I think it would be worth it for them to do it. The reasons for them not doing it is probably because the guy that is reworking all the shaders for future Vulcan work wants to just do that and not look back.
If they shipped something like this then they’d need to either ship two versions (the as is ones and the VR masked ones) of precompiled shader cache files (the ones you have to delete to get the VR mod to work, and it rebuilds for a while when restarting).
But yeah, I do think it would be worth them doing it, as the gains are non trivial in VR for sure.
The shader mod didn’t change anything visually for me. At least that I noticed. I didn’t touch any options just loaded it up and got an extra 20-30 FPS.
There used to be a problem with NVGs and the mod but apparently it’s fixed now. No issues for me.
Haven’t used the VR Shader mod in a long time now… Maybe I should give it a go again.
Maybe use a mod installer, or something? It was such a chore to install it, which is why I gave it up.
Giving it a go again as well. It is a bit of a doing to install, but eh, I seen worse. I hope visual quality isn’t as bad as it used to be, that’s why I uninstalled it previously. Now I turned off the canopy glass and shadow things. See if that helps.
Oh geez, first boot does take a while, doesn’t it?
edit: So it finally loaded and initial impressions were OK. Pit is dark, landscape looks nice. But then I took the 2v2 MiG-19 insta. At the merge the thing glitched out something fierce, rendering white goop instead of mountain valleys with bogeys flitting across the canopy. So that’s not getting reinstalled when next week’s patch wipes it.
I tried some of these settings without the VR mod, and not to besmirch some random guy on the internet (you need a license for Youtube film making, right?) these aren’t great for me. My findings:
I tried on Normandy, and putting DCS terrain textures to low looks very obviously bad to me, or rather, they look like fields of low textures. I also didn’t see any improvement to VRAM, so perhaps only in more extreme MP circumstances would it help? Back to high for this one.
I really don’t like grass off in the warbirds. It’s worth the extra 2ms per frame in VR for me. Back on again.
Visible Range to Medium is not good, and not worth the trade off to use Shadows to Medium. Visible range to High and Shadows to Flat is my personal delicious plat-du-jour.
Using Nvidia Control panel anti-aliasing like FXAA/MSAA doesn’t work for me in VR. One day I’d like to do something a bit more scientific about this and actually check. Perhaps it differs with stacks, i.e. just for pure SteamVR but not SteamVR + WMR or Oculus? Otherwise it is so odd how some people the driver antialiasing works for them in VR while others can’t see any difference whatsoever. I think I’m in the latter camp, and feel the former is just quaffing down liters of placebo juice to make themselves happy.
The Nvidia ansiotropic filtering is a bit confusing, as if set in the driver then I think will just override and not use the app setting. I guess it could be faster in the driver, but can’t be massively different (and the app might just request it of the driver anyway). AF does work in the driver for the VR compositor though.
TLDR
Shader mod doesnt work like it used to, at least in my experience.
So i tried the new updated version of the VR shaders mod with 2.5.6. Here is the basic rundown:
I dont notice the massive FPS increase I did with the old version.
The sun bloom/glare goes through the aircraft pit and basically all solid objects
You lose the badass new water effects on Persian Gulf
The in-pit shadows and lighting in general does not look as good.
The mod I want is to leave all the shaders the same, but allow me to use the render mask without messing with everything else. Surely this would allow for increased performance with the same visual effects. I mean even if it meant you were rendering 5-10% less screen area, it would have to be an FPS boost right?
