VR poor performance fix?

Can we have a clear pathway of what the company will do to improve or at least get VR performance back on track?. Some of us invested good money in this sim and think is fair that we should be informed on some steps and time scale that will be taken for the fix of now poor performance and visuals in VR!

Main thing is they provide us an alternative to MSAA. Wags said they were looking into this a few months ago but haven't heard anything since.

+1 I haven't preo4dered the F-18 or Persian Gulf because of the lack of info on VR performance. I don't want to invest more money in a title that can not provide reasonable vr performance or at the very least keep its customers informed as to their plans to rectify issues.

Frustrating times as better hardware (as in new graphics cards) is not available also...so we pretty much stuck with my 1080Ti. With quite low res in current VR headsets we certainly need some form of AA. Problem with deferred is that looks like it might be difficult if not impossible to implement. At least we should be keep posted in this regard! I certainly hope for a fix and I will also hold further purchases for now. How about some news re Vulcan implementation which was promised months ago??

+1...

I'd like to see VR performance improvement, but I'm not sure it is fully possible without significant hardware evolution (GPU...).

In the meantime, I play VR just for fun, and non-VR when I want to play missions the best I can.

Therefore, I preordered both F18 and Persian Gulf map :)

Can we have a clear pathway of what the company will do to improve or at least get VR performance back on track?. Some of us invested good money in this sim and think is fair that we should be informed on some steps and time scale that will be taken for the fix of now poor performance and visuals in VR!

+1 :thumbup:

Pls ignore. Sorry.

Maybe they are devoting all their energy into bringing Vulkan online? Seems silly spending a lot of time and energy fixing stuff with a low shelf life.

True, the shimmers suck, esp in normandy, but in my view, devoting time to bringing along greater long term benefits sooner, seems like the logical move.

Maybe the 1180 TI will help, I hope.

Coulda, shoulda, maybe. I have the greatest admiration for ED, and all they've done over the years, and there is a sense in all of these posts that they are beyond criticism and can do no wrong. Well, sorry, but forcing deferred shading, which cuts frame rates in half, on users, as a simple one line bug fix in a readme, with no explanation, no warning, is to treat their users with complete disdain. It's just not an acceptable way to behave. I think that we should complain loudly, and that it's right and fair to do so.

You make it seem like there is room for debate on how DCS World progresses. The deferred shading route was chosen for a reason. Perhaps developing 2 branches of technology was determined to be a waste of resources - go figure!

Like it or not, DCS World is, and always was and probably always will be work in progress as technology evolves. Technology just hasn't quite caught up with the demands of VR yet, but given a few more decades maybe it'll be almost there!

I suppose the alternative is ray-trace boxes that look dire, but run incredibly smoothly on a 386 SX so as not to exclude anyone who isn't quite cutting edge.

Who remembers Betamax and VHS? That's kind of where VR is today. It'll improve, but not without you having to bin your entire collection of Mad Max Videos.

There is an alternative of course, ask any ostrich!

Maybe they are devoting all their energy into bringing Vulkan online? Seems silly spending a lot of time and energy fixing stuff with a low shelf life.

 

True, the shimmers suck, esp in normandy, but in my view, devoting time to bringing along greater long term benefits sooner, seems like the logical move.

low shelf life?

It's either go down the DX12 windows rabbit hole and cutout everyone out who doesn't have Win 10 or go with Vulkan. Many supporters, Right choice from what Ive read about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)

"Khronos announced that Vulkan would be getting support for automatic multi-GPU features, similar to what is offered by Direct3D 12. Multi-GPU support included in-API removes the need for SLI or Crossfire which requires graphics cards to be of the same model. API multi-GPU instead allows the API to intelligently split the workload among two or more completely different GPUs."

This is what I'm looking at and if ED is going down this track with Vulkan? Multi threaded and possibly Multi GPU, not SLI... Should I be saving for twin 1180ti's and a 16 Core 1950x threadripper CPU...:huh:

You make it seem like there is room for debate on how DCS World progresses. The deferred shading route was chosen for a reason. Perhaps developing 2 branches of technology was determined to be a waste of resources - go figure!

 

Like it or not, DCS World is, and always was and probably always will be work in progress as technology evolves. Technology just hasn't quite caught up with the demands of VR yet, but given a few more decades maybe it'll be almost there!

 

I suppose the alternative is ray-trace boxes that look dire, but run incredibly smoothly on a 386 SX so as not to exclude anyone who isn't quite cutting edge.

 

Who remembers Betamax and VHS? That's kind of where VR is today. It'll improve, but not without you having to bin your entire collection of Mad Max Videos.

 

There is an alternative of course, ask any ostrich!

That's very helpful, thank you. Problem solved.

That's very helpful, thank you. Problem solved.

The point still stands though: technology evolves and so do the system requirements. Bottom line is, at the moment you need a beast of a PC if you want to run VR properly:

https://www.polygon.com/2016/1/5/10719326/nvidia-virtual-reality-performance-power

Foveated rendering in the next generation of headsets should help. Vulkan will help as well. In the meantime, there are several things you can do to improve performance in VR, all of which have been mentioned before in other threads about VR performance.

To me, the shimmering in VR seems to be related to some core engine functionalities, not specific to VR: shadows and some other objects such as clouds and vapour trails have their visibility depend on which angle you look at them from. Sure enough, MSAA reduces the shimmering significantly but I fly around in DCS just fine without it.

There are several issues still with deferred shading (not being able to pick out details in the cockpits of the Mirage and Gazelle because of the darkness and lack of contrast stands out), but personally I'd rather wait for the DS technology and lighting in DCS to mature than going back to the pre-DS days.

I'm not trying to claim that there is no problem simple because I don't experience it myself, but I have no framerate issues whatsoever in DCS with graphics settings maxed out and PD 1.5 - 1.8 . And yes it took quite some time tweaking and testing to get there.

The current limitations on flying in VR are purely hardware related (low pixel density, low field-of-view) and will improve when hardware improves.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for Vulkan as much as anyone else, so I can put PD at 2+ again ;-)

The point still stands though

The point I was making was with regard to the manner in which this has been handled by ED. I believe that it is customary, when replying to a post, to debate the point being raised. Hence my curt reply to that other poster.

The points you make are all entirely reasonable, but have been discussed endlessly already.

The MSAA thing is very subjective, of course. To me, no MSAA in VR results in unacceptable image quality. I have come down to 1.0 PD, and 2xMSAA, and am living with that; but it grates when I had found settings that I was very happy with, with deferred shading off, and much higher fps.

I am concerned that vulkan will do very little to alleviate our plight. I have read on comparisons that vulkan led to significant performance gains for those with AMD cards but Nvidia users only saw a minor improvement ~5-10%

You make it seem like there is room for debate on how DCS World progresses. The deferred shading route was chosen for a reason. Perhaps developing 2 branches of technology was determined to be a waste of resources - go figure!

 

Like it or not, DCS World is, and always was and probably always will be work in progress as technology evolves. Technology just hasn't quite caught up with the demands of VR yet, but given a few more decades maybe it'll be almost there!

Problem is this decision, now, is nonsensical when you know they are also pushing for VR.

They either don't do VR and push for DS heavily, or keep touting DCS as a VR product and DON'T kill VR in their product with DS. Doing both makes NO SENSE, whatever blabbling about evolving technologies. When you push 2 "non compatible" (in terms of performance) technologies at the same time, you're doing something stupid.

Problem is this decision, now, is nonsensical when you know they are also pushing for VR.

They either don't do VR and push for DS heavily, or keep touting DCS as a VR product and DON'T kill VR in their product with DS. Doing both makes NO SENSE, whatever blabbling about evolving technologies. When you push 2 "non compatible" (in terms of performance) technologies at the same time, you're doing something stupid.

I have to agree here. If a 1070 can't reach 45 fps there's something really wrong. It was fine without DS, but this update basically killed multiplayer for me.

Maybe the 1180 TI will help, I hope.

Sure, why fix this when we know that the next graphics card will be 20% faster? it is no their problem if players need to spend 800$ more in a new graphics card if they want to play their game.

That remember me the 32 GB ram recommendation (are you serious?). As a software developer, I only can say they disappoint me very.

Tips for the "Graphics Engineer": users raise the pixel density to read gadget/displays not to see more clearly the clouds, so instead of rendering the whole scene at 2x, render the cockpit at 2x and the background/landscape at 1x. As an extra point, you will fix the problem Spotting Bandits.

The problem isn't the GPU, my 1070 doesn't run at 100% in MP and mostly not in SP. There is a CPU bottleneck inherent to the way directX works (draw function calls what what). The only way around this is the vulcan api and to introduce multithreading where it'll make the frame times less.

IMHO the developers should only be given the todays hardware if they are planning to release something in 2-3 years.

If they want to release something today, then they need to use 2-3 year old hardware.

That way the customers who have 2-3 year hardware will benefit a lot from optimization and customers with 4-5 year hardware are able to use the product.

The Virtual Reality in DCS is like a fool's dream, as alone the normal version can be very demanding, but there is no explanation why one can run DCS all maxed out in 4K for 180 FPS, but only get in a VR sub 45-30 fps and so on serious artifacts just in default VR profile.

There is likely coming a large change to core technology of ground units (all units) behavior, so we could have hundreds or thousands of units on map without impact to performance. Same thing is with the modules, that we should start to see more optimizations for gameplay, as now it seems that there is too much design for perfect laboratory simulator that ain't required.

But we are talking as well now more about Open BETA branch, what is meant for those who can accept the broken behavior, as if they don't like it then they should go to Stable and stick on that.

One fix in future for VR should be Vulcan that could arrive 2018-2019 (no where is promised that it should have been out months ago!) and that would bring the possibility to have the two GPU cards running side by side so the VR is running one eye per card. That would split the rendering to fluid one.

I keep hearing peeps bang on about advances in technology, but IMO, VR performance and image quality has dropped significantly since the introduction of DS which even 2 x super sampling and 4 x MSAA doesn't fix. It would be interesting to know if the drop in VR image quality is inherent with DS and if it can be improved to what it was pre DS?

They're doing something right.

I completely expected the new Caucasus map and 2.5 to cripple me in VR. It didn't, in fact the first iteration of 2.5 saw increased frames for me on an i7 6700HK and GTX1070.

The latency issues comes in spurts. One update will completely resolve it while the one following it may make it unusable, but eventually it works out.

I play VR with a 1070 and rift CV1 and I use almost only 2.5.1 OB, so DS always on. Well, my performance is good enough, the game is quite smooth and fully playable, and I keep graphics settings to high. PD = 1 and MSAA 2x, of course. If I could have a better AA instead of MS I'd be happy, and maybe I'll get a 1170 or 1180 (we'll see the prices) to be even happier, but I can't understand people with 1080ti that complain about low fps and then keep PD = 1.8 and MSAA 8x. Lower those settings and stop complaining! Otherwise switch back to monitor (but I strongly advise against... do it at your own risk, and don't say I didn't tell you).

I can't understand people with 1080ti that complain about low fps and then keep PD = 1.8 and MSAA 8x. Lower those settings and stop complaining! Otherwise switch back to monitor (but I strongly advise against... do it at your own risk, and don't say I didn't tell you).

Framerates were over 100% higher (not using DS) than they are now, with all other settings staying the same. I can understand why some might complain.

There is no option for MSAA 8x.