can explain it far better than I could.

 

*edit*
I see you have Samsung NVMe drives, so make sure you have Samsung Magician installed and running in the background. That’s incredibly important for your drives’ health and performance.

Edited April 9 by Raven (Elysian Angel)

[onib89]

Sorry for not answering....

I'm gonna do a fresh install windows 11

And I will first install pimax play and dcs only to see if the problem insists.. if it's not then with every program or driver install I ll check if it appears again. This is really frustrating tho..

[sleighzy]

51 minutes ago, onib89 said:

Sorry for not answering....

I'm gonna do a fresh install windows 11

And I will first install pimax play and dcs only to see if the problem insists.. if it's not then with every program or driver install I ll check if it appears again. This is really frustrating tho..

You still haven’t provided a DCS log file, in case it offers some insights. 

[onib89]

On 4/9/2025 at 3:39 PM, sleighzy said:

You still haven’t provided a DCS log file, in case it offers some insights. 

Yeah here it is man, with clean win install and stlll that thing,,,... i don't know if log shows something..

dcs.log

[Flappie]

Disable Tacview recording in DCS Special options and see if that changes anything.

[onib89]

1 hour ago, Flappie said:

Disable Tacview recording in DCS Special options and see if that changes anything.

it didn't help .. i also enabled Center priority rendering FFR in pimax play ..same thing... dlss balanced,, the same annoying stutter/lag..also the fps white line is stable 90 fps but on the frametime green line i'm getting spikes.. but even when no spikes appear the stutter exists

[Flappie]

If you have no use for it, disable Windows hypervisor.

2025-04-10 16:07:36.623 WARNING EDCORE (Main): hypervisor is active

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-to-optimize-gaming-performance-in-windows-11-a255f612-2949-4373-a566-ff6f3f474613

[JoniHH]

I had a similar challenge about 2 weeks ago and also tried a lot of things. I also tried to delete the fxo and metashaders2 folder and deleted all scripts and mods. Tried older Nvidia drivers (with DDU)  with Nvidia APP or without it (not relevant for you). I tested deleting OpenXR kit and different quadviews options and checked different process lasso settings. Things that helped me in the past but unfortunately not this time.

What helped me at the end, was one of the basic things that is always mentioned (Renew the DCS folder).

I renewed the DCS folder in C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS by renaming it (C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCSbackup) and started DCS again so the folder will be created by DCS. Then i stopped DCS and copied the old config folder from the backup (C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCSbackup\config) to C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS. By doing this i did not needed to renew all the configurations. Then i started DCS again and all the stutters were gone. I was really surprised about the effect and i can still reproduce it by switching back to the DCSbackup folder. It also showed nothing obvious in the dcs.log

I think it's worth a try and will need about 5-10 minutes time invest.

[freehand]

10 minutes ago, JoniHH said:

I had a similar challenge about 2 weeks ago and also tried a lot of things. I also tried to delete the fxo and metashaders2 folder and deleted all scripts and mods. Tried older Nvidia drivers (with DDU)  with Nvidia APP or without it (not relevant for you). I tested deleting OpenXR kit and different quadviews options and checked different process lasso settings. Things that helped me in the past but unfortunately not this time.

What helped me at the end, was one of the basic things that is always mentioned (Renew the DCS folder).

I renewed the DCS folder in C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS by renaming it (C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCSbackup) and started DCS again so the folder will be created by DCS. Then i stopped DCS and copied the old config folder from the backup (C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCSbackup\config) to C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS. By doing this i did not needed to renew all the configurations. Then i started DCS again and all the stutters were gone. I was really surprised about the effect and i can still reproduce it by switching back to the DCSbackup folder. It also showed nothing obvious in the dcs.log

I think it's worth a try and will need about 5-10 minutes time invest.

Nice first post.

[onib89]

35 minutes ago, JoniHH said:

I had a similar challenge about 2 weeks ago and also tried a lot of things. I also tried to delete the fxo and metashaders2 folder and deleted all scripts and mods. Tried older Nvidia drivers (with DDU)  with Nvidia APP or without it (not relevant for you). I tested deleting OpenXR kit and different quadviews options and checked different process lasso settings. Things that helped me in the past but unfortunately not this time.

What helped me at the end, was one of the basic things that is always mentioned (Renew the DCS folder).

I renewed the DCS folder in C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS by renaming it (C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCSbackup) and started DCS again so the folder will be created by DCS. Then i stopped DCS and copied the old config folder from the backup (C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCSbackup\config) to C:\Users\username\Saved Games\DCS. By doing this i did not needed to renew all the configurations. Then i started DCS again and all the stutters were gone. I was really surprised about the effect and i can still reproduce it by switching back to the DCSbackup folder. It also showed nothing obvious in the dcs.log

I think it's worth a try and will need about 5-10 minutes time invest.

I'll try this and I will tell you.. hope it works .. it's the only thing I haven't done yet and reseting bios... I'll check it out this afternoon 

[sleighzy]

13 hours ago, onib89 said:

Yeah here it is man, with clean win install and stlll that thing,,,... i don't know if log shows something..

dcs.log 99.45 kB · 2 downloads

Thanks for the log @onib89, much appreciated. Renaming the Saved Games\DCS folder as mentioned by JoniHH will confirm that TacView isn't an issue as this will ensure that the scripts and hooks/exports aren't being used.

Few points:

• Your Preload Radius in the DCS settings is currently maxed at 150000. Drop this back to 60000 - 10000 to save yourself some VRAM / RAM
• Your currently have a core affinity set on your PC, are you using Process Lasso? Try disabling that (or if you are doing this via other means, e.g. registry.)
• There are currently known performance issues with later versions of the Nvidia drivers on 5000 series GPU cards, which you're on. Trying rolling back to 566.36. You may need to use DDU to completely clear the Nvidia driver prior to rolling it back.
• Ensure that you aren't running the DCS.exe or shortcut as admin. Right-click your shortcut and under the compatibility tab make sure Run as administrator isn't checked. This applies to however you're currently starting DCS, so let me know if it's just via a shortcut. I say this as I noticed you have a number of peripherals, your Winwing one is a known serious performance issue if DCS is run as admin.
• You're also running DCS from the bin-mt directory. Run it from the bin directory instead. DCS is now all multithreaded so no need to run from bin-mt (and some people have mentioned problems).

You also stated that you're using the PimaxPlay, this OpenXR runtime is also confirmed in the logs. You could instead use the original PimaxXR runtime instead as folk have had better experiences with this. This is what the PimaxPlay one is based on, although comments are that this original one is somewhat more performant. Not saying it's going to fix your problem, probably unrelated, but just something to keep in mind: https://github.com/mbucchia/Pimax-OpenXR/wiki

[onib89]

On 4/11/2025 at 2:07 PM, sleighzy said:

Thanks for the log @onib89, much appreciated. Renaming the Saved Games\DCS folder as mentioned by JoniHH will confirm that TacView isn't an issue as this will ensure that the scripts and hooks/exports aren't being used.

Few points:

• Your Preload Radius in the DCS settings is currently maxed at 150000. Drop this back to 60000 - 10000 to save yourself some VRAM / RAM
• Your currently have a core affinity set on your PC, are you using Process Lasso? Try disabling that (or if you are doing this via other means, e.g. registry.)
• There are currently known performance issues with later versions of the Nvidia drivers on 5000 series GPU cards, which you're on. Trying rolling back to 566.36. You may need to use DDU to completely clear the Nvidia driver prior to rolling it back.
• Ensure that you aren't running the DCS.exe or shortcut as admin. Right-click your shortcut and under the compatibility tab make sure Run as administrator isn't checked. This applies to however you're currently starting DCS, so let me know if it's just via a shortcut. I say this as I noticed you have a number of peripherals, your Winwing one is a known serious performance issue if DCS is run as admin.
• You're also running DCS from the bin-mt directory. Run it from the bin directory instead. DCS is now all multithreaded so no need to run from bin-mt (and some people have mentioned problems).

You also stated that you're using the PimaxPlay, this OpenXR runtime is also confirmed in the logs. You could instead use the original PimaxXR runtime instead as folk have had better experiences with this. This is what the PimaxPlay one is based on, although comments are that this original one is somewhat more performant. Not saying it's going to fix your problem, probably unrelated, but just something to keep in mind: https://github.com/mbucchia/Pimax-OpenXR/wiki

i turned on osd to see what my gpu does and i came in front to this ... my gpu usage is on 70% and cpu 35-40% ..maybe this is the problem...but why is that/ any clue?also I tried what you said except 566 driver. My card says don't support it. It doing it also in flat screen.. it's a stutter every 2 or 3 or 5 seconds and it's very annoying in vr it's not a frame drop. The frames are stable but in eyes it stutters

Edited April 12 by onib89

[sleighzy]

I don't have an answer at this stage sorry. Can you drop another log here after replicating again given you've made these changes.