My 2070 SUPER VR settings and suggestions (Index - SteamVR) šŸŸ¢

As always @CptLucky8 , your settings make things better. At least a little more bearable for the moment. The blurry ground scenery/textures have been so immersion breaking in VR. My eyes keep telling me ā€œmaybe you need sim prescription glassesā€! :upside_down_face:
Is it ironic that msfs added the Orbis flying eye hospital to the sim at the same time of the lod/clarity regressions?
WMR, Openxr @100 Repro-off, Reverb G1, 2080Super, i9 9900KS, 32GB.
Update: 0530 utc I just did the Orbis tour and things look even betterā€¦hmm :face_with_monocle: :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: and the new CYVR update looks much better than earlier today.

1 Like

Using this version of the settings it looks quite great for me, except for the motion projection which still produces unacceptable distortions at least around the prop, so I have to turn that off. Frame rate for stuff outside seems not great either way, but I can read many things on the PFD in the Pipistrel Virus. On the MFD most text is still too small to read.

Overall ā€“ had a very pleasant sunrise flight from KLAX to KPOC! Looks great, performance is pretty good once I get out of the airport, and was acceptable enough for the takeoff.

Thanks again @CptLucky8 ! :slight_smile:

1 Like

ah, le loto. Havenā€™t heard this one in a loooooong time :slight_smile:

1 Like

There are solutions for these!

And of course pre-made for defaults:

10 Propeller Mods for the FS2020 Standard Edition ā€¢ Flight Simulator 2020

6 Propeller Mods for the FS2020 Premium Deluxe Edition ā€¢ Flight Simulator 2020

2 Likes

That seems to be an attempt to hack things up to hide the prop? Definitely not something Iā€™d want.

Note that at least previously, motion reprojection also created bad distortions on the wings, edges of hangars, etc. I took off before sunrise so didnā€™t see much out the window at takeoff so didnā€™t notice all of those except the prop distortion, but I suspect theyā€™re still there if itā€™s something inherent to how the motion prediction works.

Motion smoothing on the Index (and the Oculus) is using NVidia Optical Flow on Turing+ GPU (part of VR Works libs), otherwise NVENC/DEC (part of the H264 encoder/decoder) on other GPUs:

This is based on analyzing the differences between 2 images in order to ā€œdetectā€ the direction and speed of the pixels between the two, so that it can interpolates the pixels among N frames in between. If a pixel suddenly changes brightness under a rotating semi transparent blurry blade, the algorithm will most likely think the pixel jumped from say 90deg right position to 0deg up position between the two frames and will therefore wrongly detect the changes.

The ā€œhackā€ therefore is nothing else than raising the transparency of the rotating blade texture so that it has lees impact on the pixels. Iā€™ve found empirically that changing the opacity of the texture to 64/255 is very effective in practice.

Besides, although it sounds like a ā€œhackā€ I see this more as a needed change even in 2D: your eyes IRL donā€™t see the stroboscopic illusion FS2020 is rendering, only a camera is capturing such illusion IRL. In turn, in changing the transparency you not only solve and workaround the limitations of the motion smoothing technology, but you also cure the inaccurate representation (IMHO) of a rotating blade in the game.

Having said this it wouldnā€™t be hard for the game to do this for you automatically though:

  • Enforce that aircraft modelers tag their rotating blades object as ā€œrotating bladesā€ (which they already do if Iā€™m not mistaken so that the game can choose among a set of more or less blurry textures ā€˜matchingā€™ the rotation speed)

  • When in VR, automatically change the alpha transparency of the texture like weā€™re manually doing otherwise.

1 Like

So this wonā€™t help with the wings, or the edges of hangars, or anything else thatā€™s not transparent?

No this wonā€™t help with the rest, but in practice I find the propeller is the most distracting.

What would help compensating for the wings and the rest, is:

  • Adjust the prediction to match. I find 33ms my all around performer with any aircraft/scene, but you can experiment and find if too high it distorts in one direction and too low in the other direction. Find the right balance for your system.

  • Lobby MSFT/Asobo to also send the depth buffer tot he OXR API so that it can more intelligently differentiate foreground and background. The Oculus API supports the depth buffer but Iā€™m not sure for SteamVR.

Some reference which might be relevant or not:

OpenXR best practices - Mixed Reality | Microsoft Docs

4 Likes

Thanks. Iā€™ll keep motion prediction off for now, as itā€™s unacceptably distracting to me. :slight_smile:

To each his own! after a while Iā€™m getting used to it and donā€™t pay much attention to these artifacts, but sometimes I still do!

1 Like

Yep, the nice things about preferences is ā€“ we all get to set them according to our own. :wink: <3

One thing I do note though ā€“ itā€™s definitely sending the depth buffer for reprojection, because head tracking seems to be smooth at a much higher framerate than anything MSFS puts out. Even when MSFS freezes for a few seconds during loading, Iā€™m able to move my head around and itā€™s not until I move/rotate a significant portion that it dims the screen and puts up the logo image in front.

If there was no depth buffer sent to SteamVR, this would be impossible.

Iā€™m not sure of this at all, but I didnā€™t dig enough into this in particular either.

The other problem is that even if there is a depth buffer sent to the OXR API, is the SteamVR OXR Driver using it?

Iā€™m looking at the Optical Flow SDK right now and it has provisions for hints:

NVOFA Programming Guide - NVIDIA Docs

Flag to enable external hints:
NVOF API provides clients the flexibility for feeding external flow vectors which will be used as hints by NVOFA while performing the motion search.

Pass good quality flow vectors as hints.
NVOF API provides the option for passing external hints. The external hints are given highest importance while performing the motion search by the hardware. Hence it is recommended to pass good quality flow vectors as hints, and not use the feature in case the hints are not of good quality.

It happens FS2020 is already computing pixel motion vector texture for TAA and this would be a good hint. Should they be able to provide this texture through OXR, and SteamVR uses it to pass along to the Optical Flow lib, this would help a lot. But is there an OXR API for this? Or even an OXR Extension for this? And what about SteamVR?

This can only be solved if Asobo, Valve and NVidia sit around the same table and decide to implement this. Given what they seem to have told about Pimax thoughā€¦ Pimax answered my questionšŸ˜¢

1 Like

Well this interesting. I am a Quest 2 user but used a lot of your settings and suggestions in the past month from this thread. After lots of experimentation I settled on using the SteamVR runtime instead of the openXR that ships with Oculus.

Few reasons for this choice:

  1. The SteamVR image didnā€™t look so washed out as the one that Oculus produced.
  2. SteamVR had less microstutters.
  3. I love the World scale option.

Within that choice I had been experimenting a lot with supersampling. Oculus users have this great OTT tool, but Steam can do it also. I tried many comboā€™s but in the end I settled on OTT doing the framerate lock on 18 Hz with ASW and the supersampling. Just leaving SteamVR on 100%. It just was more fluid that way.

Along came SU5 and as many users I was able to upscale resolution and settings without stutters. But after a few flights it became clear that the image quality had changed. I could not lay my finger on what the difference exactly was but the outside world looked more cartoonish and unsharp.

After reading your settings I tried to use the Steam supersampling again and Lo and behold! the sim looked like it was before SU5. Less washed out, more definition in objects and sharperā€¦

I donā€™t know how this is possible but the change is visible. Only downside is that I now have some minor microstuttering again.

2 Likes

Iā€™m glad this is helping!

One of the reasons behind 126% and 152% (+ FOV 95%) is that with the Index native panel resolution and lens distortion, it seems to me these are slightly enhancing aliasing compared for example to 125 and 150, compensating a little bit for the blurriness due to motion smoothing and/or FS2020 rendering. It is really subjective though but it seems it is striking a balance to me, enough to make barely legible middle EFIS small letters slightly more legible (but aliased).

Thatā€™s interesting, Iā€™m also a quest 2 user but never saw any impact at all from increasing the SteamVR super samplingā€¦ Is there anything special you need to do for it to kick in?

2 Likes

I donā€™t know if I understand your question well. Do you mean how to enable supersampling in SteamVR? Just use the slider for resolution scale.

Yes, moving the slider in the steam menu never had any impact for me in visuals or performance even if I put it outrageously high or low. I had thought this was a limitation of virtual desktop but I tried it through link and had the same. Maybe I just needed to restart the sim or something, Iā€™ll have another experiment.

I am wary not to derail this thread which is about the Index, sometimes I am tempted to gift a quest 2 to Captain lucky just to get his input on that headset :grin:

Iā€™d be pleased but only if you also gift the computer that goes with it. I donā€™t want to have anything to do with the company backing this headset up on any of my electronic devicesā€¦

2 Likes

One thing to check is whether youā€™re setting this on the global setting or the per-application setting, which can override the global setting.

2 Likes

Thank you, I was using the per application but maybe will experiment further, especially given the good quest results mentioned above.

Iā€™m afraid I need the PC, but Iā€™ll grant use of it via virtual desktop nightly between 2300 and 0700 hours UK time. No crypto mining and stay out of My Documents :grin:

1 Like