Poor and unstable VR performance on a decent and recent rig

[hinapilot]

Hi guys,

 

So basically, I need help. I'm going completely mad with my VR performances so far and I'm questionning what I've been doing wrong or if my rig is faulty. I hope somebody here will be my savior.

 

Let's start with my setup then I'll explain point by point what I've tried and noticed.

 

Setup

Motherboard  
ASRock X299 Steel Legend

 

Proc  
Intel® Core i9-10900X

 

RAM
GSkill 32GB DDR4/3600MHz 

 

GPU
Zotac GeForce RTX 3070

 

Storage
1TB Samsung 980 PRO M.2 PCIe NVMe 
 

Cooling
Corsair Hydro Series H100i Extreme Performance Liquid Coolin

 

VR Headset
HP Reverb G2

 

Flight Gear
Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS Stick & Throttle
Trustmaster TPR Pendular Rudder

 

UserBenchmark done today: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/45006662

 

Nvidia details

Driver 471.41

 

See screenshots for settings

 

 

Windows Settings

HAGS - Off

Game Mode - Off

Fullscreen Optimization - Off

DCS.exe vrcompositor.exe vrserver.exe all in High priority, added through Regedit

Graphics performance preference - DCS.exe set to High Performance
HPET - Disabled in Device Manager

System page file - 32Gb

Performance Options - Adjust best performance for Programs

 

WMR Settings

All by Default

 

SteamVR Settings

 

Using OpenXR at runtime.

 

OpenXR Settings

 

As I understand it, OXR settings don't apply to DCS even though SteamVR uses it at runtime for the G2

 

DCS Settings

 

VR Settings by default (Pixel Density at 1, Force IPD Distance unticked, no bloom)

Hotplug disabled.

 

Environment

No Chrome, no Spotify, no nothing but fpsVR.

No DCS Mods but the VR Shaders

 

I also have OpenVR FSR: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/45006662

 

Mission Environment

I have a small multiplayer mission I scripted, nothing funky.

Starts in Vaziani.

I do all my performance tests and changes in the cold and dark F/A18.

Attached is the .miz    Mi-24P - Saving the 'murican convoy.miz

 

Experience so far

 

Okay so I guess it gives a proper idea of what I have in terms of setup and settings.

 

I barely hold 30fps, cold & dark on the ground, with that whole configuration which is pretty disappointing for me considering the visual compromises and my setup that i would qualify as decent (it's a month old, all new pristine parts).

 

I have followed several guides to improve performances. Guide specifically for the G2, guides specifically for the 3070, guides specifically for the G2 AND the 3070. When i see some posts on these forums showing 45 to 90fps in average with "weaker" setups, I'm just wondering what the heck I've done to Saint VR to be stuck at 30fps in a cold Hornet.
 

Just to be clear, I am not a FPS chaser. I aim at 45 to 50 without multiplyer and without streaming/recording so that i can have a steady 30 to 35 when both in MP and streaming/recording.

 

I have tried to put all the settings down to the bare minimum and got different results (which i can't really explain either).

 

-90 fps (fpsVR) in the cold & dark hornet when i start the mission for the first time after booting the game up from SteamVR (meaning starting SteamVR first and then inside the headset to start DCS)

-45 fps with the EXACT same settings and the EXACT same configuration after moving up some sliders and settings, applying them, starting the mission (crying because 20fps), stopping the mission, going back to settings, going all the way back down for everything then starting the mission again.

-40 to 45 fps when launching the game not from Steam but from the shortcut on my desktop (I have the standalone version that i added as a non-Steam game on Steam), no matter if it's the first execution of the mission or not.

-Randomly less then 20fps and huge stutters after starting the mission several times because i'm trying to tweak the settings and got back to the lowest possible

 

Performance results

 

As I mentionned, i barely hold 30fps with that configuration but here's a more in depth summary.

 

GPU Frametime is 15 to 18ms in average depending on where i look in Vaziani

GPU is at 58°C

GPU is used at 35% in average
SteamVR SS is shown at 50%

GPU Mem is shown at 7.5 out of 8

Retro-projection ratio is shown at around 60% in average

 

CPU Frametime is at 30ms in average

CPU is at 65°C 

CPU is used at 65% in average

CPUs are at 85%

20Gb out of 32Gb of RAM

2 dropped frames after 5min of time

 

Overall smoothness is ok, the view doesn't "grip" when looking quickly around me.

Obviously as soon as the aircraft is live and i have, let's say, the FLIR and a MAV on each DDI, I get stutters and the fps drops at 24/25fps in average.

 

Conclusion

 

What do you guys think? Is there something really obvious that i missed?

I hope one of you's gonna be my angel because i'm literally clueless.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

-Hina

[eaglecash867]

Try changing the Motion Reprojection setting on the OpenXR Development Tools page to "Motion Vector" and see what that does for you.

[Underscore]

I would do / try 3 things

• Steam motion smoothing to - force on (not just enabled)
• In WMR has an option in its display settings of:-
  • Experience Options - set it to Optimise for performance
• Set this parameter in your Autoexec.cfg file in C:\Users\xxxxxx\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Config
  • options.graphics.stereo_mode_use_shared_parser = true

 

I have steam global setting set to 64% and then DCS to 100% rather than the other way round - doubt it makes a difference but you could try that too

 

Open XR settings are irrelevant as its not used

I think you should be able to set the graphics options higher than you have assuming not a massive gap between the 3080ti and the 3070 you have

 

 

 

Edited July 28, 2021 by Underscore

[hinapilot]

@eaglecash867 Thank you for the suggestion. I tried assuming that by Motion Vector you mean Motion Retroprojection.

 

I got 50fps for like a min and a decent 11ms on the GPU and 12ms on the CPU then the CPU went back up to an average of 30 to 32ms in average and the dps lowered to 30 again in average.

 

@Underscore  Thank you also for the suggestion, i will try exactly that and let you know in a min

[hinapilot]

@Underscore So i bumped up to 38/39fps now (still cold & dark but that's an improvement i couldn't get before), GPU is still around 12ms, CPU is down from 30/32ms to 25ms. It helped a lot already thanks.

 

Any idea why my CPU is bottlenecking so hard? What settings have such an effect on it? (going from 11ms in the lowest settings possible to 25 now)

Edited July 28, 2021 by hinapilot

[Underscore]

I have scenery detail factor set to 0.6 in DCS options and grass to 250 --- thats with my 3080ti..... so you should be at least the same i would have thought

 

[speed-of-heat]

so it is your CPU time that is eating you alive 30ms is way outside of tolerance to maintain 45FPS, in summary its likely nothing in DCS unless its a very heavy AI mission, or you are doing exports out using DCS bios or maybe TACVIEW... 

 

I would look to processes that are eating your CPU time, to do that i would start with your idle times... so boot the device , go make a hot beverage of your choice come back after its all settled down, whats your CPU running like in task manager ... it should be around 1-5% utilisation at most ... if i had to guess i would go with backgrounds that change or a re "live" or the one that was a pain for me LED lighting ... but look in task manager for task that are active 

[DucS2r]

Following up on speed of heat’s suggestion, when I loaded the NVIDIA 471.41 driver it loaded a monitoring process that took 10-12 % of my CPU and kicked off the cooling fans. I disabled it and got my cycles back. I don’t remember what it was called but a number of people complained about it. It you find processes hogging your CPU google their name and see if you can safely disable them. 

Edited July 28, 2021 by DucS2r

[hinapilot]

Hello again,

 

@speed-of-heat yes this is very worrying to me that my cpu is doing that.

I waited for things to settle like you suggest and out of nowhere...

 

 

A few minutes later. (with Chrome open in the background)

 

 

Eager to see if this wasn't a lucky try. I stopped the mission then pressed Fly again

 

 

It sometimes went up to 80 to 90fps when i'm not doing anything.

 

 

It is extremely confusing. I started SteamVR, then the game from the light home menu (just the menu not the 3D room), started the mission then fpsVR and there we go. I swear on everything i cherish including my sister sitting right next to me that i changed NOTHING, did not even reboot we just did 3 hours of Baldur's Gate 3 online. Thank you again @speed-of-heatfor taking the time to suggest that!

 

What the hell.

 

@DucS2r I don't seem to find the processes you mentioned in the task manager and i don't have anything weird running i think. CPU is idling at 20% with DCS being 14 to 15% of it. I will keep an eye on it though thank you very much for the tip.

 

The top of my processes stack just for reference. (17minutes in)

 

Edited July 28, 2021 by hinapilot

[eaglecash867]

3 hours ago, hinapilot said:

@eaglecash867 Thank you for the suggestion. I tried assuming that by Motion Vector you mean Motion Retroprojection.

 

I got 50fps for like a min and a decent 11ms on the GPU and 12ms on the CPU then the CPU went back up to an average of 30 to 32ms in average and the dps lowered to 30 again in average.

If you're getting anything for FPS other than 45, your Motion Reprojection is not turned on.  "Motion Vector" is a setting for Motion Reprojection that tells WMR to run Motion Reprojection all the time.  That should give you a solid 45 FPS.  It may go lower at times, but if its turned on, you'll never see it go above 45...it isn't possible for it to do that if its turned on.  

[DucS2r]

33 minutes ago, hinapilot said:

 

@DucS2r I don't seem to find the processes you mentioned in the task manager and i don't have anything weird running i think. CPU is idling at 20% with DCS being 14 to 15% of it. I will keep an eye on it though thank you very much for the tip.

Thanks. I looked it up and it was NVRLA.exe that was giving me problems. I don’t see it listed in your services. And I think speed of heat meant to look at task manager with nothing else loaded to see if a background app or service was soaking up your CPU time. Good luck. 

[speed-of-heat]

I did and order the list by cpu usage…

like this 

 

and @eaglecash867 if motion smoothing is enabled rather than forced you can see frame rates above 45 and below 90, its a transition thing, but i would recommend forced on your hardware  

Edited July 29, 2021 by speed-of-heat

[eaglecash867]

6 hours ago, speed-of-heat said:

 

but i would recommend forced on your hardware  

 

That's why I have specifically been saying "Motion Vector" to force it on in my last two posts...for basic troubleshooting purposes to make sure its actually getting activated when he's telling it to.  No way to know that for sure if its set to "Auto".  

[peachmonkey]

in my painful experience with DCS 2.7 and WMR the game doesn't like when both WMR and SteamVR have motion reprojection turned on/enabled. It's one or the other. Otherwise it's a stutter paradise.

 

1) if it's ON in Steam VR, then disable it in WMR:

 

YourDisk\SteamFolder\steamapps\common\MixedRealityVRDriver\resources\settings\default.vrsettings

find the below line and comment it out with //

   "motionReprojectionMode"

 

2) if you set it to MotionVector in WMR, then make sure motion smoothing is disabled in SteamVR

 

hopefully it's one of these..

 

[speed-of-heat]

10 hours ago, peachmonkey said:

in my painful experience with DCS 2.7 and WMR the game doesn't like when both WMR and SteamVR have motion reprojection turned on/enabled. It's one or the other. Otherwise it's a stutter paradise.

 

1) if it's ON in Steam VR, then disable it in WMR:

 

YourDisk\SteamFolder\steamapps\common\MixedRealityVRDriver\resources\settings\default.vrsettings

find the below line and comment it out with //

   "motionReprojectionMode"

 

2) if you set it to MotionVector in WMR, then make sure motion smoothing is disabled in SteamVR

 

hopefully it's one of these..

 

whilst historically correct, this is not the correct way anymore. The correct approach is documented here: Using SteamVR with Windows Mixed Reality - Enthusiast Guide | Microsoft Docs

 

[RealDCSpilot]

@hinapilotYou can also try to use process lasso to get more control about CPU core usage.

1. disable hyperthreading in BIOS if you don't need it

2. download and install Process Lasso, have VR and DCS running

3. open Process Lasso window and look for DCS.exe, vrcompositor.exe and vrserver.exe

4. set CPU priority to Always -> high

5. uncheck CPU priority Always -> Windows dynamic thread priority boosts enabled

6. set CPU Affinity to Always -> choose 4 cores here

7. set I/O priority to Always -> high

8. set Application Power Profile to highest possible
9. now repeat these steps for vrcompositor.exe and vrserver.exe, but in Affinity set a single CPU core of the ones that are left and not bound to DCS.exe

[Rebel28]

Been there tried all the above suggestions. None worked. Linked is what I found worked to solve all the problems. Don't ask me why it works, this is the only app that I have to do this with. But it works every time.

Link: Scroll down

System is a Intel I9-9900K overclocked to 5ghz, Nvidia 3080, 32ghz 3600ram, HP Reverb G2

[RealDCSpilot]

@Rebel28 The safe standard procedure to launch any VR game is always starting the vr compositor(s) first. In case of WMR headsets and OpenVR game: 1. launch WMR, 2. launch SteamVR, 3. launch game. This prevents SteamVR from loading ressources to late (parallel to loading the game).

Edited August 2, 2021 by RealDCSpilot

[hinapilot]

Hey guys just a quick update,

 

First of all thank you @peachmonkey @RealDCSpilot and @Rebel28 for all your suggestions. 

I have spent some time looking at my computer first and foremost because as we discussed, it felt extremely weird to me to see very different results depending on where the game was launched from, if it was the first mission loaded or not, etc, etc.

 

The first thing i did was to buy a new power unit.

I went from a BeQuiet 650W Bronze to a Gigabyte 850W 80 Gold.

Right off the bat, the weird behaviors of going from 25 to 80 (and back forth) fps at the lowest graphics were gone. I suspected a power issue after some benchmarks made in Cine, Prime and CPU-Z and it got fixed.

 

Then i downloaded the beta version of SteamVR instead of using the Main one.

I discovered in the process that DEPENDING from where i launched the game, the SteamVR settings changed. (I can launch Steam then SteamVR, i can launch WMR for SteamVR or i can launch DCS.exe then tick start VR)

-> One of the main issue was that sometimes I had Motion Smoothing On in global and "Use Global Settings" in DCS Video settings, sometimes i had it off global and force always-on in DCS Video settings, etc.

It might just be placebo, i don't know, but i'm now always launching Steam, SteamVR and then withing SteamHome light, start DCS. This way i know i'm always using the following (and final) settings all the time:

 

Then I spent some time figuring out the visual settings I was comfortable with whilst maintaining 45/50fps minimum.

 

As a reminder, i'm not chasing frames, I want to have some headroom for recording and obviously for multiplayer, heavier missions, Marianas type of maps, etc.

Here are the settings in DCS:

 

Pixel Density at 1.0 and Force IPD Distance disabled in VR.

 

Just to summarize what i "prioritize" when i'm playing (which obviously could be very different from somebody else):

 

-Textures: I did not buy a high resolution headset to look at pixelated textures -> High

-Terrain Textures: DCS has incredible maps and being able to use the terrain colors, aspect, textures, etc as a point of reference whilst flying (i mostly do CAS) is really important, i'm a ground hogger -> High

-Civ Traffic: Hum, nope, thanks. -> Off

-Water: I fly from or to a boat sometimes but it's not really my main concern, also the medium setting is fine enough for me in terms of visuals -> Medium

-Visib Range: It was one of the main perf killer for me, i bumped it up to High and locked it here. I'd love to have more but I can't right now. -> High

-Heat Blur: I don't care honestly and it gives me motion sickness -> Off

-Shadows: Another perf killer for me. I want shadows because without it, it looks like you're back in 1999. Flat are enough for me, for now at least. -> Flat Only

-Res of Cockpit Displays: I don't use mirrors (again, not a dogfighter. If i need to check six, i just turn in VR) so I don't really care and the screens are pretty sharp thanks to the G2 already -> 512

- MSA/DoF/Lens Effects/Motion Blur/SSAA/SSLR/SSAO: all off or none. I tried them on, obviously MSAA is pretty cool to make the edges smooth but seeing that i loose 20fps and get stutters by just activating x2, it's a nope. SSLR helps with immersion but I'm also noob enough that i don't need reflections on my displays that are going to stress me even more 'cause i can't read sh*t ^^ -> Off/None

-Clutter/Grass: not gonna lie, it looks aweful. But it looks even more old school and 1999 with grass off. I found a setting of 250 that i like, i have grass right next to me, it does the job -> 250

-Forest visibility-> 50%, i'm thinking of bumping that to 60/70 (read below why) but I know that it is a safe, perf/eye friendly setting. ->50%

-Forest/Scenery factor-> Following @Underscore's suggestion, i tuned that down to 0.6. Honestly i don't see much difference visually, I do see the improvement in smoothness though especially when in flight and looking at cities in Persian Gulf, I don't have stutters anymore and way less clipping as my system is able to load em' up faster.-> 0.6

-Preload radius: 10k. I haven't really seen a difference between 10k and the maximum of 15000k. Might be because i mainly fly (way) below mach 1. -> 10k

-Anisotropic Filtering: I like to have straight and well-defined textures/objects in the distance so i bumped that up to the max -> x16

 

Cold & Dark Hornet in Vaziani in the .miz I provided earlier: 50 to 60fps, goes down to 40-ish with FLIR and MAV open on both DDI and obviously the bird running.

 

I then spent some time to OC my GPU, RAM and CPU to get a little oomf in performances

 

I was running 10 cores at 4.3Ghz turbo and 2.4Ghz cache, 2133Mhz for the RAM speed and stock settings for my RTX3070 of 1755Mhz of core clock speed at 7000Mhz of memory clock.

 

After spending some time overclocking whilst remaining at 80° max core CPU and core GPU package in Prime or Cinebench, I found my sweet spot at 10 cores at 4.6GHz turbo and 2.8Ghz cache, 3600Mhz for the ram, RTX3070 at 2100Mhz core clock, 8000Mhz memory clock.

 

Under workload in DCS my CPU and GPU barely reach 70° so I'm fine with that and it's super stable (no BSOD whilst playing in VR so far).

 

Cold & Dark Hornet in Vaziani in the .miz I provided earlier: 65 to 80fps

Hornet hot i got 55-ish with FLIR and MAV open on both DDI

 

Oh and I forgot to mention, all of this at 100% SS in SteamVR.

 

I should be able to bump the graphics settings up but I'm honestly quite happy with that for now. It allows me to record/stream on a single computer setup at a steady 45 in the VR version of the Tomcat or in Marianas in the F16 with Chrome running, Spotify and some good ol' dogfighting playlist and some other perf monitoring stuff.

 

Thanks again to y'all for helping me. Now I need to figure out the same stuff for MSFS SU5 ^^

Edited August 3, 2021 by hinapilot

[RealDCSpilot]

Good thing you found out that you were power limited.