RTX 3090, 5800X, 1 TB m.2, 32 Gb RAM, Reverb G2
Settings high to ultra, LOD 200, render scale 100, 85 Open XR, Dev mode on, clouds off,
antialiasing off.
Flew around Bielefeld Germany WU6. Once it fully loaded, it was actually beautiful! True color and high resolution. The photogrammetry trees were high enough quality that autogen trees weren’t really necessary. The cool thing was these are the actual trees so they don’t suffer from the usual issues with autogen trees (height, color, type etc). They also don’t sparkle with antialiasing off or look blurry with it on. The buildings looked like real buildings, not blurry boxes with signs you can’t read. You can even see individual cars parked in the parking lots. The interesting thing was the ground texture doesn’t need antialiasing. In fact I turned TAA off since it makes everything blurry anyways and dulls the color saturation. The color was actually beautiful in VR and not the typical washed-out look I see in other areas. The other interesting thing was my framerate was actually better with this scenery than any detailed area I’ve flown. I in fact was getting 45-50 fps on average…butter smooth. I also flew around the Alps near the Sphinx Observatory and it was the first time the mountains actually could pass for real mountains in VR. The only issue there was the scenery would load when I’d fly by a mountain, then unload, then reload again when I’d pass by that same place. It was really annoying and I hope it gets fixed because it ruins the entire experience…especially with so much RAM and VRAM to play with. But these nuisances aside when it comes to Bielefeld Germany in WU6…
Way to go Jorg! This is the quality I’ve been waiting for. We need this quality minimum for VR.
Performance is about the same as SU5 in many areas but this particular area performed better for me for some reason. I just mentioned it so the developers could take note. I am not using reprojection. It just took a long time to fully load the scenery, but that’s down to the servers they’re using. If the trees look like blocky triangles, be patient. Autogen trees have some advantages (like seeing tree trunks better) but that doesn’t bother me. I get a significant boost anywhere having Dev Mode on and clouds unchecked (off). Downside is they’re one of the best things about the sim. Now if they could make the scenery pre-cache available in VR, stop scenery unloading and reloading everytime you fly by the same place multiple times, and implement path/raytracing effects using raytracing cores (which are 5 times faster than using CUDA which they’re presently using), clear and realistic looking night lighting (not blurry like it is in VR) we’d really have something amazing. I played around with Lego Builder’s Journey. It had amazing performance and looked gorgeous. I’d like to see lighting effects like this in the simulator in VR. It would make airports look like real. Right now the buildings still look fake in VR even with addons and we need better antialiasing. Here’s to DLSS 2.2.
I had a similar experience yesterday flying in Switzerland around St. Bartholomew’s Church and other POI’s in that area. I was flying in the valleys between the mountains and thinking “Oh my God, this is so beautiful”. My fps was great, the view was great, no stutters etc. Those mountains with their sharp peaks and great colors were astounding. I often fly in those mountains but it seemed better for some reason.
Did you know this setting is in the UserCfg.opt file in the VR section of the file? I haven’t changed mine yet. It’s set to “1” but a “2” is equivalent to high and a “3” is the ultra setting. Eventually I’ll probably experiment with that but it was so beautiful yesterday I’m having second thoughts.
Slightly off topic but there was a London photogrammetry patch in this update (1.19.8.0) - I imagine to change LoD levels further out so you can see buildings further away however fps is notably better after the update which is great, buildings themselves though are not.
I’m glad they fixed that problem. I personally didn’t have it on my system for whatever reason. My issue with LOD is taxiing up the ramp and seeing parked airplanes with no wheels until you’re about 10’ away from them. But that’s caused by another problem…setting the LOD’s for models too close before switching. I’d change this myself but Asobo locks you out of being able to do this even in Developer Mode it seems.
I built my own computer so I saved a ton but I know it’s sad, isn’t it, for a person who has a real pilot’s license and even built a kit plane I had to sell years ago. But I figured if the sim could look and fly like real-life (like what was being touted in the trailers upon release) I could enjoy a trip for less than plane rental for the weekend. Where I live that would cost me over $1000.00. I can’t log it as actual flight time but if it feels like actual flying, I’m happy for now. I also wanted to fly over realistic looking places (not computer-ish looking or cartoony being passed-off as real life) to explore possible places to move to. Practicing touch and goes and shooting instrument approaches with VATSIM or PilotEdge would be nice. I was really looking forward to the Developer Q&A today. I hope the cancellation wasn’t because someone is sick of the project already. Please don’t quite now!
I tried this and it seems to have worked with textures. Now the textures stay loaded. But the LOD of the mountain remains an issue. I fly along a rockface that after enough passes loads in full detail. But when I fly to the other side of the same mountain then come back around to the original side, it’s all back to a lower LOD again to start the cycle again. Maybe it’s related to the morphing mountains problem. It all seems to be related to LOD’s loading too late and retiring too early. If this has anything to do with Bing throttling the servers to handle the demand, please open the faucet or the complaining from users will never stop.
After fiddling with terrain LOD in the config file it seems best to leave it alone for fps or set it at 3 for best trade-off (fewer LOD switches vs fps). It seems the photogrammetry trees loading doesn’t finally quit after flying for some time. It’s LOD apparently making them pop in and out at different detail. This is very immersion breaking for me; autogen trees are far better for this. But I still love the scenery resolution and color. Maybe in time we’ll be able to get even higher resolution photogrammetry but I think the state of the sim does not allow it without huge fps drops. That’s why I wonder if DX12 mesh shaders would fix this. Then we could have high resolution DEM without the LOD pop-ins perhaps by allowing a setting that loads the DEM at the highest resolution first and then take advantage of the mesh shader’s parallel processing to manage it. This would work if the current mesh system in MSFS uses only serial processing like most programs in DX11 do.
VR is amazing! I tried the Alps discovery flight and was blown away by it. I have a good rig (i9 10900k, 64Gb ram, RTX 3080) and the Reverb G2 and whilst I don’t have everything maxed out, it still looks stunning and super smooth.
Yeah I can fully relate. I made the switch to VR back in Jan 2017 and have not gamed on the monitor since. Have now had Rift CV1, Quest, Rift S, HP Reverb G2, and now Vive Pro 2. I fly in IL-2 Great Battles, DCS, and now MSFS 2020. Loving VR with all three titles. Still tweaking to try and get best experience with MSFS and my Vive Pro 2.
My rig is i9 9900k @ 5.1 GHz all cores, 32 GB DDR4 ram 3200 MHz, and EVGA 3090 FTW3 Ultra GPU. EVGA Z390 Dark Motherboard.
Yeah thanks and agreed but it seems never good enough lol. However in all the years I have messed with MSFS that has always been the case even on just monitor.
I had the same experience Friday night. Spawn airborne in San Francisco, around .5 km south east of the Golden Gate Bridge. Fly nw toward the bridge. We flew a community flight there, and the scenery blew me away.
One of the guys I fly with lives about 5 km from the bridge, and he said the weather looked very realistic for the area. So I flipped on Live Weather, and the winds were crazy.
Flew around Braunschweig Germany. It is just a colorful as Bielefeld and has more autogen trees (so less LOD popping) and the houses to the north were high resolution enough to look like the actual houses. Amazing!
