VR performance improvements

[Gora_]

Hello

In the times of upcoming new VR headsets (more advanced and more demanding) was there any Devs statement about VR optimisations? Other sims told us something about new stuff that is on the way, but not heard anything here. Is there some roadmap and milestones for us to see in the Il2 development? I know BoB and FC, but I mean something strict technical. 

[dburne]

I would be surprised if there was, but with these Devs anything is possible.

They have already tweaked VR since their first implementation back in 2017, performance is certainly much better than it was originally.

Used to if you turned the HUD on fps would plummet, now it hardly has any effect at all - even with the mini map on.

 

1CGS is already considerably above in the VR department than the others.

But certainly with the new higher res devices coming any further improvements would be welcomed.

 

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

Don, what HMD do you use now ?

[dburne]

Still using Rift CV1.

Rift S is on pre-order.

[Gora_]

I made everything that should help in VR and with my setup it runs ok (CV1) when I'm high and not much is happening around. When I go lower and there are few bandits and some bombing then 45fps kicks in. I don't like it. You can live with this but it's not nice. With another gen. it will be even worst. So it would be great if devs think about it right now if they don't...

[Dutch2]

1 hour ago, P_Gora said:

I made everything that should help in VR and with my setup it runs ok (CV1) when I'm high and not much is happening around. When I go lower and there are few bandits and some bombing then 45fps kicks in. I don't like it. You can live with this but it's not nice. With another gen. it will be even worst. So it would be great if devs think about it right now if they don't...

 

What system do you have, if I may ask? 

 

For Nvidia graphic cards owners this company does have improvements that can be implemented, like VR-SLI or VR-Works https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks  Still think the simplest and cheapest road for 1c would be an implementating of SLI for VR. 

[dburne]

2 hours ago, Dutch2 said:

 

What system do you have, if I may ask? 

 

For Nvidia graphic cards owners this company does have improvements that can be implemented, like VR-SLI or VR-Works https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks  Still think the simplest and cheapest road for 1c would be an implementating of SLI for VR. 

 

Probably the simplest, however SLI users in the VR community - very small. Niche in a niche in a niche.

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

All we need is to have the engine use multiple cores.

 

The notion that "the processor to run IL-2 isn't out yet" is false. IL-2 is just still badly optimized to modern processors. If they want to be the techlead in the flightsim industry, they have got to nail this one down with the move to DX12 and eventually Raytracing as well.

 

The latter could make the scenery looking more real than anything available anywhere on the flightsim market. DCS would rock itself in shame.

[A_radek]

I suspect the latter has the potential to improve performance in itself.

From what I've heard somewhere on the internetwebz - and consider this as reliable information as everything else there -  Scenes with a single or just a few light sources (a sun in the case of il2) can be faster to render with raytracing enabled cards as opposed to the old way that requires quite a lot of juice just to calculate the faked shadows. Considering the amount of objects in these maps and the fps impact the shadow quality setting has..

Edited May 7, 2019 by SvAF/F16_radek

[FTC_Mephisto]

Multicore support would solve 90% of the issues... 

[chiliwili69]

I have been writing code in the past (from Z80 or 8086 code machine, to languages like basic, pascal, Lisp, fortran, Ada, SQL, C, etc). Most of the languages that I have seen  (except Ada) are thought to run in one execution thread. At that time (talking about more than 20 years ago) the CPU had only one core and all code and compilers were thought to run in one execution thread.

I believe that IL-2 is written in some short of C, C++, C# and the code that they are producing has already the capability to run multiple threads in parallel (in fact we believe that IL-2 run 4 threads in paralell, but one of them is the heavy one). Rewritting the code of this heavy thread to parallelize in multiple threads is not a trivial task. I think it will require a tremendous amount of work in the case it is feasible and it will only benefit to the small group (but growing) of VR users.

It has never been mentioned by Jason or Dev team.

 

In a comparable case of other professional dynamic simulators for the chemical process industries (code written in the late 90s), they are also very much single-core. With R&D budgets in the range of 100M$ they are unabled to write it to multicore.

[FTC_Mephisto]

Yes, multi core is really an issue for flight sims. We all remember the CloD failure, beside the raw game the designers banked on continues clock increase on CPUs and where not prepared for the shift to multi cores... 

[Alonzo]

We've also seen patches where the dev team casually mention "improved tree rendering performance" or "reduced impact of HUD" that have given night-and-day improvements to the IL2 VR experience (and then unfortunately other patches where performance has taken a step back). I think even without going fully multicore there are opportunities to get better VR frame rates, but the team is (rightly) focused on getting new content out. That's where they make their money. I'm sure a performance pass is on their road map, but they gotta get that P51 out and sell a hundred thousand copies of the game first ?

[Gora_]

On 5/7/2019 at 1:41 PM, Dutch2 said:

 

What system do you have, if I may ask? 

 

 

Win10, 8600k@4,8 1080ti, 16GB 3200 RAM SSD M2

 

Like Alonzo said. There are many possibilities to improve VR. Some are not so time consuming. Like gr8 mod for DCS made by Kegetys. Devs of DCS work on some optimisation of the ground rendering (they claim it brings 50% optimisation!). Something like different type of stereo rendering, etc. If only Devs would like to listen and try to see in the future a little bit... but I'm sure they are.  

[dburne]

4 hours ago, P_Gora said:

Win10, 8600k@4,8 1080ti, 16GB 3200 RAM SSD M2

 

Like Alonzo said. There are many possibilities to improve VR. Some are not so time consuming. Like gr8 mod for DCS made by Kegetys. Devs of DCS work on some optimisation of the ground rendering (they claim it brings 50% optimisation!). Something like different type of stereo rendering, etc. If only Devs would like to listen and try to see in the future a little bit... but I'm sure they are.  

 

I would say they definitely are , they have made some significant gains in their VR performance the last two years.

[BlackMambaMowTin]

I heard ASW 2.0 works in IL-2. Any confirmation? 

 

The performance increase I would love to see is a switch to Vulkan

[dburne]

4 hours ago, BlackMambaMowTin said:

I heard ASW 2.0 works in IL-2. Any confirmation? 

 

The performance increase I would love to see is a switch to Vulkan

 

Yes the below was posted by an Oculus Staff member over on the Oculus Forums , along with how to tell. I checked IL-2 and it stayed rendered with the Dash Panel open.

 

Jumping in to shed a little additional light on ASW 2.0 for you all. ASW 2.0 functionality is enabled for all Rift users at this time - it is not dependent on a specific software version. We called out four apps in our blog post that currently utilize ASW 2.0 (Oculus Medium, Robo Recall, Red Matter, and Oculus Home / Dash). It is ultimately up individual developers as to whether or not they flip the switch for their app, but we're encouraging more devs to utilize the tech every day. As to the question of "how do I know if it's working," the best way to know if a game is using ASW 2.0 is to have the game open and then hit the Oculus button to bring up Dash. If the game or app stays rendered behind Dash, it's utilizing ASW 2.0. If you get the big white / grey grid instead, it is not. You should see an overall smoother experience with less reprojection artifacts in ASW 2.0 apps. I hope this information is helpful!

https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/comment/672118/#Comment_672118