Propeller reprojection artefacts in MSFS2024

Hello,

New to MSFS2024, using it in VR, and I am very happy about it in general. I did not have to change much, it was running smoothly with no specific tweaking except the ones inherited from MSFS2020 in OpenXR toolkit.

Everything is going fine except the very strong and annoying reprojection artefacts caused by the propeller. It is particularily bad in the first Cessna you get in the career.

In MSFS2020 we had the option to use mods that mitigated it, but I could not find any for MSFS2024, it seems noone is complaining about them anymore so I could not find any solution.

It is very frustrating as I would not care completely removing the propeller, but this is not an opion apparently.

Any idea what could help? Thanks.

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There is no way to remove those. They are a side effect of MR, and everyone gets them. The only way to avoid them is to achieve the FPS equal to your refresh rate, and in that case MR is not doing anything.

You don’t need motion reprojection. You also don’t need OpenXR Toolkit. You should share your headset and PC specs to make it easier to help.
I have the Valve Index, and I set the refresh rate to 80. It is impossible to achieve 80fps in VR consistently, so OpenXR will decide to switch to 40. 40fps is achievable.

Some background. If the headset is expecting a frame, and it doesn’t arrive, the GPU will send the last frame it has. So in my case, every second frame is an old frame. The easiest way to see this is to watch the runway lights as you takeoff. You will see double vision in this case.
MR is supposed to guestimate where the pixels should be based on the motion vectors from the headset, but but the problem is the pixels behind the object that’s wobbling. The propeller, the edges of the wings, etc. all exhibit these artifcacts (called de-occlusion artifacts) because there’s something behind them that the sim can’t know about until they appear.

Some say ā€œit feels betterā€ having the headset at 120 or 144, but in those cases every third or fourth frame is and ā€œold oneā€. It’s fine if you just look forward all the time. However, panning side to side in the cockpit makes it noticeable as tiny micro stutters. This may or may not bother you.

So, long story short, set the headset to the lowest refresh setting, and tune for 40fps.

You can create the mod yourself by editing the propeller circle texture to make the blades not visible (or just barely visible) - the texture should be just concentric circles of gradual shades of grey.

In real world you see the propeller as an arc only (if you can see it at all - this is why it is so dangerous) only cameras working at a given shutter speed can ā€œseeā€ the blades due to stroboscopic effect.

I will not tell you whether in MSFS2024 the textures are easily available for editing, there are some guides available for livery editing.

I don’t use the reprojection (SmartSmoothing in Pimax language) as I can’t stand the artifacts not only in the propeller arc but overall (Pimax implementation is quite bad). I’m flying gently, only civilian GA planes and I’m happy with 35-45 FPS.

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I did some testing on this again. I have my headset refresh at 80, and with max frame rate set to 40, motion reprojection is very good. The reason this works well for me is because my rig can achieve 40 fps all the time. So, if your headset has a refresh rate where you can lock the frame rate to half and achieve that FPS target, you should have a better experience. For example, if your lowest refresh rate is 90, tune your settings so that you never go below 45fps. Then turn on MR and lock the frame rate to 45.

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motion reprojection is very good

Well as I said I fully agree with that. I am very happy with reprojection, with the only exception being the propeller for some of the propeller planes, not all, actually mainly with the Cessna Skyhawk and a couple of others.

That’s why there should be a solution. Because it works just fine in most cases.

You can create the mod yourself by editing the propeller circle texture

Good to know I’ll try that, thanks. I guess I could even replace the texture for one of the plane with the texture of another, considering many of them are fine.

For many planes such a mod already exists: https://flightsim.to/file/20719/vr-friendly-prop-mod-multi-pass

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For many planes such a mod already exists: https://flightsim.to/file/20719/vr-friendly-prop-mod-multi-pass

I expected it to be msfss2020 only, but it actually work at least for many of the msfs2024 planes! Thanks !

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How did you manage to get it working? I copied the multi pass mod folder into my Community (and Community 2024) folders, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to prop textures

Unfortunately it wont work because MSFS2024 texture file format is different (png.ktx2) to MSFS2020 (.png.dds). Also the the stock MSFS2024 file location is different to MSFS2020. In addition, some aircraft are streamed rather than files being resident on your PC.

It’s possible that haltux has seen that some of the aircraft that have been ported over from MSFS2020 have worked but the ā€˜new’ stock aircraft in MSFS2024 definitely wont - unfortunately.

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Thanks for the clarification!

Mind boggling that Asobo have not fixed this yet.

Asobo will not fix it as they developed the propeller textures to provide video-like stroboscopic effect. Such effect seems more natural to people (majority of sim users) who have never seen the rotating propeller arc in the real life.

You can quite easilly edit the textured into concenrtic circles, no need to depend on the work of others.

When you say you can ā€œquite easily editā€ the texture, are you able to provide any pointers on where to start with this for someone unfamiliar with modding MSFS?

Can it be done via the SDK Material Editor, or would it involve Blender/Photoshop?

In MSFS2020 it was enough to find the texture containing the propeller arc, edit the texture (to make the arc just concentric circles, with no blades visible or just faintly visible) with a program capable to save it back in the format required by MSFS (including alpha channel) and replace it in the aircraft folder. In MSFS2024, with streamed aircraft it ma be more tricky, but you will be probably able to google it.

Yes as stekusteku says, it was much easier with MSFS2020. Definitely not as easy with MSFS2024, at least presently. Currently there is a difficulty converting ktx2 files to png using the tool(s) that are readily available, i.e. Nvidia texture tools exporter.

Have a look here….

It seems there is a bit of an impasse right now. I’m hoping someone will pop up with a solution soon.

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