Iāve been a āMotion Smoothingā naysayer since I first started flying in VR back in December 2020. I would get bad āwobblysā and distortions when moving my head inside the cockpit. It was always a non-starter for me.
This morning, while reading the new posts on @CptLucky8 ās G2 thread, I thought maybe Iāll try reducing my SS in SteamVR to further reduce the GPU overhead and see if that works better. Lately Iād pretty much settled on 100/100 for RS and SS, and was ok with the results.
Iāve tried every known combination between SS / In Game RS / FOV trying to get the best compromise between glass screen readability and smoothness (especially when maneuvering the plane and looking at the terrain). I fly the TBM 930 (IFR) and the Piper Arrow III (just flight) (VFR) exclusively.
When setting my SS to 90 and the RS to 110 and enabling Motion Smoothing in SteamVR, I was pleasantly surprised by the very smooth experience. No wobbling or distortions (very very minor distortion near the prop animation only). Screens in the TBM (the MDF has some painfully small text) was acceptableā¦ as good as 100/100 Iām sureā¦ and the smoothness was as good as Iāve experienced. I was able to keep my FPS pretty much maxed out at my locked 30.
Of course this was a short test before heading off to work, but I am very encouraged to continue down the āMotion Smoothingā road with a reduced SS and slightly raised RS.
System:
AMD 3600X
2070S
32GB 3200 ram
NVMe install disk
(I have absolutely nothing running in the background with no OC. HAGGS and Game Mode are OFFā¦and perform a clean reboot before every FS session)
SteamVR settings:
120 MHZ
Motion smoothing: ON
SS: 90
FPS locked at 30
Prediction: 25ms
FOV: 90
Flight Sim settings:
Render scale: 110
AA: TAA
Terrain LOD: 100
Terrain Vector Data: Medium (what does this even do? I donāt see any changes)
Buildings: Medium
Trees: Medium
Grass and Bushes: Medium
Object LOD: 100
Volumetric Clouds: High
Texture Res: Ultra
Aniso Filter: 16X
Texture SS: 8X8
Texture Synth: High
Water Waves: High
Shadow maps: 1024
Terrain Shadows: 512
Contact Shadows: Medium
Windshield Effects: High
AO: off
Reflections: Off
Light shafts: off
Bloom: on (canāt live without that bloom off my wing tip at sunrise)
Glass cockpit refresh: High
Thank you for your feedback, Iāll have to try this.
I was not willing to reduce the buildings and trees since SU5, because their quality falloff is way shorter than before though. As for bloom I like it in general but I canāt help noticing with their TAAU implementation, and probably a few bugs with the Shaders Iāve documented (viewdir), I get more clarity on ground textures when I disable Bloom and the Sun is low. At night, I find it is also blurring a little bit the integral lighting sometimes further reducing legibility.
Thank you for sharing and updating CptLucky8, much appreatiated. I have studied the guide and follow up descussion and it has actually helped me to tweak my settings and achive a much better VR experience with my index and RTX 3070.
The most helpful for me was the suggestion to set SS 152 / TAA 100 and use motion smoothing with fixed framerate to 18 fps. First i was sceptical about 18 fps, but it really turned out to be quite fluid. No any stutters or jitters, very smooth. At same time SS 152 makes the whole image much much sharper then my previous setting 100/100. Very nice thank you. Looking forward for updates to your guide.
just one thing. Wouldnāt it be better to increase the maximum amount of CPU prerendered frames from 1 to 2 or 3 in nvidia settings when using fixed framerate and additional waiting time of 33ms? Im still seing artifacts though im well capable to maintain 18 fps with my settings. I am suspecting that the CPU is being hold off prerendering follow up frames because its not allowed to do so by nvidia settings. Im gonna try this later today.
This one is not easy. In theory I believe youād be right about it but in practiceā¦
There has been some reports in the past of people managing to get better results with 2, or 4, sometimes 3, but to be honest, anything but 1 has been worse for me, regardless of the driver version. My take on this is the OpenXR API and the way Asobo is using it (they donāt have much different choices though). I believe the OXR layer in the driver doesnāt take advantage of this and limiting to 1 helps in practice getting a good CPU/GPU sync , even if this means you might have had the possibility to pre-render more frames otherwise.
If you CPU has ample room, this means you can certainly raise settings affecting the CPU more, like the traffic, the buildings (ULTRA), and this sort of things. If your VRAM has ample room, you can also probably raise Terrain LOD to 200 for example. Eventually, you might find it is better using 4:1 motion smoothing at 22.5fps
Otherwise you might also consider 120Hz/20fps (5:1) with your hardware and maybe youāll find it better. It seems to me 90Hz is what FS2020 and/or OXR is most ātunedā for though.
Yes, i have actually switched to 80Hz/20fps (4:1) its even a little better i find. However i keep observing artifacts (wobbling propeller and distortion from lights) even when CPU and GPU is not pushing limits. From my understanding it should not happen when you fix framerate below what you can achive without fixing it. With 100/100 it can go up to 50 and never below 33. With SS 152 its around 22 - 27 fps without throttling.
it makes them perfect for VR instead because this eliminates wobbles, and they are faint like IRL (otherwise most aircraft in the game are displaying propellers like, well āa gameā)
Hi again. I have managed to get rid of almost all wobbling now.
I have installed these propeller mods:
its basically same solution for the propeller, just packed as a mod in the community folder. It is a better option i think then editing textures directly as it can be enabled/disabled on updates quickly and safe. Also it took me just a minute to install.
There was another update on NVIDIA drivers yesterday.
Also i have updated firmware for the index
Set pre-rerendered frames to 3 in NVIDIA settings
Now using 90Hz / 22fps / 33ms
I am not sure which of these actually helped most, but the wobbling is completely removed. Even in new york with weather its just wobbling the wings slightly barely noticable on the ground. Once flying over 300 ft its no anything is wobbling anymore.
I was even able to increase some settings to ultras, its still smoth like butter.
Just a question. I am using a Reverb 1 under SteamVR OpenXR. Can I set those 22fps/33ms, too, and if so, how is this done? Or is this something specific for the Index?
I have noticed some more performance boost with the new update. I can crank up LOD distance to 200 and resolution scaling to 200 in steamVR with render resolution 100 maintaining same performance. Before the patch i couldnāt do that it started tanking hard.
found something you might want to consider playing with.
in game you can set screen space reflections quality from OFF to ULTRA right?
on my machine ultra eats up to about 5 true fps compared to off. But in the UserCfg.opt file there is also an extra option which you cannot change in game.
{SSR
Enabled 1
HalfRes 1
Quality 2
}
The HalfRes parameter is by default set to 0 and you cant change it in the game.
Using the above settings only cost me 1 fps compared to off, and the reflections still look very good. Looks still much better then low or middle setting without halfres but costs less performance.
Quite a nice way to tweak out some extra fps without losing much of the image quality.
@AlexejGeldt
This is a good idea indeed and I thank you for sharing this tip, Iāve been wondering how it would render since SU5.
When I tried it in the past, I did noticed it was really half-res visually but in a checkboard pattern IIRC, and this was looking like āgrainyā patterns incidentally.
However, since SU5 (but prior WU6) I did find any other setting than Reflection LOW (including Off) was kind of producing a less sharp picture in the distance, at least with the G2. Since WU6 I do find the G2 with the same settings I was using with SU5 is slightly sharper and better now (as if there was something in SU5 a little off-subpixel which is now correct). I didnāt try the Index for a few weeks though as Iām still tuning the G2 right now!
I heard somewhere grainy reflections was a bug in the rendering pipeline. You also have it on ultra settings. On ultra its just little less visible but still grainy. Itās difficult to fix, but should resolve itself when they switch to DX12. Therefore they are not going to fix it until DX12 switch and we will have to get used to it. However i didnāt find it worse in terms of graininess when using Halfres 1. They are grainy as usual, just the reflecting image is less sharp, but you barely notice that in VR anyway.
Ok Iāve tried yesterday HalfRes with the G2 and this was no longer grainy as I remembered it, but blocky instead and very visible in VR to me. I didnāt measure whether this was actually saving fps for me, but I didnāt see with WU6 any āsharpnessā difference on the distant objects when set to anything but LOW compared to SU5 (good news). So Iām not fond of HalfRes yet not only because of their blocky look but also because even if this allows raising the level of the reflections setting, it is not without problems either.
In effect, the screen space reflection approach reaches its limits when using a cockpit with posts around you which are degrading the reflection by making sometimes big chunks of the reflected pixels absent (by lack of source pixels to reflect from).
All this to say in the end, I believe LOW is a good compromise to show some reflections and its inherent limitations less, while not taxing the perf too much.
