GeForce Experience now includes built-in upscaling and sharpening tools

[Youtch]

2 hours ago, QB.Gordon200 said:

@Youtch His specs are listed in his comment signature. To view a member's signature go to your IL2 account settings (click on your avatar in upper right corner) and select Signature. There you will see a button to enable View Signatures.

Thank you very much! I had no clue about that trick!

[Drum]

5 hours ago, [F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly said:

Tried that, for me it has no effect in VR (on a 2070, runing an Oculus Rift in either SteamVR or OpenComposite)

 

Notably, the image of the 2d monitor itself is considerably sharper, but that's not what I was looking for

Sorry to here that, Moeras Grizzly.  It must not work for 2070's then.  I edited my above posts because since the newest game update, the FPS have really sped things up, it's near monitor clarity now with only the murkiness of the lenses remaining.  But you can see ground targets a long ways out now.

On 12/7/2021 at 7:49 AM, [CPT]Crunch said:

Pretty sure its working, I can dump my rocket pods and turn, look back and track them falling, flying the arc, all the way until one hits some poor saps roof top and slides down into the street.  Never been able to do that before.

 

The sharpen and overall visuals are very different to the perception of my eyes between the two ways.  The modded file method using NIS clears up the skys to a rich blue, but the far horizons of terrain just don't look good.  The in built G E brings back some of the smog/fog effect, but not bad at all, looks more natural.  Still experimenting for optimal visuals balanced against frames, but think this is a keeper for me.  HDR seems to really bleach everything out and drag the frames down the crapper.

Indeed!  I just turned mine off tonight too, and you're right, it's much nicer turned off.

Edited December 10, 2021 by Drum

[[F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly]

11 hours ago, Drum said:

Sorry to here that, Moeras Grizzly.  It must not work for 2070's then.  I edited my above posts because since the newest game update, the FPS have really sped things up, it's near monitor clarity now with only the murkiness of the lenses remaining.  But you can see ground targets a long ways out now.

Going off on a hunch here and say it's not down to the 2070 (since NIS works in literally everything else otherwise), but down to a difference between how WMR and the Oculus API handles upscaling (IE it'll work with a G2 but not with a Rift).

[Youtch]

On 12/7/2021 at 8:43 AM, Drum said:

Nvidia Control Panel, Manage 3D Settings

Firsrt of all, thank you very much, Drum. I have more or less similar specs to yours but with Ryzen5600 and I followed your settings by the letter to test it and it was the first time i had a smooth experience in VR and i quite enjoyed it.

 

Very much appreciated that you shared your settings. It really allowed me to speed the trial&error process, and saving tons of frustration.

 

NIS is a fantastic addition, staying above 60 fps with ultra settings.

 

The only remaining painpoint is that enemy planes are still like very blurry greyish things, making identification very painfull, except if i am really almost on the top of it.

 

Guessing emblems, colors scheme is nearly impossible for me, forcing me each time to go check close and personal, making impossible to play multiplayer or even complete some missions in solo campaigns.

 

Maybe i need to play with sharpen percentage in upscaling and 100% is too much.

 

I wonder as well if it would not be worth going back to non ultra settings, abandon complex mirror and other ultra features, and increment slightly SS resolution instead. This is something i need to try, but i don t know if you have been experimenting with it.

 

I also turned off first motion reprojection and i think their flight is now more fluid. Before when a fighter was passing fast in front of me, it looked like a slideshow or ghostly plane.

 

Thank you very much again!

 

[=GW=501Railgun]

After setting up NVIDIA，In VR, sharpening does not work

I am pimix 8kx sharpening does not work

Before using FSR ‘openvr_api.dll’,but After updating the new cloud, FSR sharpening is invalid

I changed back to the default ’openvr_api.dll’,but Sharpening still doesn't work

 

help me

[Drum]

6 hours ago, Youtch said:

Firsrt of all, thank you very much, Drum. I have more or less similar specs to yours but with Ryzen5600 and I followed your settings by the letter to test it and it was the first time i had a smooth experience in VR and i quite enjoyed it.

 

Very much appreciated that you shared your settings. It really allowed me to speed the trial&error process, and saving tons of frustration.

 

NIS is a fantastic addition, staying above 60 fps with ultra settings.

 

The only remaining painpoint is that enemy planes are still like very blurry greyish things, making identification very painfull, except if i am really almost on the top of it.

 

Guessing emblems, colors scheme is nearly impossible for me, forcing me each time to go check close and personal, making impossible to play multiplayer or even complete some missions in solo campaigns.

 

Maybe i need to play with sharpen percentage in upscaling and 100% is too much.

 

I wonder as well if it would not be worth going back to non ultra settings, abandon complex mirror and other ultra features, and increment slightly SS resolution instead. This is something i need to try, but i don t know if you have been experimenting with it.

 

I also turned off first motion reprojection and i think their flight is now more fluid. Before when a fighter was passing fast in front of me, it looked like a slideshow or ghostly plane.

 

Thank you very much again!

 

Hi Youtch, good to hear!  I've been tweaking steady since, too.  Definitely need to do that for your personal preferences.  I have gone back to the lower base presets, too.  Lowered the sharpening from 100% to 50% to get the FPS back into the 70s trying to find nirvana still and getting closer by the hour.  <G>

 

Turning down your gamma to .8 or .7 should help for spotting, but that's personal preference.  I also keep the HDR on now as that helps spotting too in my case.  I can see the plane shapes very clearly now, so IDing is more an exercise of recognizing the different plane images; tail length, rudder height/shape wing shapes etc. but at least I can see them a lot more clearly now.

 

6 hours ago, =GW=501Railgun said:

After setting up NVIDIA，In VR, sharpening does not work

I am pimix 8kx sharpening does not work

Before using FSR ‘openvr_api.dll’,but After updating the new cloud, FSR sharpening is invalid

I changed back to the default ’openvr_api.dll’,but Sharpening still doesn't work

 

help me

The sharpening works for Nvidia cards 2080TI and up I'm hearing, so it should be working with your pimix too.

[I.JG3_CDRSEABEE]

On 12/9/2021 at 4:08 PM, Drum said:

This is with NIS on, in fact it's displayed in the upper left corner of the HMD like the FPS is when turned on in the upper right corner of the HMD, so you'll know when it's on.  What is surprising me is no one else is raving about this yet.  At roof top level on the Stalingrad map for instance, the buildings go by smoothly now, no jittering which was normal before the last update and use of GE.

 

I'll post a more detailed walk though of what I did to get this working shortly.

For starters, do you have these settings active/set in your GF (Geforce Experience)?

I tried these settings. Not sure I understand. Are you using the mod in addition to these settings?

[=GW=501Railgun]

3 hours ago, Drum said:

Hi Youtch, good to hear!  I've been tweaking steady since, too.  Definitely need to do that for your personal preferences.  I have gone back to the lower base presets, too.  Lowered the sharpening from 100% to 50% to get the FPS back into the 70s trying to find nirvana still and getting closer by the hour.  <G>

 

Turning down your gamma to .8 or .7 should help for spotting, but that's personal preference.  I also keep the HDR on now as that helps spotting too in my case.  I can see the plane shapes very clearly now, so IDing is more an exercise of recognizing the different plane images; tail length, rudder height/shape wing shapes etc. but at least I can see them a lot more clearly now.

 

The sharpening works for Nvidia cards 2080TI and up I'm hearing, so it should be working with your pimix too.

I am 3090  but In VR, sharpening does not work...

[Drum]

I'm just using the sharpening from the mode, and the last game update has been the cause for the extra FPS and improved performance.  I'm basically using the sharpening as much as I can to get rid of the blurry picture, that's it.

 

If you strip off the eye candy and get the image set as low and you can (on balanced) and adjust the sharpening until the image is clear and undistorted, you will see planes/ground targets a long ways off clearly even if you zoom in close while viewing them on max zoom or from any angle.  I then only improve the eye candy until my FPS become unacceptable, or until the image begins to blur again, then I stop.

Edited December 12, 2021 by Drum

[I.JG3_CDRSEABEE]

10 hours ago, Drum said:

I'm just using the sharpening from the mode, and the last game update has been the cause for the extra FPS and improved performance.  I'm basically using the sharpening as much as I can to get rid of the blurry picture, that's it.

 

If you strip off the eye candy and get the image set as low and you can (on balanced) and adjust the sharpening until the image is clear and undistorted, you will see planes/ground targets a long ways off clearly even if you zoom in close while viewing them on max zoom or from any angle.  I then only improve the eye candy until my FPS become unacceptable, or until the image begins to blur again, then I stop.

Are you running the mod + the nvidia settings?

[TCW_DirtyMike0330]

Wow, can this thread possibly have any more conflicting or unclear information? Every other reply I was going from "Ok I will download GFE and USE NIS" to "Ok I guess I will just keep the FSR mod". Here I am at the end, more confused than when I started. 

[I.JG3_CDRSEABEE]

40 minutes ago, TCW_DirtyMike0330 said:

Wow, can this thread possibly have any more conflicting or unclear information? Every other reply I was going from "Ok I will download GFE and USE NIS" to "Ok I guess I will just keep the FSR mod". Here I am at the end, more confused than when I started. 

I agree. This guy is more informative. 

 

Edited December 12, 2021 by CDRSEABEE
Spelling

[shirazjohn]

22 minutes ago, TCW_DirtyMike0330 said:

Wow, can this thread possibly have any more conflicting or unclear information? Every other reply I was going from "Ok I will download GFE and USE NIS" to "Ok I guess I will just keep the FSR mod". Here I am at the end, more confused than when I started. 

I have to agree it has got a little confusing but one thing for sure is that the fholger mod (fsr or ni) definitely works which ever you decide to use.

 

But the geforce experience upscaling definitely does not work for me.

[firdimigdi]

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here but: nVidia themselves have said that NIS unless implemented in a game engine (or injected as an intermediary like with the alternative openvr_api.dll) will not apply to VR via the driver's implementation.

source:

The original poster of that is the editor in chief of https://babeltechreviews.com/ , a site somewhat known for its benchmark analysis of GPU drivers and they had asked nvidia about it explicitly since they cover VR performance-related subjects as well.

[Youtch]

23 hours ago, 335th_grFirdimigdi said:

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here but: nVidia themselves have said that NIS unless implemented in a game engine (or injected as an intermediary like with the alternative openvr_api.dll) will not apply to VR via the driver's implementation.

source:

The original poster of that is the editor in chief of https://babeltechreviews.com/ , a site somewhat known for its benchmark analysis of GPU drivers and they had asked nvidia about it explicitly since they cover VR performance-related subjects as well.

Does it mean that sharpening is not operational or that only upscaling does not work? 

[firdimigdi]

Sharpening from the nvidia control panel was never functional in VR since 2019 that it was added, at most it'll apply itself to the game's screen mirror but not in the HMD.

 

There's some major confusion about all this, the gpu upscaling has been in nvidia drivers for a long time (since about September 2019). What recently changed was that the code for it was released as open source under the NIS moniker as an adversarial marketing move against AMD's open source FSR which was picking up ground and being adopted in games and was added as an extra option to GE while previously it has lived solely in the nvidia control panel. The release of it as open source is what made it possible for fholger to add it to the OpenVR .dll modification as an optional upscaling algorithm and it can be applied via that to OpenVR games that do not implement it natively.

[354thFG_Rails]

So with that mod do you have to change those settings in the open vr config file to see a difference. Simply changing it in GeForce experience will do nothing?

[firdimigdi]

Yes. You simply need to swap the .dll and edit the accompanying .cfg file to your liking.

 

From nvidia's site - it explicitly says that the GPU scaling (and the sharpening that is part of it) does not work in VR:

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4920/~/how-to-enable-image-sharpening-in-the-nvidia-control-panel

[Drum]

I'm not using the Nvidia upscaler, just the sharpening from this which does work.  FSR does not sharpen as well, go try it, and yes the reading above shows Nvidia's upscaler does not work in VR, correct.  But I'm talking about the sharpening, it works much better and no you can't find anywhere where it says the sharpening doesn't work.

 

Really easy to test, go into Nvidia Control Panel; manage 3D settings;  Global Settings, Image Scaling and click it on then set the Sharpen slider to 0%, save.  Now go into the tab next to that named Program Settings, select IL-2: Sturmovik: Great Battles Stalingrad and turn Image Scaling: on, then slide the sharpen to 100%, save.

 

Now go into the game and tell us if it doesn't sharpen better then FSR, please.

Edited December 14, 2021 by Drum

[C6_lefuneste]

3 hours ago, Drum said:

Now go into the game and tell us if it doesn't sharpen better then FSR, please.

Knowing the game has also a sharpen feature that is working well.

[Drum]

1 hour ago, C6_lefuneste said:

Knowing the game has also a sharpen feature that is working well.

I doubt FSR or anything else would be used for sharpening if the game's was working well.  

 

Entering the hanger area in VR on the lowest graphic settings and the image is blurry, if you bump the base graphic settings from balanced to high it gets a little more burry and same when moving to ultra.  The painted lines in the hanger are blurry right at your feet and slowly get less burry at the 6-8 foot range then it slowly starts getting worse again.  Until they fix that, sharpening helps and it's noticeable between the game's sharpening and those of FSR's and GE's.

[firdimigdi]

5 hours ago, Drum said:

Really easy to test, go into Nvidia Control Panel; manage 3D settings;  Global Settings, Image Scaling and click it on then set the Sharpen slider to 0%, save.  Now go into the tab next to that named Program Settings, select IL-2: Sturmovik: Great Battles Stalingrad and turn Image Scaling: on, then slide the sharpen to 100%, save.

 

Now go into the game and tell us if it doesn't sharpen better then FSR, please.

 

Of course I did exactly this in my previous test, you can see it in this thread - I can see it being applied to the desktop mirror of the game (there is also the NIS indication on the top left) but the image in the headset is exactly the same both with it on and with it off - I do not use the game's sharpening filter. As expected it only applies to a fullscreen session, you won't see it (in the game's desktop mirror) if the game is windowed since this is a Freestyle-like post processing effect; which also means that if this applied to VR then all Freestyle effects could be applied to VR and things like VR-specific reshade would not be necessary.

 

I am fairly certain this was discussed in 2019 when nVidia added the image sharpening slider, people hoped it worked in VR, some said it did, but ultimately it was accepted that it did not.

 

This however does not detract from the fact that this whole thread is misleading and makes people expect they will get the performance boost of upscaling, either NIS or FSR (which is necessary if you plan on playing with motion reprojection off as I do). The only way for this to work until the game supports any of it natively is to override the openvr_api.dll.

 

Addendum: a very good test to see if sharpening is active is to look at the grille of the drain in the hangar when the game first loads. At 100% sharpening, any type of sharpening, this should positively glow - which is the case on the desktop mirror when NIS is applied from the driver, but looking in the headset this is not so.

 

Edited December 14, 2021 by 335th_grFirdimigdi

[jollyjack]

On 12/6/2021 at 2:42 AM, LukeFF said:

Heads-up: the latest release of GeForce Experience now includes built-in upscaling / sharpening, so it pretty much renders the FSR mod moot, IMO. ??

 

Hi Luke, thanks for the tip. As i never use Experience, is there an access via control panel? I have a 2080ti ...

[THERION]

8 minutes ago, jollyjack said:

 

Hi Luke, thanks for the tip. As i never use Experience, is there an access via control panel? I have a 2080ti ...

 

You actually don't need NVidia Experience to access this new feature. Make sure you have the latest drivers and
you will be able to access NIS through the NVidia Control Panel.

I tried it, but it's nothing for me.

[C6_lefuneste]

3 hours ago, Drum said:

I doubt FSR or anything else would be used for sharpening if the game's was working well. 

The purpose of FSR is not to provide sharpen, but a low fps cost supersampling solution. Sharpening is part of solution because the upscaling algorithm create some bluriness.

The only advantage of not using in-game sharpen is to be able to tune it, as with my mod. But you did not you provide any elements justifying not using  in-game sharpen...Did you see numbers on fps ? Or comparison between images ? Or impact on shimmering ?

So arguments like "others are doing it, so it would be better" are worthless, especially if you do not use the solution in the same way.

Edited December 14, 2021 by C6_lefuneste

[Youtch]

32 minutes ago, C6_lefuneste said:

The purpose of FSR is not to provide sharpen, but a low fps cost supersampling solution. Sharpening is part of solution because the upscaling algorithm create some bluriness.

The only advantage of not using in-game sharpen is to be able to tune it, as with my mod. But you did not you provide any elements justifying not using  in-game sharpen...Did you see numbers on fps ? Or comparison between images ? Or impact on shimmering ?

So arguments like "others are doing it, so it would be better" are worthless, especially if you do not use the solution in the same way.

 

The main purpose is that VR is still way too blurry for me, plane have blurry contour and make it almost impossible to ID except when they are very close.

 

I m getting better results with the mod sharpening especially with NIS.

 

My question is if it makes sense to activate both, or it is too much taxing or could distort the image even more.

[Drum]

One things for sure, the new IL-2 patch improved VR a lot.  One or two more patches like that and the 2D advantages will be few and far between.

 

@Youtch + @=GW=501Railgun, Considering your system is similar to mine, try these settings to help with the blur...

 

[KEY = graphics]
    3dhud = 0
    adapter = 0
    bloom_enable = 1
    canopy_ref = 2
    desktop_center = 1
    detail_rt_res = 4096
    draw_distance = 1.00000
    far_blocks = 1
    fps_counter = 1
    fps_limit = 0
    full_height = 960
    full_width = 1280
    fullscreen = 0
    gamma = 0.80000
    grass_distance = 300.00000
    hdr_enable = 1
    land_anisotropy = 1
    land_detail = 3
    land_tex_lods = 3
    max_cache_res = 1
    max_clouds_quality = 3
    mgpu_compatible = 0
    mirrors = 3
    msaa = 1
    multisampling = 2
    or_ca = 0.00172
    or_dummy = 0
    or_enable = 1
    or_height = 2392
    or_hud_rad = 1
    or_hud_size = 0.75000
    or_ipd = 0.06480
    or_sipdc = -0.00000
    or_width = 2448
    post_sharpen = 1
    preset = 1
    prop_blur_max_rpm_for_vr = 155
    rescale_target = 1.00000
    shadows_quality = 4
    ssao_enable = 1
    stereo_dof = 5.00000
    vsync = 1
    win_height = 960
    win_width = 1280
[END]

 

I'm still running the sharpening of NIS with in game sharpening on as well, the more the better.  ?

 

[Youtch]

Thanks again! I will try

 

You are using which Value for NIS Sharpening in FSR mod, and which radius? No upscaling from the mod?

 

Your resolution per eye seems quite low, compared to your specs. Removing some high candy like complex mirror and cloud and SSAO would not constitute a good trade off to increase resolution per eye to 100%? Or low SS helps you with ID?

 

 

[Drum]

Only using the sharpening from Nvidia Control panel, placebo or not.  ?

 

st have t

[Youtch]

?

 

Since then i explored the FSR mod as well, it is not as daunting as it initially look, and he using debug plus 0.05 radius I was finally able to set up my IPD correctly.

 

Fear not, it is worth a try, more tweaking possibilities!

[Drum]

The problem is when I increase the base graphic setting from Balanced, to High or Ultra, they both increase the bur each stage.  Balanced is the clearest and least blurry;  the lower res will show you everything worth seeing minus the filtering (bur) you get from High & Ultra.  Plus, my FPS are a solid 80+ now.  I'm running MSAAx4 which eats lots of FPS but you really don't need much more SS IMO with the latest patch. 

Yeah I was using the recommended "Barrel distortion" 3088P global res setting, then lowering that within the SteamVR settings to 70%ish, but that doesn't seam to be an issue anymore I see since the last patch.  I see no distortion, only more FPS with this setting.