DCS 2.5 Antialiasing comparison

In fact, turning Deferred Shading off seems to create more problems. If you try flying in autumn with DS off, the trees aren't even autumn colors anymore.

While I understand it's beta, going from MSAAx8 with good performance in 1.5.8 to MSAAx2 with terrible performance puts it at pre-alpha status in my mind...

I'm afraid it won't change in the stable version either, at least not soon. Deferred Shading and MSAA don't mix well in any 3D applications (DCS is not the only game suffering from this issue) because of how these both rendering techniques work.

Unless someone in gaming industry invents a complete new AA tech for Deferred Shading, with good quality and performance at the same time, we're stuck with "dirty" compromises.

So the technology is faulty to begin with....not exactly comforting.

with FXAA on and SGSSAAx8

How about trying the following? Still excellent quality, at least on my end, and a very small performance footprint. I'm flying with DS off, though.

Yeah after a couple of while its more and more saying that MSAA of DCS is producing a bottleneck but we also need to understand that we have a BETA here and for a BETA honestely it works good and i think most of us see a good improvement.

MSAA is not a bottle neck. This kind of AA has always been a performance hog in any game. Heck in GTAV I barely find the impact of 2 X MSAA acceptable there. Why would anybody expect different from DCS?

I honestly don't understand the majority of the complaints regarding MSAA and deferred shading, they are working as expected. Deferred shading costs some performance, expected with any new graphical features. MSAA increases the resolution everywhere there is an edge in order to get more accurate pixels and reduce the flicker you get with thin objects as well as smoothing angled edges. The more edges on the screen, the more performance will decrease. This has nothing to do with deferred shading and everything to do with the new trees. All those trees are expensive and are being anti-aliased which tanks performance.

I did a quick rough test of MSAA and tree performance impact in the same tree filled hills:

GTX 1080

100% GPU usage if not stated

Framerate is capped to 100

3440 X 1440 resolution 5MP

Trees either 0% or 100%

This was not a highly controlled environment, only a rough gauge

 

0 X MSAA no trees: 100fps - 65% GPU

0 X MSAA with trees: 85fps

0 X MSAA no trees DS off: 100fps - 50% GPU

0 X MSAA with trees DS off: 75fps

 

2 X MSAA no trees: 100fps

2 X MSAA with trees: 60fps

2 X MSAA no trees DS off: 100fps - 55% GPU

2 X MSAA with trees DS off: 62fps

 

8 X MSAA no trees: 75fps

8 X MSAA with trees: 45fps

8 X MSAA no trees DS off: 100fps - 60% GPU

8 X MSAA with trees DS off: 55fps

 

Nvidia DSR 2 X Res no trees: 70fps

Nvidia DSR 2 X Res with trees: 48fps

 

- Trees have more impact on performance than MSAA.

- Notice that even with deferred shading off, at 8 X MSAA going from no trees to full trees requires 250% GPU power for equivalent framerate.

- As expected DSR which is similar to SSAA and which requires similar power to 8 X MSAA, is less affected by trees since it is sampling the whole image instead of edges.

- Increasing MSAA with deferred shading off has less performance impact than with DS on, unless you add trees into the mix.

- Interestingly, with trees and no MSAA deferred shading is actually less demanding than without.

- There is nothing unusual with MSAA performance.

I strongly recommend using FXAA in place of MSAA or using at the most 2 X MSAA. The performance impact of FXAA is basically nothing and it gets rid of all the jaggies. It will not of course eliminate the shimmering of thin distant objects as it does not affect the resolution. In most games I make sure to disable FXAA due to the blurriness it causes, but in DCS there is no significant blurring (at least with Nvidia).

I would definitely like to see the lighting get fixed so that you can turn off deferred shading and have normal colors as it does have a pretty significant impact on performance in some cases. That would allow lower end GPUs to use a little MSAA. But even if they did that, I'd still be using deferred shading on my system as I'll take the better graphics at the cost of a little MSAA and fps.

/rant on

You can't expect to get better graphics and somehow have exactly the same performance as before. If the 2.5 Caucasus map had the same short view distance (buildings), the same low resolution terrain mesh and the same flat trees, I am willing to bet you'd have better framerates that 1.5.8. But you'd have the same old graphics that we've had for the past few years. 2.5 is a much needed improvement that is designed to look decent for the next few years. As such you can't expect to max out the settings and get 500fps. Go and get yourself an 8800GT (from 2006 was it?) And see how well it runs any game made in the last 5 years. More graphical fidelity requires more power, and always will. In 2 or 3 years you can go and buy a $100 GPU and get good performance with this version of DCS with MSAA and all the bells and whistles, but not today. Hopefully they continue to optimize, but I'm not expecting a significant boost. If you want 4K resolution and good framerates, you have to live with lower settings like you do in any other game. Same thing if you are running a low end GPU. It's not magic. And Performance without trees is actually very good, so the game isn't unplayable for anyone who could run the old DCS.

/rant off

So the technology is faulty to begin with....not exactly comforting.

Not faulty, different.

The problem on my low end system is not low FPS.

I can set DCS 2.5 up to have a constant 50-60 FPS, which is more than sufficient for me.

Problem is the stuttering, not probably caused by the insane memory demand.

I´m happy to see that this issue is among the developers top priority, cause no other sim or game I have uses this huge amount of memory.

How about trying the following? Still excellent quality, at least on my end, and a very small performance footprint. I'm flying with DS off, though.

On my machine, I have to have FXAA enabled for Nvidia settings to enhance/override DCS. If I have FXAA off, even with MSAA and/or Nvidia AA on, I will get no antialiasing in game at all.

Nice Thread!

Ive been reading through it but cant seem to find a solution to get rid of the shimmering. The trees, shadows, tarmac lines and rivers shimmer alot specially when they are in the distance. Ive tried so many different settings in the NVidia Settings and in the game but cant seem to figure this out. Any suggestions? It really is driving me crazy...

How about trying the following? Still excellent quality, at least on my end, and a very small performance footprint. I'm flying with DS off, though.

I agree excellent quality but DS is on otherwise the trees looks yellowish....and all so ugly..DS must be on:)

What kind of shimmering do u mean ? For me it sounds like that there is a filter active or something like this ? Because with normal settings u should get a clear picture or a clear jaggy picture but not a shimmering picture which u get when u have for example a "Blur" filter on

DS must be on:)

OK, so how about this? You can turn the in-game AA off for an even smaller performance footprint and the setting still works:

Hmmm... it seems there's something wrong with how v2.5 handles transparency AA. V2.2 had no problems with even Normandy and all that foliage, but now, if I see a forest I slam into a brickwall FPS-wise, DS on or off. Anyone else suffering from this?

EDIT: see the following post.

OK, a guy in an another thread seems to have found a solution to this. DS off, 2xMSAA set, trees visibility 100%, ground clutter 500m, and visib range set high in-game with the following enchance setting gives me a solid 60F/S everywhere:

Hmmm... it seems there's something wrong with how v2.5 handles transparency AA. V2.2 had no problems with even Normandy and all that foliage, but now, if I see a forest I slam into a brickwall FPS-wise, DS on or off. Anyone else suffering from this?

EDIT: see the following post.

Man, I see the same thing. Have read every thread on AA, AF, flickering & shimmering. Tested several suggestions & tweaks.

For me it's most apparent with ships. When doing carrier ops on the Tarawa with AV8B. But all ships are affected, the ships & water wake shimmer & flicker :(.

Will try your settings & report back.

EDIT: sorry I don't have this AA-Setting in my NCP & can't test.

Try installing NVidia Inspector (https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/nvidia-profile-inspector-download.html) and see if the extra AA presets become available that way.

As I got older and began to notice my eyesight was slowly but surely losing it's ability to read very small print I was very depressed when I bought my 1st pair of reading glasses.

Now I take the lemons into lemonade attitude because 90% of these before and afters I cannot see any difference.

In VR it really doesn't matter. The only thing other than really bad stutters and pauses are the jaggies which are totally unacceptable. FPS be dammed. Going to crank what ever it takes to eliminate them as for me they are the number one immersion killer.

I'm having no luck at all with DCS, I'm lucky that my hardware copes easily as far as FPS go, 8700k and a 1080Ti. Setting MSAA in game to 2x or 8x has no FPS effect.

The ingame MSAA is the only thing I can get to control the visual effects.

8x looks good when the aircraft is sitting still, but as soon as I taxi, the lines are shimmering and flickering, the TAD map has flickering lines, runway lines are flickering and shimmering, it looks terrible.

The strange this is, I can not get NVCP or Inspector to do anything to my ingame settings. I have tried all combinations, but nothing.

Tried new profiles, with DCS launcher as the exe and run as the exe. I tried enhance, override, FXAA on and off, SGSS, but it always looks the same.

One trick that I think should work is to leave vsync off in the game, then set it to 1/2 or 1/3 refresh from NVCP or Inspector, then if I check my FPS in game, I can see that the game is taking commands from one of the programs, but in my case, it never does, and FPS is not controlled by external vsync.

In the past, any gaming was just a case of override or enhance, supervcaa 64x for AA and get rid of the shimmering with spare grid SS 4x, but now it just wont work.

Lastly, if I run NVCP and Inspector profiles, which one overrides which? Do they work together or conflict with each other?

EDIT : actually, one thing I meant to try, and just pop into my head, was if Inspector profile won't work, then maybe the game is reading the Global settings, so I set some Vsync global settings, and now DCS is responding to them..so some success there, now to try some different AA settings, fingers crossed!

So I seem to be able to make some improvements by changing the global settings, can never get the game profile to work.

But it seems the AA or SGSS settings are not making the improvement, something else is, which I’m looking into.

To add, this is with deferred shading on. I just tried HDR only for the first time and it looks perfect! No jaggies, flickering or shimmering.

Its a pita but you might try going back and trying older drivers. I am currently using the one before the latest Nvidia driver. When I loaded the latest one I had issues so went back. Problem solved. I should know by now that if something is working don't muck with it. Worth a try. BTW I am MSI 1080TI VR. Also drop all the fancy refresh rates/Samples and keep it simple with default/basic settings. Eliminate all the mostly snake oil settings and once you hopefully get it close then continue the never ending Holy Grail settings.

Its a pita but you might try going back and trying older drivers. I am currently using the one before the latest Nvidia driver. When I loaded the latest one I had issues so went back. Problem solved. I should know by now that if something is working don't muck with it. Worth a try. BTW I am MSI 1080TI VR. Also drop all the fancy refresh rates/Samples and keep it simple with default/basic settings. Eliminate all the mostly snake oil settings and once you hopefully get it close then continue the never ending Holy Grail settings.

Which driver do you recommend, I have the last 3 or 4 downloaded so happy to try your suggestion.

Which driver do you recommend

I just went from 388.59 to 388.71 yesterday because folks here recommended it and yeah, it seems to be a good driver for DCS. Even the occasional glitches I mentioned in one of my previous posts seem to be gone now. So I suggest you give it a go as well :)

Glad to hear that the driver downgrade helped u. For the VR experience i noticed that the 388.13 works well. Already read that the 388.31 has there some problems so i will stay for 388.13 even i dont know if the 388.71 is maybe more efficient compared to the 388.13 with non-vr experience but at the moment all works well.

VR specific analysis done with high end system. i7-5960x extreme CPU, EVGA 1080ti FTW, 16g RAM, dedicated EVO Pro 1tb SSD, Rift CV1. Settings I settled on give me enhanced quality with stable 90 or 45 fps with no edge bleed or sensor blur, dropping below 45 only in very extreme situations. The key was 1.2PD and 2xMSAA.

See link for full analysis:

VR PD = 1.2

MSAA = 2x

Anisotropic Filtering = 2x

Deferred Shading = ON

Terrain Shadows = FLAT

Cockpit Global Illumination = ON

 

[TABLE]

__PD__

|

_MSAA_

|

_Quality_

|Performance

1|

0

|

0

|

10

1.2

|

0

|

2

|

10

1.4

|

0

|

4

|

10

1.6

|

0

|

4

|

10

1.8

|

0

|

4

|

8

2.0

|

0

|

6

|

6

1

|

2

|

6

|

10

1.2

|

2

|

8

|

8

1.4

|

2

|

8

|

6

1.6

|

2

|

10

|

4

1.8

|

2

|

10

|

2

2.0

|

2

|

10

|

2

1

|

4

|

8

|

4

1.2

|

4

|

8

|

4

1.4

|

4

|

8

|

2

1.6

|

4

|

10

|

0

1.8

|

4

|

10

|

0

2.0

|

4

|

10

|

0

1

|

8

|

8

|

2

1.2+

|

8

|

10

|

0

[/TABLE]

After much experimentation and points brought out in this thread, These are my grail settings. I attached both pages of the nvidia CP.

AMD Ryzen 5, ASUS Rog Strix 1080ti 11G, 16G ram, Crucial SSD, windows 10.

Pixel density is 1.5.

Solid 45fps everywhere, even in Vegas, even when I'm throwing the Gazelle around like a go-kart. I can't say how or why it's working for me, but I'm very happy with it.