I have a Pimax 8K X and an Alienware Aurora R12 PC with an RTX 3080Ti and Intel Core i9 11900F, but I can’t get more that 20 FPS and the image is rather blurry, no matter what I change or try out. So I have done a lot of research about VR settings and performance, but I can’t wrap my head around some basic concepts of upscaling, although I don’t consider myself slow on the uptake.
So the basic idea of upscaling is clear to me: for instance, if you play a movie on Blue Ray disc in 1080p on your 4K TV, the TV uses upscaling to “stretch” the lower amount of pixels from the source on to its screen and make it look almost like 4K. Applied to VR, it is sometimes interesting to reduce the resolution of a source (an application, game, MSFS) to reduce the workload of the GPU and then have your VR headset upscale it back to something that looks like its native resolution.
Now how does this work with MSFS? I don’t mean the technology behind it, but rather how to do it really. Do I have to reduce the resolution of MSFS by means of the Global Render Scale in the Graphics settings? If so, to what percentage or resolution exactly? And then I activate the upscale mode on my Pimax application (PiTool)? Or is it the other way round, do I have to reduce the render scale in PiTool and keep it at 100% in MSFS? And what about the upscale settings in the OpenXR toolkit? I understand that is better to do the upscaling thing through OpenXR toolkit, but when I increase the upscale setting above 100%, the resolution actually gets smaller. I am lost!
Sorry for these rather basic questions but I really couldn’t find answers to them in the plentitude of information that is in this forum and elsewhere in the internet. If someone could explain this to me or point me to a good explanation or video, that would be much appreciated. But I have seen plenty of videos where people say “do this or that” but don’t really explain how it is done or what’s the logic behind it.
The best upscaling methods are called DLSS and FSR (Nvidia technology and AMD respectively). They’re easy to use and with your GPU either method will work, even the AMD technology, although FSR is only available at the moment when using DX12. Give both a try and see which works better for you.
In the options, under the anti-aliasing setting just choose one. After choosing one of them, the next box below it will be which “quality” setting you want to choose. Try the different quality settings and find one that looks good and performs well. It’s that simple. I use FSR and both the “quality” and “balanced” settings look good to me ;).
Regarding all of the other ways to set the render scale like in the PiTool, Nvidia control panel, OpenXR Toolkit etc. just set them all to 100% and only adjust the quality setting for DLSS and/or FSR. Regarding the in-game settings like volumetric clouds, texture resolution etc. just move them to their highest setting and then back them off 1 notch meaning if ultra is the highest for a setting then back it off to high.
The only other setting that has a big impact is the “motion reprojection” setting for VR. I don’t have Pimax so I’m unsure, but I leave MR off.
You should be able to get good results like that. Once you get it working then you can tweak the other settings, and try motion reprojection, but keep it simple to begin with. Good luck.
Thanks Mayhem6633! I didn’t know that DLSS has to do with upscaling, I thought it had to do with anti-aliasing, but I am really just about to start understanding more about these things. In any case, when I choose DLSS, the image gets quite a bit blurry, to the point where I have difficulty in reading smaller text like in the A320 ECAM in the cockpit. That’s why I use TAA. Am I doing something wrong here?
About FSR, if I am not mistaken, the OpenXR Toolkit offers FSR. Is it a good idea to use DLSS and FSR at the same time?
Like I mentioned, set all the other things to 100%. Only play with DLSS and FSR in the game. The FSR in the openxr toolkit is a version 1 implementation. The game impelments v2 and is better. You’re blurry because 1) either your eysight is bad (like mine is as I’m over 50) or 2) all of your other settings are conflicting with each other. Try setting them to 100.
But in reality, in the game the glass cockpits are difficult to read no matter what you do. That’s just happening in the game and there’s not much we can do about that. Look out the window to check the clarity. You should be able to get clear views outside the cockpit. Then just live with whatever inside the cockpit looks like and don’t stress. Enjoy the experience.
I was getting 30’ish fps with 3080ti / 8kx / 100 MSFS TAA and it wasn’t “blurry” but i suppose we all have different ideas on what’s acceptable visually, it’ll never be 4k monitor sharpness. Have you got parallel projections disabled in pitool? What are the Quality and fov settings set to in pitool?
The image in the headset if focused in a distance. I would say you need glasses for normal (far) vision, not for reading. The best way is just to try it.
Well I need glasses to see far but not yet for reading, although I am close at that point. But in any case, when I use TAA (anti-aliasing), I get an image that is just sharp enough for me, and in the MSFS menus, the image also seems to be quite sharp. But DSLL makes it very blurry.
If you have a powerful enough GPU with plenty of VRAM, you can super sample at higher than 100% render scale outside MSFS and still use DLSS to achieve clear displays. eg. With my 4080 I have OXR set to 160% and use DLSS quality and am very happy with the clarity and performance I get. The 3080 Ti should be able to run 120-130% OXR and still get better performance and clarity than TAA at 100%.
