Tweaking VR settings for smooth DCS Supercarrier experience.

[Mnemonic]

Hi Mnemonic

 

I'm not much of a fan of shadows and found them to be very resource hungry so have them set to off, but wondered what the artifacts are that you mention as a consequence of not having them enabled. Are you saying overall my cockpit would look better with them on?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Sure, I made a little comparison and you can judge for yourself.

All screenshots are made where the effect is most pronounced - when we are looking into the sun.

 

So here is a Hornet cockpit without shadows.

 

 

 

 

Foot wells are very bright (should be dark actually) and a lot of light bleeding on top of the button caps, around MFD frames, etc.

All these high-contracts areas are shimmering when you move your head around, and even with high AA it's not really fixable.

 

 

 

 

So here is a Hornet cockpit with shadows.

 

 

Everything looks even, and nice. Foot wells are dark as they should.

 

 

 

 

So here is a Tomcat cockpit without shadows.

 

 

Not as bad as with Hornet, but still quite some lightbleeding around buttons and screens.

Brightly lit foot wells

 

 

 

 

 

And Tomcat cockpit with shadows.

 

 

All looks nice and smooth, nothing shimmers when looking around

 

 

 

[bni]

Thanks for the great posts Mnemonic

[twistking]

Great post!

Thanks Mnemonic.

 

Just one thing to consider is, that it is not necessarily a problem when reported VRam usage exceeds physical Vram.

It's common that Vram usage exceeds physical Vram and shifting stuff back and forth does not have to impact frame timing.

Your observations are still valid concerning compute vs Vram and PD vs MSAA on powerful GPUs, however i would highly recommend not to take the reported VRam as gospel, but do even more testing to really see at what point VRam usage really starts to introduce stutter.

 

For example i see no frame time differences when running with up to 8GB of Vram reported on my 4gb card.

 

Again, keeping it under 8GB might still be the best thing to do on your particular setup, but it should not be universal.

But of course, at some point, every system will crumble under VRAm usage, so your general conclusions are still valid!

Edited May 26, 2020 by twistking

[Svsmokey]

Thanks for the great posts Mnemonic

 

Indeed , i have found them helpful and well-presented .

[Mnemonic]

Thanks guys!

Happy you find this info useful!

[Crimson_Ghost138]

What i found out today, playing around with the settings in VR:

 

When i set the daytime to either sunrise or sundawn, and the deck-lighting is active on the Super-Carrier, the frames go completly down, NO MATTER WHAT i change in settings! I tried VR preset, i tried shadows OFF, MSAA off, Textures Medium, Global Illumimation OFF, Ground Shadows OFF....

 

NO DIFFERENCE!

When i change to full daylight settings with no Carrier-Lights, everything comes much smoother, and setting-changes can be observed (Shadows Medium, High, MSAA and so on. Only then i can see an impact on framerate)

 

Anyone else could check this?

 

So on my rig, it definitly has something to do with the lighting system....?!?!

 

My Rig:

i5 9600k - GTX1080 - 32GB DDR4 RAM - Win10 64bit - Valve Index

[Mnemonic]

Seems like compute issue, your GPU can’t handle so many lights calculated.

I had the same on my 1080 pre-supercarrier when I turn floodlights in F-16 - FPS would go down significantly, same in Tomcat, with 2080 it’s much better +40% of pure compute performance does it’s thing.

 

Crimson_Ghost138 - something to try - set PD less than 1, put it like 0.5 and see if performance will improve. Less pixels for the fragment shader to work with.

Edited May 26, 2020 by Mnemonic

[twistking]

Mnemonic, you write that you aim for 80 noASW, with 40 ASW in certain situations being acceptable, which sound very reasonable, however I'm relativley sensitive to ASW (don't know, if i can get used to it with time), so I'm wondering what it would take to run a SuperCarrier or very populated Airfield Situation with 80 noASW.

 

From your tests it seems that in these situations and with modern, high tier CPUs, DCS is indeed GPU limited.

What is your estimation of how much more GPU compute power would be needed to run your settings in 80 noASW most of the time?

 

(I've only played DCS VR at other peoples computers, but planning to make the jump when i get myself a new computer).

[Crimson_Ghost138]

@Mnemonic: I will try to reduce PD (it is now on 1.0) and see if this makes any difference!

 

I will also try the same thing on another map and airport to see if its the Super Carrier or ALL the new lightning-effects?

 

I already thought about upgrading from 1080 to 1080Ti or 2080 (Ti is too expensive for now..) but i am curios, why they don´t include some "low res" lightning or something that doesn´t impact frames THAT hard.... maybe there is an option i haven´t tested?!

[Mnemonic]

Mnemonic, you write that you aim for 80 noASW, with 40 ASW in certain situations being acceptable, which sound very reasonable, however I'm relativley sensitive to ASW (don't know, if i can get used to it with time), so I'm wondering what it would take to run a SuperCarrier or very populated Airfield Situation with 80 noASW.

 

No, my goal is to have stable 40 with ASW, which happens if my GPU can output anything between 40 - 80 FPS. I can tolerate it drop below 40, but if that's very occasional.

And if I happen to have more than 80 FPS - Oculus ASW automatically shuts down and I have native 80 FPS (ideal conditions). If again I have something heavy going on, I want ASW to catch-up and offload my GPU, so again, no less than 40. I actually like how nicely Oculus ASW works when you give it enough frames to work with.

 

And this is what happens, with the relatively populated carrier (see my included missions) I have 40FPS ASW in a Tomcat while on the deck, taxying around, getting to the cat etc.

When I leave the deck - FPS goes up and I have 80, which is nice. I actually don't feel any "jump" because with ASW I also perceive 80 ASW-driven-frames.

So smooth all around.

 

Of course if my headset would have much higher input signal resolution, then probably I would need to do something extra.

 

From your tests it seems that in these situations and with modern, high tier CPUs, DCS is indeed GPU limited.

What is your estimation of how much more GPU compute power would be needed to run your settings in 80 noASW most of the time?

 

(I've only played DCS VR at other peoples computers, but planning to make the jump when i get myself a new computer).

 

Currently I see a big issue with VRAM.

I read your previous comment about having VRAM overbooked is not a problem, well technically yes, drivers do everything for you to optimize the process.

So while you are running around the map in Doom or Call of Duty different textures are being loaded to the VRAM and stay there while you are in the area and it's more or less seamless.

 

With DCS a problem becomes more pronounced because there could be situations that to render a single frame you need more VRAM than your GPU has, and next frame is the same.

So what heppens driver needs to offload big texture from VRAM to download it again next frame. It becomes a problem when you need to do this operation every frame with large data.

While playing on monitor it's still kinda tolerable, you just have less FPS, in the helmet you see double-vision or strange unpleasant stuttering, which is much less acceptable to me.

 

Let's see what next gen GPUs will be, we need large memory on board and fast chips to process all the stuff.

Edited May 26, 2020 by Mnemonic

[Mnemonic]

however I'm relativley sensitive to ASW (don't know, if i can get used to it with time)

I wonder why, when ASW has enough frames it works great! Almost undistinguished from native 80 FPS.

[dburne]

Mnemonic, you write that you aim for 80 noASW, with 40 ASW in certain situations being acceptable, which sound very reasonable, however I'm relativley sensitive to ASW (don't know, if i can get used to it with time), so I'm wondering what it would take to run a SuperCarrier or very populated Airfield Situation with 80 noASW.

 

From your tests it seems that in these situations and with modern, high tier CPUs, DCS is indeed GPU limited.

What is your estimation of how much more GPU compute power would be needed to run your settings in 80 noASW most of the time?

 

(I've only played DCS VR at other peoples computers, but planning to make the jump when i get myself a new computer).

 

There is not a rig today that can run DCS without ASW/Reprojection kicking in at times.

[dburne]

I wonder why, when ASW has enough frames it works great! Almost undistinguished from native 80 FPS.

 

Yeah I find about the same with my Rift S.

ASW does not really bother me that much.

[Crimson_Ghost138]

With SteamVR and Reprojection it becomes unplayable for me, because it morph´s part of the screen and this looks REALLY weird for me xD I always kept it off.

[twistking]

Thanks for the replies to all.

 

I'll have to check again about ASW. It could very well be, that i experienced not stable 45fps ASW, but maybe even lower (i guess that would be 30fps for the original Rift, if 45 can't be maintained), as i did not monitor FPS when trying it out.

 

But i don't want to derail this thread with my ASW experiences, so i'll shut up now and will just check fps, next time i feel offended by the ASW;)

[streakeagle]

The only penalty I see with ASW is ghosting of aircraft in a dogfight. When I have my settings tuned well enough for speed over quality, it isn't an issue. But I love quality! Shadows kill fps. Mirrors kill fps. Not to mention anything that gets rid of jaggies and shimmering like MSAA and PD.

 

I have reached the point where I give up shadows, keep mirrors, and run MSAA at x2 with PD at 1.0. The lack of shadows only looks really horrible when sitting on the ground. I can maintain a fairly steady 40 fps on my Rift S/GTX 1080/i5-4690K@4.4GHz using that approach.

 

Medium shadows kill my performance on the carrier deck, but are manageable while flying, but it is annoying to see any stuttering at all, which I didn't have before Supercarrier. So for now, I am living without shadows.

[SmartyKD]

ASW seems to have a negative effect for me so I leave that off. Shadows are definitely are massive hit, but I like them too much to give up on them! I get 30fps on carrier deck until lining up on a cat which I get 40fps and then a fairly solid 40fps throughout multiplayer. I think it’s absolutely fine and playable.

 

I’ve tweaked loads of other stuff and don’t get much more so it looks to be the max I can run. Running a 3700x, 32Gb, GTX 2070S and Rift S. I haven’t found a silver bullet yet to get vast improvements apart from shadows.

 

I take it the consensus now is that there’s no need for any shaders mods?

[Mnemonic]

New observation - for late evening / night flying, disable shadows altogether, it improves FPS on the deck when Super Carrier has it's lights on, and at night there are no cockpit shadows anyway.

[VitS]

Note that for ASW to work properly your GPU should have headroom. If you are having bad exprience with ASW try to lower you settings. As streakeagle said, only downside of ASW in DCS is is ghosting of aircraft in a dogfight.