@NEVO I don’t know what your system is but your post made me run X-Plane again, to see where it’s come since about, oh, 3-4 months ago in the VR/Vulkan department.
It’s great in VR!
VR vs 2D isn’t really a direct comparison to me. They are, again to me, totally different experiences.
As far as DCS vs XP/VR goes, my only two sims[1]:
Comparing DCS to XP/VR/Vulkan (XP-VRv) isn’t exactly apples to apples; I’m rendering this opinion based on how smooth the experience is based on the amount of ‘stuff’ I see outside the cockpit.
XP/VR+Vulkan runs smoother with more ‘stuff’ displayed than DCS does. The FPS was similar, but it is smoother; a better sense that I’m moving through space (flying). I’m running at medium settings, a little higher in some things.
Now, there ain’t no war going on (NOTE: I don’t have much going on usually in DCS anyway), with the associated computations required, but the biggest point (concerning DCS and it’s lack of performance) is Vulkan should be (is?) more scalable ; throw in a faster CPU and/or GPU and you should get, mostly, what you paid for [2].
Not so with DCS it appears.
Sidebar | I was about to pull the trigger on a new system for DCS but I’m just not seeing that the $ spent will scale, much at all. Yet.
VR, as long as we have 2 eyeballs, will never render as fast as 2D - you have to render everything twice. Even if they find a way to eliminate 2x transformations and 2x rasterization, doing something twice will always be slower than doing it once. Beyond some point though you won’t be able to notice I’m sure. But I digress…
In a nutshell, if you have the system to support VR and like X-Plane I recommend the VR experience - right now.
Here’s my specs, a 3-4 year old system (not cutting edge):
- i7 6700K (O/C’d to 4.4Mhz)
- 32 Gb RAM (RAM speed is kinda low (2400?) cuzz it’s old see below for a report on my specs)
- nVidia 1080 (non-Ti) 8GB VRAM
- Samsun Odyssey Plus VR headset; not Gen 1 or Gen 2 (Reverb G2), more G 1.5. It’s cheap but that’s about all.
[1] I have FS2020 but it’s collecting dust til I see how VR is: unless they worked some serious magic, FS020 is DirectX 11, not DirectX 12, which is more akin to Vulkan. Time will tell. Perhaps, as I wondered when FS2020 was announced, they looked around and said, “Hey, the world is multi-core, lets build this from scratch with that in mind”. They’d be the first to do it (I’m not familiar with any other sims so no ideas beyond these 3) - with the exception, now, of X-Plane. LR spent, what, a year (or three) rewriting the engine to do this. It was not playable to me before.
[2] I think XP should scale better with the Vulkan re-write but not, likely, as well as we flight simmers would like - just better (than say DCS as it is now). Flight sims, as long as we are in a niche (within the game niche), will always pay out the nose for performance. I just can’t afford to pay every year for 2 FPS.
EDIT: I just did a lap around the Empire State building (New York city, default scenery) with medium thunderstorms and rain: XP-11 + Vulkan is significantly smoother than DCS; 38 FPS (worst case, stayed around 40-42) was as smooth as DCS at 60 FPS. That tells me things.
I’m not a big stickler on graphics in VR. Or I don’t think I am. Before VR I was into the Big Iron airplanes (FSX, P3D) but XP, in VR, I’m enjoying VFR flight like never before, so that’s all I do.
Note that my FPS weren’t way up there (over New York City, default scenery, default C172, the weather I described). But it was smooth, smoother than DCS would have been at ~38-42 FPS. I even tried to ‘make sudden moves’ to see how it reacted and it didn’t stutter, or very little. Don’t know how they did that.
Didn’t know the O+ was not available. Not that I would recommend it unless you found one really cheap. Not sure what would be comparable. The newer ones might actually run better at the same resolution; newer, more efficient tech, perhaps?