Nvidia Variable Rate Supersampling, a sort of fixed foveated rendering solution. Could be big news and framerate gains for 20x owners. Who’s going to be the first to try to force it to work with DCS (although that isn’t a forward rendered engine is it? shame) 
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Hmm, I tried Talos Principle, but with my default of supersample of 270% on an O+ I can’t tell if it looks better or not. There is nothing super obvious in fpsVR to indicate better frames or something.
I guess I could try ol’ ‘BlackShark.exe’ in the Nvidia inspector for DCS but not sure without developer support this feature would work…
EDIT: Yep, not possible to enable for dcs.exe… 
PS Why is it that titles as small and innocuous as ‘Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ (a one man indie game) get official Nvidia support and this feature supported, while the expectation is that DCS can’t get a game entry even? So odd.
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What’s a forward rendered engine? Isn’t forward always where my nose is pointed? Because that’s also how my VR headset is oriented.
How do you all wear it? 
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It’s effectively the order you draw to the frame buffer. Forward rendering is the norm, so you overwrite what’s there so often just draw z-order back to front. Deferred Rendering is the other way, where you do your own buffer and then blit it when all done. The advantage with deferred rendering is that it really simplifies having lots of light sources (DCS, sun, shadows etc) as the light rendering is only done the once in a single pass.
Unfortunately, once you get off the main path (as most just use forward rendering in the driver) then you lose of on things that try to help the performance of the pipeline like this. The road to lots of work is paved with good intentions etc.
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What am I missing? I installed 441.87. Rebooted. I don’t see the new VRSS option.
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You’ve got a pick a game that supports it I think. So far they are:
Battlewake, Boneworks, Eternity WarriorsTM VR, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, In Death, Job Simulator, Killing Floor: Incursion, L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files, Lone Echo, Mercenary 2: Silicon Rising, Pavlov VR, Raw Data, Rec Room, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, Robo Recall, SairentoVR, Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, Skeet: VR Target Shooting, Space Pirate Trainer, Special Force VR: Infinity War, Spiderman: Far from Home, Spiderman: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience, Talos Principle VR, The Soulkeeper VR
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Don’t most other games use just a handful of engines?
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Yep, good point - I think most that are supported would be Unity or Unreal 3+ powered. L.A. Noire and Talos are custom though. As Nvidia are whitelisting on the inspector side with a registry fiddle, it might be possible for something like IL2BOX? Not sure…
The BlackShark entry with no forward rendering and the use of MSAA in VR is a long road away from being helped by stuff like this.
None of my Unity engine games work 
Neither does VTOL VR or IL2 BoX.
Nvidia are restricting it to ones they test themselves, and that they say are ok in the driver. It seems a bit cautious, but they did say they would expand the list soon.
Heh, tried renaming dcs.exe to ‘Talos_VR.exe’ (with the feature enabled in the NV side already) to fool the profiler, but alas, DCS calls updater and thinks the install is corrupt. Not sure other titles would be that diligent though…
Being one of the first VR titles on steam and selling a lot of copies doesn’t hurt. Plus seems like the dev is all about making opportunities happen rather than waiting for people to come to them.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/17/how-one-vr-studio-sold-100000-copies-of-its-20-game/
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I do hope that the new MAC title at least gets a Geforce Experience (and corresponding Radeon thing) set of decent settings and a proper entry in the Nvidia Program Settings list. I don’t know the history why DCS seems to be actively ignored, because even old titles not supported anymore still get added each month. Seems like a missed opportunity, especially considering the huge amount of man hours people must have spent trying to get things working better.
I think users will have to actively bug nVidia with it to get traction. The wake of that could mean that DCS fares better as well, since it’s highly likely that they will use the same engine.
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I read that DCS can’t use this as it uses deferred rendering rather than forward rendering.
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Weird huh?! It’s like serious flight simming is filthy to those execs or something. Look at how little (IE zero) spotlight Il-2 BoX and DCS get on the oculus storefront. It’s like they willfully ignore one of their prime use cases. Madness!
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What’s extra weird, is it seems pretty pretty focused ignoring in that the abandoned title Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition actually got a Nvidia Optimal Playable Settings (OPS) update with this new driver today! That title doesn’t even have a publisher anymore and has just been added for the first time…
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I’m going to try renaming the .exe for VTOL, that should work - I’ll report back, and see if I can make @BeachAV8R happy.
EDIT: It seems to work, although I’m only about 50% sure it actually does anything. The trouble with VTOL is that I get a solid 90 fps in it at 270% SS anyway, so enabling it makes it hard to see if it actually looks better or not - it looks really clear already. Maybe @BeachAV8R can try it, as I can’t tell not being super familiar with how it looks anyway.
Anyway, if anyone wants to try here’s the steps:
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As VTOL is not a supported VR title, but is a Unity engine game, I thought I’d just take a supported title that uses Unity, set up the profile and then do it that way. I chose ‘Hot Dogs Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’, the Jane Austin classic RPG that also uses the same version of Unity.
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If you don’t own it, untick the ‘Show only programs found on this computer’ and start at ‘H’ in Program Settings. Set up the VRSS like this:
(don’t forget to hit ‘Apply’ down low when you change the setting).
- Now go to the VTOL VR install location and rename the .exe and data folder, so it looks like this (as in, I’ve renamed them in this example already, they were vtolvr.exe before:
In theory if this is working you should now be able to reduce the native SteamVR SS setting, and then MSAA will get applied to where you are looking, at rates dependent on your framerate headroom (i.e. what’s left below 11ms, for 90 fps).
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Did you try a sym link?
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Some more tech info on how it works:
Still sort of confusing. I think they are saying that you can set your in-game MSAA to x4 and then this VRSS will apply it as a fixed area to reduce the load as it’s not doing the entire frame anymore. Or are they saying they apply stuff in addition to the x4 MSAA, as it’s something else. Dunno.
VRSS is based on the MSAA level set by the player in the game. For example, if MSAA is set to 4x, then VRSS in Adaptive mode will create a 4xMSAA region in the center of the screen that will expand and contract based on having sufficient performance headroom. If MSAA is set to 8X, then VRSS in Adaptive mode will create a 8xMSAA region in the center of the scene that expands and contracts. If Always On is set, a fixed area in the center of the scene will be created corresponding to the MSAA set in game but it will not expand nor contract.
NVIDIA: There are 2 different components in play here – VR game app provides MSAA, we leveraging on top of it to apply corresponding shading rates 4x or 8x.
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