VRSS works in IL2

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

From Nvidia´s newest driver:

Quote

Variable Rate Supersampling (VRSS) is a new technique to improve image quality in VR games. It uses NVIDIA Variable Rate Shading (VRS), a key feature in NVIDIA’s Turing architecture, to dynamically apply up to 8x supersampling to the center of the VR headset display, where the eye is generally focused. It intelligently applies supersampling only when GPU headroom is available in order to maintain the VR headset’s fixed FPS and ensure a smooth VR experience.

 

VRSS is supported by the driver--no game integration required--and can be applied to DX11 VR games or application that have forward renderers and support MSAA, and have been tested by NVIDIA. At the time of writing, over 20 games meet this criteria, including:

 

AFAIK the game meets these requirements.

 

On 10/11/2019 at 5:15 PM, Jason_Williams said:

 

It's simply a technical limitation because of how we draw the clouds and the planes. The only way to try and alleviate this issue is to change how we render all our scenes and employ what is called 'deferred rendering', which in theory will work. Remember I have ONE graphics programmer and he wears many hats and his work touches many aspects of the product so he is always swamped. He is well aware of this issue with clouds and he also hopes he can find the time to eventually work on deferred rendering. 

 

Jason 

 

AFAIK there is only deferred and forward rendering and  the absence of the one implies the other being employed.

 

So if the game uses MSAA as the multisampling in the startup.cfg file suggests, there should be no problems with getting this to work.

[Jason_Williams]

We are switching to deferred so doubtful it will work with what we are planning. Still early days.

 

Jason

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

Hmm, too bad, but maybe Nvidia will make it possible with deferred rendering at some point.

[[APAF]VR_Spartan85]

What’s differed rendering?

[Jade_Monkey]

5 hours ago, Jason_Williams said:

We are switching to deferred so doubtful it will work with what we are planning. Still early days.

Jason

 

Will that come with PBR? I know they are separate technologies but it certainly looks great on planes and vehicles in general.

[YoYo]

Cant wait simply for VRSS in IL-2 series also !

Edited January 11, 2020 by YoYo

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

3 hours ago, YoYo said:

Cant wait simply for VRSS in IL-2 series also !

 

12 hours ago, Jason_Williams said:

We are switching to deferred so doubtful it will work with what we are planning. Still early days.

 

Jason

 

it won’t work after the switch to deferred rendering, unless Nvidia changes how it works.

@Jason_WilliamsIf you don‘t mind me asking, what are the advantages to switching to DR for IL2?

Also, would it be possible to keep forward rendering as an option for VR?

 

Especially since:

Quote

VRSS is supported by the driver--no game integration required--and can be applied to DX11 VR games or application that have forward renderers and support MSAA, and have been tested by NVIDIA.

 

Best regards

Edited January 11, 2020 by So_ein_Feuerball

[Alonzo]

4 hours ago, So_ein_Feuerball said:

it won’t work after the switch to deferred rendering, unless Nvidia changes how it works.

@Jason_WilliamsIf you don‘t mind me asking, what are the advantages to switching to DR for IL2?

Also, would it be possible to keep forward rendering as an option for VR?

 

Deferred rendering has a significant performance upside when doing lighting calculations, and may allow the developers to improve the "planes in front of clouds" visibility problems. I doubt they would maintain two different rendering pipelines for the game.

 

But, a switch to deferred rendering might give a big enough performance improvement that it would help those of us in VR, obviating the need to use VRSS, which is an NVidia-only Turing-only technology. So from the developers' point of view, they might be able to help all players by a switch to deferred, rather than putting that effort into something that would benefit only a fraction of their player base.

[Jason_Williams]

What Alonzo says above is basically correct. We have been planning DS for a while as a way to increase performance and possibly allow for more graphical improvements, but the work is preliminary at this point so we shall see. The VRSS feature was dropped without much warning and we have no idea if it will have much of an effect on IL-2. Maintaining two different render techniques is likely not possible. I have only one guy and he's always swamped and it will likely cause other problems. We hope DS will increase overall performance and also VR performance. But again, we have no big data yet on the preliminary work. The industry moves too fast for our small team to keep up and I don't have nearly enough programmers to stay on top of it all. If we had an off the shelf engine maybe we could, but sims like ours require a custom solution. Never easy. Our competition has 4x as many employees as we do.

 

Jason

[Art-J]

When DCS switched to deferred it came with quite a performance hit at first, plus bucketload of lighting and shading issues. It got optimized with time, though some issues are still waiting to be resolved. Most of NVidia's AA-modes becoming incompatible with the game was a bummer. When it works as intended, however, the results are great indeed.

 

I fear the conversion is going to be a bumpy ride for Jason's guy as well, but I'm sure he's going to pull it off eventually.

[Sgt_Joch]

On my system, VR in DCS is noticeably smoother with equivalent graphic settings to Il-2, so the DCS team does seem to be on the right path.That is not to say there is anything wrong with Il-2, VR performance has noticeably improved over the past year, but obviously, any improvement is welcome.

[IckyATLAS]

Let's hope that by end 2020 Intel will come back with 7nm CPUs and improve the performance in single core (which is what counts with IL2). This plus the next Ampere Nvidia 3xxx series board added to whatever improvement Jason's team can do should allow to have richer environments more plains, vehicles ships, bombers etc. with less of a performance hit.

It makes me mad when I see that the race is to increase the core count and this game can't make use of it. We are now at 64 cores with AMD. Just crazy. To be fair IL2 uses 3 threads (or logical cores)  when it runs my missions which are very heavy. But that is just three threads out of 16 threads. Or it uses one and half physical core. 

To put things in perspective 8 cores at 2 Ghz are equivalent to one core at 16 GHz or 2 cores at 8Ghz, which basically do not exist. 

The 9900KS can run 8 cores sustained all at 5Ghz . This is equivalent to one core at 40Ghz. Except a fully optical processor no coming CPU with existing technology can reach that. Optical CPUs are a very long way to go. So there is no other solution, but going multicore, programming code for multicore, thinking in parallel and multicore. MULTICORE. 

[skpcarey1]

Thanks to IL2 front end rendering,I Got it working  on my RTX 2080 and the Index,Not sure if it made a big difference but it seems like it, I ran VRFPS in multiplayer on Combatbox and it never maxed like in DCS, and no visual issues and my gauges did seem clearer but just a bit,Now if I just wasnt such friggin rookie at the sim(So much to learn)thnk god for you tube.

[dburne]

How did you get it working when Nvidia Control Panel shows it " Not Supported for this Game" ?

[jarg1]

25 minutes ago, dburne said:

How did you get it working when Nvidia Control Panel shows it " Not Supported for this Game" ?

 

I'd like to know also.

[=SFG=capt_nasties]

 

[skpcarey1]

exactly

 

[=SFG=capt_nasties]

2 hours ago, skpcarey1 said:

exactly

 

 

Sounds like you got better fps and image quality?  Can you elaborate on what settings you changed to achieve this?  If you just enabled vrss I imagine fps would not improve as it is designed to increase imagine quality rather than increase fps performance.  

Edited February 10, 2020 by capt_nasties

[DD_Arthur]

Wow!  Got it working.

Too early to tell but image quality does seem slightly improved.  Not sure if frame rates have improved but game does seem as fluid,  if not more fluid than ever.

 

I'm willing to admit this might be a placebo effect and I'm using a Rift CV1 but I think it's worth trying.  I'd be interested to hear other opinions.

 

Nice one skpcarey1

Edited February 10, 2020 by DD_Arthur

[=SFG=capt_nasties]

I will post in this thread and do a benchmarking live stream (and condensed follow up video)  on VRSS for IL2.  I have low expectations but I also like to test stuff and everything currently on YT regarding VRSS is absolutely awful 

[skpcarey1]

Actually VRSS  is supposed to help  with FPS because it restricts the rendering not directly in front of your eyes(I tried this out by not turning my head but just looking at the side by only moving my eyes it is definitely blurrier) so it supposedly gives a decent improvement  in fps with your hardware, but I read you should cap your framerates as well using the max frames in NVidia control panel as well, so I run my index @90fps so I cap my frame @87fps in NVidia control panel(I read it will help smooth things a well so your gpu isnt swinging wildly back and forth depending on what the sim is trying to render at any given time,both of these can be ran either on or adaptive they recommend adaptive according to what Ive read.

I was wrong maxframes is either on or off period.

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

VRSS itself wasn‘t really developed to give you more FPS, it‘s supposed to give you the same visual quality as 8xSS in the middle of the screen, whilst keeping the surrounding areas at the selected resolution.

 

But who says it‘s impossible to simply turn down said resolution to gain the desired FPS?

Edited February 10, 2020 by So_ein_Feuerball

[dburne]

Curious to try this, will have a go with it a little later in the morning - thanks for the info.

 

Edit:

Ok so am I understanding this correctly?

https://news.developer.nvidia.com/vrss-2020/

 

The amount of VRSS being applied is dependent on the game supporting MSAA and the amount applied? ie 2x, 4x, 8x?

If that is the case, how does this affect IL-2? Is in game AA setting in IL-2 MSAA?

 

Quote

 

 RSS accomplishes this through fixed-foveated super sampling: increasing the shading rate in the center mask region of the screen, while keeping the sampling rate unchanged in the peripheral region.  The center mask region can be supersampled up to 8x to optimize image quality and reduce anti-aliasing.  The maximum shading rate achieved is limited to the MSAA sample count per pixel, so 8x supersampling is enabled via 8x MSAA, ­4x supersampling is enabled via 4x MSAA, and so forth.

VRSS can be applied to all VR games and applications that are DX11, Forward Rendered and have MSAA.

 
 

 

Edited February 10, 2020 by dburne

[skpcarey1]

I was wrong maxframes is either on or off period.

Also since its easy to turn it off and im gonna do some testing in IL2 and DCS but Id like to hear from you fellas and what your seeing as I am skceptical myself

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

 

45 minutes ago, dburne said:

If that is the case, how does this affect IL-2? Is in game AA setting in IL-2 MSAA?

You can easily test this yourself, change the in game settings and check the startup.cfg file. There we have an option saying multisample. If it changes, then I‘d say that we have a strong indication that in game AA is Multisampling.

 

Can‘t be too sure without a dev confirming it though.

[skpcarey1]

Please post your results as this has my curiousity up and where is that CFG file in IL2 its been awhile since Ive messed with IL2

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

2 minutes ago, skpcarey1 said:

Please post your results as this has my curiousity up and where is that CFG file in IL2 its been awhile since Ive messed with IL2

Can‘t check myself, am not at home. IIRC, startup.cfg is in the data directory in the Game directory 

[skpcarey1]

Thanks

 

[dburne]

I can't say I see a perceivable difference with this, at least as far as image quality or performance.

MY CPU core temps seemed to run a bit higher with this enabled, around 5-6c.

 

Edited February 10, 2020 by dburne

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

It's done on the driver level and only fires if you have a large enough overhead. For example, your target frametime is 11.1 (90Hz), but your actual frametime sits at 8.0 (so the game would be capable to run at 125Hz). So there is a headroom. Then supersampling is applied in the center of your vision.

 

It doesn't change any MSAA setting in the options / startup.cfg of the game as it's all done on driver level. It requires you to set your base supersampling in Steam to <= 1; so a native or sub-native resolution.

[skpcarey1]

So it only works at  100 % Steam SS? am I reading that right?

[coconut]

What I did:

1. Disable parallel projection in PiTool (EDIT)
2. Enable the possibility to use the feature for IL-2 using NVidia Profile Inspector
3. Enable in NVidia Control Panel, set VRSS to Always
4. Lower resolution in SteamVR to 1400 lines
5. Enable 4x anti aliasing in the game. I also tried using Profile Inspector and Control Panel, but that did not work
6. Observe in the login screen that the small trademark text was smooth (but blurry) in the centre of the vision, and jaggy on the side

Disabling VRSS makes all text jaggy, and also reduces GPU utilization.

So yes, I can confirm it works, but it's not terribly useful to achieve clarity like PiMax' own implementation does (until it crashes the game, that is). It allows me to use maximum anti aliasing, which is neat, but not what I was hoping for.

 

5 hours ago, SCG_Fenris_Wolf said:

It requires you to set your base supersampling in Steam to <= 1; so a native or sub-native resolution.

I tried it at 2600 lines, and it sent to GPU utilization flying, so I think it was doing something. But the effect was not easy to see.

 

5 hours ago, SCG_Fenris_Wolf said:

It's done on the driver level and only fires if you have a large enough overhead

You can force it on, or set it to adaptive.

 

 

Edited February 10, 2020 by coconut

[FTC_ChilliBalls]

Gonna try it out myself in the next few days, let‘s see whether my RTX 2060 even has enough overhead at 1.0x Rift S resolution.

 

Another interesting test would be to have subnative resolution and check whether VRSS even works like that.

[Alonzo]

I haven't read the thread in full, but this didn't work for me. Have you tried forcing VRSS to "maximum" level? i.e. ignore the 100% limit for the GPU, apply 8x SS in centre of frame? This should max out your GPU and actually reduce frame rates -- the idea is to use this to see if VRSS even does anything.

 

When I tested, I could not get VRSS to overload the GPU, so my conclusion was that it's doing nothing in IL2 and that any improvement is placebo. This was several weeks ago though.

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

I tested it, and found the functionality working - but not correctly.

 

Process:

 

1. Enabled via Nvidia Inspector as described in the video
2. Forced it on for IL-2
3. Set SteamVR Resolution to 1666 vertical
4. Started Flight Records, paused, looked for the effect on the cockpit gauges by swiveling head left and right, then up and down.

Now the result is this:

VRSS does work, but incorrectly. Its center is not located in the center of the vision, but it is there. A picture says more than a thousand words.

 

As NVidia has stated, the games need to be updated individually and cleared. It the center of the VRSS sphere must get adapted. If it's tied to the vanishing point, I do not know.

 

Now for us as the VR community, it would be interesting to find out, how or where the centering point is tied to. Is it the vanishing point - may it be off in IL-2 to begin with? Can we do research on that and find out what to adjust, so we can help the team regarding the time effort spent researching?

[coconut]

@SCG_Fenris_Wolf I tried with parallel projection off in PiTool. Also, I've set the mechanical IPD to the minimum, and I'm using an IPD Offset of +2. It's possible all those things affect what's considered the "center" of each frame.

Edited February 10, 2020 by coconut

[skpcarey1]

1666 vertical is about 68% on my Index. What HMD are you using? is that its native vertical resolution?Ive been testing mine @100% in Steam and its not even taxing my system at all @around 40FPS.

Im going to keep testing,but I see what your referring to the sweet spot is no right,But I believe this bodes well for VR as a viable platform lets hope NVidia will do the work  making their expensive RTX cards a little easier to swallow

 

[=SFG=capt_nasties]

you are on an index @SCG_Fenris_Wolf?  after reading some of these I am starting to get less and less excited by VRSS....going from 2 to 4 on the AA on IL2 has a very minimal impact on the reverb...sounds like the real bennefit of VRSS would be occasionally going up to 4xAA rather than 2xAA (in the center only) when I have headroom....if this even costs me 1 FPS it would not be worth it IMHO

Edited February 10, 2020 by capt_nasties

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

1 hour ago, coconut said:

@SCG_Fenris_Wolf I tried with parallel projection off in PiTool. Also, I've set the mechanical IPD to the minimum, and I'm using an IPD Offset of +2. It's possible all those things affect what's considered the "center" of each frame.

I have done all this as well.

 

I'm using Pimax 5K+. In approved games it seems to work properly.

Edited February 10, 2020 by SCG_Fenris_Wolf

[Alonzo]

OK. So this is a different process than I previously tried, and I'm using OpenComposite to bypass SteamVR, so I guess all bets are off for how it might work. What I'm hearing though, is:

• Enable VRSS using the Profile Inspector
• Set in-game AA to 4x (multisample=2 in config file)
• Set game render target to less than 100% -- is this achieved by pixel density < 1.0 in Oculus Tray Tool?
• Observe VRSS renders outside of frame at lower resolution than inside, which will be at up to 4x multisample depending on headroom?

Also @capt_nasties I suspect with the Reverb you're in such a better position with the native pixels that you're going to see less improvement in quality, but if you can convince the VRSS system to do less work around the edges, you'll get better FPS overall. The centre won't get much better (Reverb center at 2x AA is probably pretty awesome already, great device) but the performance might.