Single Player Career Campaign VR (Normandy/Rhein/Kuban) - Good rig but terrible FPS near battles.

[Smeggles]

I know most of you probably play multiplayer or on co-op servers, but I'm asking about VR specifically in the campaign mode (which I especially like).  I actually never play multi.

 

My rig is a water cooled 9900k clocked to 4.97, some 32gb of 3600mhz ram, and a water cooled 3090ti, with a vive pro 2.

 

i'm running OpenVR_FSR and opencomposite, but I have run in SteamVR.

 

No matter what I do (drop resolution down to 2000x2000 ish, lower AA to zero, turn reproject on/off, tinker with openxr/fsr settings as advised in this forum, kill background processes, etc), when I get near the combat zones in Rheinland/Normandy/Kuban single player pilot career campaign, the FPS tanks from 80-90 down to 45 or even below.  I suspect it's just the colossal number of AIs all running at once.   It's worst in ground attack planes like an IL2, but it's not the greatest even in fighters.  I can adjust the settings in really wild swings and spend hours looking up new methods to squeak out a few more FPS, but ultimately the gains in the dense combat situations in single player career mode are small and often not worth the drastic visual hit.

 

I could share my startup.cfg but I don't expect anyone's going to find anything especially outlandish.  I've tinkered with almost all the settings at one time or another and really improved FPS quite a lot in many areas of the game, but not what I described above.  Those situations are always very slow and very choppy.

 

What's disappointing is, If I play primarily in Moscow or Stalingrad everything runs great.  I can occasionally get drops down into the 70s, but that's manageable.  I can play at much higher resolutions with better graphics settings as well and still keep a high fps with little stutter.  It's just Kuban,Normandy,Rheinland that crushes my FPS.

 

Does anyone have any experience with squeezing performance out of the single player career campaign in VR?  Is it even possible to get a decent FPS near single player campaign battle sites, given the increased CPU load probably caused by all the AI?  If not, Is there some other play mode I should consider?  Maybe host my own server?  Is campaign mode an option there?

 

[firdimigdi]

Sadly even if you do find the perfect balance in quality vs performance and it plays at max HMD fps, or even if you settle for motion reprojection, with plenty of headroom you'll still run in to the below as soon as enough AI are active:

 

 

What you are seeing is that plus your framerate reducing.

 

IMO, the best bet for enjoyable SP action with multiple AI is PWCG co-op campaign hosted on a separate PC.

 

Edited August 31, 2022 by Firdimigdi

[Smeggles]

46 minutes ago, Firdimigdi said:

Sadly even if you do find the perfect balance in quality vs performance and it plays at max HMD fps, or even if you settle for motion reprojection, with plenty of headroom you'll still run in to the below as soon as enough AI are active:

 

 

What you are seeing is that plus your framerate reducing.

 

IMO, the best bet for enjoyable SP action with multiple AI is PWCG co-op campaign hosted on a separate PC.

 

 

Honestly that's pretty encouraging, it means I can end my futile crusade to try and get a buttery performance in single player.

 

pardon my ignorance, what is PWCG co-op campaign?  And would a cheap beater PC be good enough to host IL2 on if it was just for myself and a friend or two?  I'm new to everything multiplayer in this game, despite playing single for years.

[firdimigdi]

9 minutes ago, Smeggles said:

pardon my ignorance, what is PWCG co-op campaign?  And would a cheap beater PC be good enough to host IL2 on if it was just for myself and a friend or two?  I'm new to everything multiplayer in this game, despite playing single for years.

 

Patrick Wilson's Campaign Generator:

https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/forum/99-pat-wilson-campaign-generator/

 

Tutorial for setting it up:

 

I run it on a laptop with an amd 3700 and it does a-ok with up to 2 other people (I suspect it can cope with more than that). Anything with a decently performing-in-single-threaded-operation CPU will do just fine. You can also play on your own with AI filling in for "co-op".

Edited August 31, 2022 by Firdimigdi

[chiliwili69]

On 8/31/2022 at 7:38 PM, Smeggles said:

My rig is a water cooled 9900k clocked to 4.97

The 9900K is a bottleneck in dense scenarios in VR. You need to realy on motionsmoothing techniques then for those scenarios.

I also don´t know the reasons why Kuban/Rheinland are more CPU demanding thant Stalingrad/Moscow for AI items.

 

Better CPUs in single-threaded performance give a qualitative gain in fps in those dense scenarios. Look at the table of the SYN_Vander IL-2 bench.