Not played with this tool in a while, so wanted to take it through a worked example as a way to show it. CapFrameX is a FPS benchmarking and analysis tool. It measures and records your frame timings for comparison and analysis. It is better than guessing and is free and open source.
So my question is ‘Is the latest Nvidia driver any worse for MSFS VR’?
What’s been happening for Turing chipsets (20XX) cards is that for MSFS at least the driver updates for the last few months has been not great - each new driver would cause pauses/stutters in VR. The only way to get around this was to go back all the way to the driver 457.30, basically because everything after it was worse.
So rather than just try it and see (too easy!) I thought I’d get some charts going, and as an example of how to use it. The capturing is super easy, and I put a bit of a longer capture time to even out the stats:
So what happens is you run your sim or game and then make sure the ‘Running Processes’ has it shown. You use the ‘Move to ignore list’ to get rid of things like VR helper apps, SteamVR etc. You then just hit ‘Capture’ and away it goes. Easy.
One nice feature is that it gauges how smooth the gameplay is (all this is in VR for me, but it applies regardless for 2D games as well):
So my test ‘methodology’ was:
- The same free flight mission.
- Not touching controls, just let it do its own thing for 60 secs.
- Only change is the driver, no other settings changes between tests
- VR reprojection all off, otherwise it will limit FPS to 45 etc
- VR Headset on a table, not moving (if you want to do real gameplay comparisons in VR then just make sure your ‘capture’ time is long (say 10 mins) to make it a bit more statistically valid for a comparison run.
DCS 2.7 VR (with VR shaders)
MSFS 1.5.8 VR
Some stats:
Results
So the answer is it’s a wash and 466.11 looks fine and just as good as 457.30 (finally!).
CapFrameX is looking pretty nice and I’ll keep it around. Because of all the variables between our settings and PCs it’s not so good for comparisons directly between us, but for seeing if a setting impacts something or a version gets better/worse then it’s a really useful and straightforward tool to use.