VR Optimization Guide - DCS 2.5.6.60

dumb and dumber GIF

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Iā€™ll post up some fpsVR numbers and my menu settings in a bit. I will sayā€¦sometimes the graphics changes in DCS World end up not affecting somethingā€¦and I probably wonā€™t get too far into the weeds with it because Iā€™ll end up getting a glass smooth presentation, then hop on multiplayer and with all that is going on there I might need a different preset.

And I didnā€™t find DCS under the available Per-Application Video Settingsā€¦I guess I need to somehow make it a Steam Library available game. Will look into thatā€¦so I just went with global settings for now. Remind me to turn it back if I play X-Plane or VTOL VRā€¦ :rofl:

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Itā€™ll only be there when it is running under SteamVR, as in, the list is your library plus any running apps using SteamVR. So basically run DCS and go look once itā€™s up. Itā€™ll remember what you set, even if it wonā€™t list it unless itā€™s running. Youā€™ll need to restart DCS if you change anything on the SteamVR side, it only looks at the values at its startup I believe.

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Hahaā€¦thank god you told me that or Iā€™d have spent the next hour trying to figure that outā€¦ :wink:

:+1:

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Yeah, thatā€™s it, and itā€™s kind of of annoying. Is what it its I guess.

I did some experimentation and landed on 0.8 PD and 100% steam. Other settings would botch motion smoothing on my wheezing little 1070.

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So my ā€œbeforeā€ settings were 1.0 PD, and a global 150% PD in Steam on the Samsung Odyssey.

Yesterday I tried 0.5 PD at what would be a global 500% (3204xsomenumberIforgot).

Frames improved from 75-90 with around 83 average to a fixed 90 fps over Dubai, but the cockpit textures seemed a bit blurry.

Iā€™m thinking the 0.5 PD is a bit low for the Odyssey, as compared to the Reverb G2 which has much more pixels.

EDIT: GPU is a 1080Ti

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What about a Rift S running DCS stand-alone (no steam)? I use OTT, and am already running SS in OTT at 1.5 (with my anemic 1080).

The other problem is that I canā€™t get OTT overlays to show up after DCS goes into 3D, so I have no idea what the real effects to performance areā€¦ anybody had that problem?

Back to realityā€¦

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Oh this is perfect timing because I was battling with this last night for hours trying to figure out if I was really seeing an advantage or not. In the endā€¦I ended up with 1.6PD and 56% SteamVR and thought the result was pretty darn smooth. Iā€™m not sure if that is ā€œrightā€ or notā€¦but Iā€™m very interested to watch this video! Perfectā€¦

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Also re: Jabberā€™s video. Late in the video he says (around 17:00) that ED PD (love that abbreviation) with its ā€œtenthsā€ multiplier (1.2, 1.3, 1.4 etcā€¦) is quite a bit number - particularly as the resolution gets higher and higher (Iā€™m not a maths aceā€¦but I guess your are obviously multiplying an ever larger number resulting in more ā€œdeltaā€ I suppose?). So yeah, when I tried 1.8 it was a stuttering nightmareā€¦but 1.6 was a dream. Weirdā€¦but I guess that .2 multiplied over the higher resolutions reached the point of saturation.

Of courseā€¦that is for one missionā€¦one set of graphics settingsā€¦on one map. The tough thing with DCS is the wide variety of quality of the maps (as far as efficiency), the number of units, and a bunch of other variables that makes VR settings so hard to pin down since the same experience is rarely duplicated over a range of missions and terrains (and multiplayer). It would be kind of cool if DCS had an option for variable graphics on the fly like X-Plane does that will adjust things to maintain FPS. Or maybe notā€¦it might be too jarring.

Anyway. Can you tell Iā€™m just drinking coffee and browsing this morning? :rofl:

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I was about to post it. Good that somebody double checked it.

TL;DW: it turns out that that the original PD 0.5 ā€œtrickā€ only worked because of a maths mistake: the frames were better because the end result number of pixels rendered was significantly lower. Jabbers used some measurement tools to get it exactly right and then with an actually equivalent number of pixels in the end, lower PD and higher SteamVR SS made no difference whatsoever.

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Yeahā€¦it is good research and Lukas was very gracious in his acceptance of the methodology. Waiting for this afternoon when a third YouTuber comes along and explains why if they had used metric pixels instead of UK pixels that the results would have been valid.

:popcorn:

(Iā€™m just here for the end result = give me my G2 settings and let me go in peaceā€¦hahaā€¦)

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The main thing is, DCSā€™ PD is actually quadratic in the number of pixels.

Do you remember what y=x^2 looked like in maths class? Climbs up ever steeper instead of in a straight line. Thatā€™s what happens to your number of pixels as you up the PD in DCS. SteamVR SS is a line, it is linear with the number of pixels.

Why does DCS do this? Their logic is: the PD is the factor by which we multiply the horizontal and vertical size. Thus, if you were at 1000x1000 pixels at 1.0, then set 2.0, you get 2000x2000 pixels. Twice as wide and twice as high, so tbat actually fits 4 blocks of 1000x1000. 2*2 = 4, quadratic, square. Get it?

Itā€™s not wrong, it just turns out that the user likes something that scales more linearly with GPU load and frametime, and that is the number of pixels, not the scaling of the width and height individually.

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Oops sorry

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Ah yesā€¦that makes senseā€¦and reveals why 1.4 vs 1.6 is a significant leap. Etcā€¦

LOLā€¦noā€¦I appreciate the knowledge. Iā€™m just sorry that it has been explained to me a dozen times before but it never sticks. My brain is officially at capacity. Strategic dumping must occur to accept any new information.

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Well there is this guy who thinks that the magic bullet is forcing DX11 mode on. Have not tried it yet.

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In the comments of that video:

ā€œFrom what I understand, forcing Directx 11 mode on, pushes the reprojection onto the cpu instead of the gpu. Which would explain why its not stuttering, as your gpu was maxing out, now its having some load taken off it.ā€

Interesting if true. The user in that video has a 5700xt - which I guess is around 30% slower than a 2080tiā€¦so Iā€™m not sure that offloading my GPU is necessarily something I might want to do. Perhaps this would be good for 1080s, 2070sā€¦ I have an i9-9900k and I donā€™t know if shifting stuff to that would be beneficial or not. Only one way to know - give it a whirlā€¦

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That video also brings up the point that I never have had ā€œLegacy Reprojectionā€ checked on. Is that something everyone is running with ON? God Iā€™m a dimwitā€¦

And. Asking the real questions. The narrator in that video pronounces Kutasi:

Kut-icey

Have I been living a lie for decades? Iā€™ve been saying it:

Kut-ay-see

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