A few quick VR things

[heathenlamb]

Greeting Commanders ... long time player, full time lurker, spasmodic commenter.

I have recently dived back into ED VR after a very long break. Last time I played was pre-Odyssey. I reinstalled this week and installed both Live 4.0 and Legacy 3.8. I played Live a few times and was very disappointed in the VR performance. I'm running a 3080ti, 64gb ram etc. It was janky, flaky and really kinda just sh*t ( I should preface this by saying I have thousands of hours combined in VR, like a lot of you, and am no stranger to VR tweaking). After reading through the forums and a lot of people insisting Live VR and Legacy VR are like chalk and cheese, I decided to fire up Legacy last night .... and I was stunned. It looked like a better VR game then Odyssey .

So after that long pre-amble ... my question is this ... Is Odyssey REALLY that badly optimised for VR ? Admittedly I've been away from ED for a few years but seriously ... it boggles the mind. And my other question is a practical one ... what happened to the Motion smooting/reprojection setting in SteamVR ... I can't find it anywhere. It's not where it used to be and definitely not avaible in the per-application settings. Is it only available in-game in the Steam Overlay ?

And pre-emptive apologies to the Mods. I went through about 20 different threads trying to find a place to post but to be blunt ... so many of them are kinda but sorted related but in the end I just went fresh.

Good to be back ...

 

[Globusdiablo]

If flying spaceships in VR is your jam, then Legacy is for you.

Personally, I consider Legacy the better game in every way. Just my 2 credits.

 

[jojon]

I don't believe performance is any more reduced with VR play than monitor play? More of the objects have more complex materials, and that takes a toll, regardless of viewing device...

Motion smoothing (hurgh!) is right in the top half of both the General and Video tabs... At least when using a SteamVR native device; With others (e.g. Oculus, and WMR), it is among the functionality that is deferred to its equivalents in their own base runtimes.

There is a bit of give and a bit of take with the visuals: Planets have gained shiny ice, and can have more localised geology, but this comes at the cost, respectively, of more aliasing, and more obvious repetition of cookie-cutter features, as well as the performance hit.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

I don't know what answer you expect. Odyssey is considerably harder on your system, that's a well known fact. What is an inconvenience on the flatscreen is annyoing in VR, and either you and your system can deal with it or not.

I play Odyssey exclusively since... I think update 8? 10? Something like that. That was when it made a big leap of performance for me so that I don't have to vomit instantly the moment I approach a busy large Odyssey settlement. There are still jank moments today. Space is fine, including CZs and stuff, planets are fine, Odyssey settlements are still iffy.

I play on a Reverb G2 aqt 60 or 70 percent at the momen (don't remember really) on a 3080ti and a 5900X with 32 GB. I get 90 fps in space, reprojected 45 fps in every place that is busy with NPCs (HazRes, CZs, stations), and at large populared Odyssey settlements I drop into the red - I have no numbers for that, but I'd estimate 40 fps on a good day, sometimes 30 or less in a particularly nasty settlement.

On foot in those settlements on the infamous virtual screen I get CPU limited 45 fps, which sometimes jump to 90 when the NPCs.... "left" the settlement. You have to make your peace with the virtual flatscreen, it isn't going anywhere. Personally I am fine with it, and it is better than disrupting the VR session every time I disembark.

Note that I rather take stable 45 fps motion smoothed than the framerate fluctuating between 60 and 70; there is some artefacting with motion smoothing (especially on vertical lines when you move horizontally), but I take that over a fluctuating framerate.

Despite all the shortcomings I am having a blast with Odyssey in VR. I like the lighting much more (bugs not withstanding) and the planets are much more consistant and interesting; by that I mean while they are not as spectacular as Pomeche 2C anymore, the landscape makes sense and flows, planets feel like real planets out in space rather than oddly shaped clumps of pixels in a video game. I like just skimming across the surface to see what view awaits me around the next corner or around the next hill. I made a thread about how I like the planets about a year ago, still stand by what I wrote back then. Especially setting down on atmospheric planets is just awesome, and I have a lot of fun with the settlement gameplay as well as the war. There are a lot of aspects of Odyssey that are just fun for me. Whenever I log into Legacy, performance is stellar, but the game feels... bland in comparison. That's my personal opinion, of course.

For me, Odyssey in VR is totally worth accepting the bugs and shortcomings.

 

[VR andysonofbob]

My PC is similar to your one.

I haven't played for a while but unless something dramatic has changed performance wise from the last patch I can't run Odyssey satisfactorily either. It's fine in space but performance tanks and visual anomolies abound where-ever I want to play (planets and asteroid fields). So we stick with Legacy.

I am a bit different to Helmut, with regard to visuals. I don't like the wobble you get with ASW. My fav ship is the Taipan and the floor window is very prone to ASW wobbling. Therefore I need to maintain the 80FPS. That said, Helmut is absolutely correct with regard to the planets. (Ignoring the glitches!) Terrain does look amazing and the lighting is better.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

I have learned to tune that wobble out. I see it most on vertical HUD lines when I pay attention to it; I try not to .

 

[heathenlamb]

Well thanks for all the comments. I have actually managed to get Live 4.0 running pretty decent in VR after reading comments and some trial and error. Jaggies are down, ASW is off to eliminate the wobble but frame rates are good. Overall am pretty happy with how it's looking now.

 

[SmiledElf]

Hi OP, I just wanted to add I had the same gripes with Odyssey.

From what I understand, they've tried their best optimising what they can, but this is about as performant as it will get without some major technical overhauls. This applies to the game in general. VR is an unfortunate 'casualty' in the new rendering system.

I almost gave up on Ody VR until I played around with vrperfkit, a "Performance-oriented collection of mods for VR games." This gave me the biggest performance gain (after tweaking supersampling and such). If you haven't tried it, I encourage you to check it out

For reference, my system: Quest 2 AirLink, RTX 3080, Ryzen 5800X3D

 

[Paso]

Hi OP, I just wanted to add I had the same gripes with Odyssey.

From what I understand, they've tried their best optimising what they can, but this is about as performant as it will get without some major technical overhauls. This applies to the game in general. VR is an unfortunate 'casualty' in the new rendering system.

I almost gave up on Ody VR until I played around with vrperfkit, a "Performance-oriented collection of mods for VR games." This gave me the biggest performance gain (after tweaking supersampling and such). If you haven't tried it, I encourage you to check it out

For reference, my system: Quest 2 AirLink, RTX 3080, Ryzen 5800X3D

What settings did you use? I have a similar setup and fraterate is really bad

 

[Crank Larson]

I have a 3090 so can get reasonable performance from EDO in my G2. Now performance is no longer an issue, all the other problems show up (I assume primarily in VR - I don't play flatscreen).

Fortunately, Legacy is still with us.

I am still (very slightly) hopeful that one day FD may look into the VR side of EDO properly. Probably around the same time that Star Citizen gets released...

 

[Globusdiablo]

... Probably around the same time that Star Citizen gets released...

 

[SmiledElf]

What settings did you use? I have a similar setup and fraterate is really bad

Hi CMDR, sorry I took so long - I had no idea how to give you 'the settings' given there's so many.
Here are the most important settings I tweaked, in order of how I arrived at my current setup...

1. Oculus​

I'll assuming you also have a Meta headset and you bought the game on Steam (as I did):

• Do not launch the game using SteamVR.
• Instead, use the Oculus runtime to launch the game.

Running SteamVR on top of Oculus tanks my performance, so I bypass Steam entirely.
I recommend using the Oculus Debug Tool to get a performance overlay - useful when tweaking settings later.

2. In-game settings​

Normally there's a lot to tweak here, but for now - set it to the 'VR Low' preset.
This is to provide a baseline for...

3. vrperfkit​

https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit

This is a vr performance toolkit that finally allowed me to play in VR again.
I won't go into detail, so please read their own page on how to actually use it.

But generally:

• Download it and put it in your installation folder (...\Elite Dangerous\Products\elite-dangerous-odyssey-64\).
• Launch the game and sit in a busy station.
• Tweak the vrperfkit settings using your keyboard.
• Tweak in-game settings at the same time.
• Keep a note on what combination of settings work well.
  (This is a lot easier with OculusDebugTool's performance overlay on.)

My settings​

Yeah, there's an art to finding the right combination of settings.

The goal was to get HMD Image Quality (in-game) as high as possible.
Using vrperfkit, I got enough performance to go up to 1.75.
Yes. 1.75x HMD Image Quality.
I have no idea what magic they're doing in that thing.

I don't recommend you follow my settings 1:1, but here's my settings for reference anyway...
In-game (this is ED Profiler if you're not familiar):

In vrperfkit, I arrived at these settings for 'upscaling':

• 'method': cas (note: keep in-game upscaling to Normal, i.e disabled)
• 'renderScale': 0.7
• 'sharpness': 1.0

Also, vrperfkit talks a lot about foveated rendering but AFAIK it doesn't work in ED yet.



Hm.... hope that made any semblance of sense.

 

[VR andysonofbob]

1. Oculus​

I'll assuming you also have a Meta headset and you bought the game on Steam (as I did):

• Do not launch the game using SteamVR.
• Instead, use the Oculus runtime to launch the game.

Running SteamVR on top of Oculus tanks my performance, so I bypass Steam entirely.
I recommend using the Oculus Debug Tool to get a performance overlay - useful when tweaking settings later.

Doing this makes a huge difference! Oculus Runtime is excellent. Once of the reasons I haven't been willing to upgrade my Q2 to the G2, the performance lose being forced to use a different runtime :/

 

[CMDR League Of Phoenix]

Running on

• i7-8700 CPU (6 cores, 12 threads) - 3.2 GHz
• Nvidia RTX 2060, 6 GB
• 16 GB RAM
• ED installed on external USB SSD

As mentioned in my signature, I am using a virtualized setup. I am passing my GPU to all my VMs - Windows 10 Pro being one of them. Nvidia drivers are current. Each VM has 5 cores (10 threads) and 14GB RAM.

I know this is an exotic setup to run any games with, so... yeah.

Using a Pico 4 with USB3 connection (Streaming Assistant).

Except for Blur, Ambient Occulusion and Particle Effects, I have set pretty much everything to normal or high.

But much more important:

• SteamVR resolution set to native resolution of display (2560x2560 per eye).
• Absolutely no supersampling enabled in SteamVR
• Elite is set to MLAAX2 Anti Aliasing, with FSR 1.0 enabled and set to Ultra Quality.

FSR 1.0 at Ultra Quality renders at 0.7x the native resolution (if I remember that correctly), which means it does render the game at roughly 2000px per eye for me. The further you go down, the more image degradation you will experience. The Quality setting may still work fine for you... but after that it is really bad. And DLSS is not available - it would probably help much more.

Space: 60 FPS+
Near objects like stations: approx. 50FPS
Planets: depends. Mostly fluid performance, but haven't been to many yet since I started playing. Seemed fine on my visits so far.
Concourse (on foot): VR-Flatscreen (which is what you get on-foot) - normally fluid performance. Camera suite with free camera and Commander Controls: depends. Usually about 40FPS.
On Foot Combat: N/A - I am not playing this part of Odyssey - and on-foot does not have a proper implementation for VR, so yeah.

So for me, even in the virtualized environment, the game is a perfectly enjoyable experience.

Your mileage may vary - I guess it's best to play with SteamVR and in-game settings (depending on the client - Odyssey is more demanding than Horizons Legacy).

Best


// EDIT: Forgot to mention the speed of my processor

 

[Crank Larson]

Doing this makes a huge difference! Oculus Runtime is excellent. Once of the reasons I haven't been willing to upgrade my Q2 to the G2, the performance lose being forced to use a different runtime :/

What makes you think there'd be a performance loss with the G2? As a WMR device, it can use either SteamVR or OpenXR for E: D (other APIs are available...). I use OpenXR with E: D.

 

[VR andysonofbob]

What makes you think there'd be a performance loss with the G2? As a WMR device, it can use either SteamVR or OpenXR for E: D (other APIs are available...). I use OpenXR with E: D.

It's not HW but the runtimes which must be used. When I play via Oculus runtime performs noticably better than Steam VR or OpenXR or anything else that I have tried. Obviously when I play games which have a choice e.g. ED

I know it isn't the HW because Karl Gosling compared G2 and Q2 (via link), not sure which runtime he used but it would have been like for like. He set both devices' resolutions as close as possible to each other, and the performances differences were neglegable. (He was testing to see whether or not Link causes some performance loss)

So extrapolating, I think it is fair to say Oculus runtime is more efficient than the multi-HDM runtimes. Which I guess makes some sense because it only needs to worry about Oculus devices?

 

[Crank Larson]

It's not HW but the runtimes which must be used. When I play via Oculus runtime performs noticably better than Steam VR or OpenXR or anything else that I have tried. Obviously when I play games which have a choice e.g. ED

I know it isn't the HW because Karl Gosling compared G2 and Q2 (via link), not sure which runtime he used but it would have been like for like. He set both devices' resolutions as close as possible to each other, and the performances differences were neglegable. (He was testing to see whether or not Link causes some performance loss)

So extrapolating, I think it is fair to say Oculus runtime is more efficient than the multi-HDM runtimes. Which I guess makes some sense because it only needs to worry about Oculus devices?

Using one runtime directly should always be quicker than using one stacked on another. E: D doesn't support WIndows MR so you must use OpenXR or SteamVR (which then of course interface with WMR). OpenXR is meant to be the more efficient of the two in that scenario. It would be hard to argue that E: D using Oculus runtime directly is less efficient than WMR (which has at least two VR APIs involved for E: D). However, I get a stable 90 FPS with my G2 in Legacy, so even if that happens slightly more inefficiently the point is moot (for me).

I dropped Oculus when FB got involved (last one I had was CV1).

 

[SmiledElf]

It's not HW but the runtimes which must be used. When I play via Oculus runtime performs noticably better than Steam VR or OpenXR or anything else that I have tried. Obviously when I play games which have a choice e.g. ED

I know it isn't the HW because Karl Gosling compared G2 and Q2 (via link), not sure which runtime he used but it would have been like for like. He set both devices' resolutions as close as possible to each other, and the performances differences were neglegable. (He was testing to see whether or not Link causes some performance loss)

So extrapolating, I think it is fair to say Oculus runtime is more efficient than the multi-HDM runtimes. Which I guess makes some sense because it only needs to worry about Oculus devices?

I believe Oculus runs faster for you because if you have a Quest headset, ED will always run through the Oculus runtime even when SteamVR is enabled.

This means that you're not really choosing either Oculus or SteamVR, rather you're choosing:

• Oculus runtime
• SteamVR and Oculus runtime

That translation from SteamVR to Oculus is what tanks the performance. If you have a SteamVR headset (e.g Index, Vive) then it would run about as well as Oculus runtime.

Here's a nice Reddit (tip) thread on it.

 

[VR andysonofbob]

I believe Oculus runs faster for you because if you have a Quest headset, ED will always run through the Oculus runtime even when SteamVR is enabled.
That translation from SteamVR to Oculus is what tanks the performance. If you have a SteamVR headset (e.g Index, Vive) then it would run about as well as Oculus runtime.

Ahh

My [really poorly explained] reasoning was because of what Karl Gosling inadvertantly demonstrated, namely HMDs appear to perform the same on non-oculus runtimes.

Using OpenXR (I think) or SteamVR, Q2 and G2 perform the same
Q2 using OR > OpenXR and SteamVR

Because I am used to Oculus performance using OR, I am worried that I will have to face poorer performance. At some point with advancing GPUs, this will increasingly matter less of course! But I feel I am pushing it with my GPU/CPU, with the best performing VR option therefor I am reluctant to upgrade to something like a G2.

I think I am stuck with meta products for a while :/

Of course, all of the above is from one experiment and my own largely unmeasured observations. And could all be complete nonsense! Does anyone have both a Q2, which runs using Oculus Runtime loading via the Frontier Launcher and any other non Oculus HMD running its most optimum runtime etc? Has anyone bothered doing a comparison, for science?

 

[jojon]

Just for the sake of completeness:

• Elite Dangerous does not (yet) use the OpenXR API to address any VR runtime -- only those proprietary to OVR (Oculus), and OpenVR (SteamVR).
• All three of the most common VR runtimes (Oculus, OpenVR, WMR) can now be addressed using the OpenXR API, as an alternative to their own APIs.
• If you play Elite through OpenXR, that is not directly, buy by way of one wrapper or other, that intercepts OpenVR calls from the game, and "translates" them to OpenXR equivalents (they are similar enough, in many ways). Whether this incurs any significant overhead, depends on whether your chosen active OpenXR-compliant VR runtime is the one your HMD talks to, or whether you have E.g. SteamVR chosen, even though you are using an Oculus headset, so that you still go through SteamVR, on top of OVR, anyway, negating the whole point of the procedure.
• What you lose, by bypassing SteamVR, is its overlay system, which will not matter if you do not use any such overlays in any case. :7