Any luck running OpenCompositeACC + OpenXR toolkit?

[jafergon]

Has anybody managed to run OpencompositeACC in Elite? It basically allows the game to run without SteamVR. Once you can run it without SteamVR you can run a wonderful piece of software called OpenXR Toolkit that allow you control image scaling, FOV render and very importantly use 20, 30 and 45 fps for reprojection. It's been out for a couple of months and it has done wonders and now is considered a must in other sims like MSFS and DCS. For me in those two simulators have allowed me to run them with more quality and with much better framerates. It's like I suddenty have a much poweful computer.

I've tried to use them in Elite, but I always get an error. I was wondering if anybody has had any success so far. I'm currently using the performance toolkit (https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit) and it's giving me great results, but if we could run Elitewith reprojection at 30fps we could use much higher quality settings and a more fluid experience. Just have a look at DCS and Flight Simulator forums, this has done wonders in terms of VR performance.

Releases · Jabbah / OpenCompositeACC · GitLab

Reimplementation of OpenVR, passing all calls directly to LibOVR.

gitlab.com

Quickstart

OpenXR Toolkit

mbucchia.github.io

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

if we could run Elitewith reprojection at 30fps we could use much higher quality settings and a more fluid experience. Just have a look at DCS and Flight Simulator forums, this has done wonders in terms of VR performance.

Its a heavy hit on quality, the problem is if you ratchet up the settings but then end up with 45fps reprojection the cockpit and static objects look great but anything that moves in your scene as you move about, travel etc goes to blurry mush. All you achieve is removing stutter in exchange for blur BUT the cockpit looks great. Lower than 45fps would be dreadful imho unless somehow you're very tolerant to the motion blur effect.

DCS you kind of get away with it to an extent because the rendering of the cockpit is your focus due to the panels and instruments so people willingly sacrifice having a good clear view of their cockpit instruments for some loss on the world outside the cockpit.

Basically we need Elite Dangerous and DCS (both good examples btw, you can throw in Star Wars Squadrons too) to perform far higher and with lower frame latency by fully utilising all the compute and memory resources on modern PC hardware. You're only other option as a consumer to throw more power at the problem but of course we are limited by drip fed hardware products and the price inflation problem from every man and his dog looking to capitalise on these things. OpenXR imho helps WMR users but beyond that is feels like all it does is offer more options... Foveated Rendering could be very beneficial but if it relies on developers my heart sinks it has to be hardware or driver-based imho you simply can't rely on games developers to do it.

 

[jafergon]

I totally agree that our ultimate goal is to have games that are well optimized (at least DCS will at some point this year or next one, migrate to Vulkan and will be multithread optimized). But in DCS I couldn't be happier with my 2080, Reverb G2 and OpenXR toolkit at 30fps. Yes, there is some artifacting, but way less than you think. Reprojection techniques have improved a lot in the last years. It's amazing how now I can run it completely fluid in demanding scenarios even with some supersampling and cristal clear picture, where previously I struggled with downsampling.

Indeed it's a matter of tolerance to artifacting, but in most games I'm using Dev Toolkit it's a game changer {MSFS, DCS, ETS2 and ATS). I hope at some point it works in Elite.

OpenXR Guide - Deprecated - This time for real (▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿)

By request of a few members I have put this guide back up. But please note OpenXR now runs natively on DCS TURBO and Reprojection work with the latest version of OpenXR Toolkit! You may be better off with the official implementation than with OpenComposite (aka this guide) If you are unsure, I wo...

forum.dcs.world

OpenXR Toolkit (upscaling, world scale, hand tracking...) - Release thread

The ball is in AMD’s court on this. There is nothing we can do.

forums.flightsimulator.com

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKqhip3fKTc

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

its not artifacting I'm on about its the motion blur effect where reprojection kicks in to make up the frames in order to give you that fluidity

are you seriously saying you play DCS with OpenXR at the full resolution of the G2 incl. the extra compensation for barrel distortion effects, MSAA etc at 30fps with reprojection using a 2080 and see crystal clear images in motion? Sorry I don't believe you I'd need to see that with my own eyes, I think what you'd see is a clear cockpit but outside the scenery in motion looks real fuzzy.

The MSFS video you posted talked about Foveated rendering that I mentioned, note that it requires developer support a developer that see's a future in VR willing to commit to it sdevelopment.

 

[silence please]

Seems like one of the people working on OpenComposite is sinking some time in to making the OpenXR branch compatible with Elite:

Changes for Elite Dangerous. Allow setSceneColor to be called but do nothing.... (1b2678ac) · Commits · Jabbah / OpenComposite_TimeInvalid · GitLab

Changes for Elite Dangerous. Allow setSceneColor to be called but do nothing. On shut down xrDestroySwapChain fails with -12 - Invalid handle error. Needs more investigation but soft abort for...

gitlab.com

It's not made it in to the binaries distributed by the project yet, but at least there's apparently some interest in getting it to work with ED.

Might just have to re-install ED and see how well it performs with that.

 

[jafergon]

Seems like one of the people working on OpenComposite is sinking some time in to making the OpenXR branch compatible with Elite:

Changes for Elite Dangerous. Allow setSceneColor to be called but do nothing.... (1b2678ac) · Commits · Jabbah / OpenComposite_TimeInvalid · GitLab

Changes for Elite Dangerous. Allow setSceneColor to be called but do nothing. On shut down xrDestroySwapChain fails with -12 - Invalid handle error. Needs more investigation but soft abort for...

gitlab.com

It's not made it in to the binaries distributed by the project yet, but at least there's apparently some interest in getting it to work with ED.

Might just have to re-install ED and see how well it performs with that.

Great news, I'll keep an eye on this. For me it changed my VR experience in DCS and MSFS!

 

[CMDR Is Fat]

I started using vrperfkit yesterday, https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit
Amazing difference in clarity in OD using steam set to windows openxr, so much sharper, cleaner looking and better performing, the difference is huge.
I had Steam at 124 and ingame SS and HMD at 125 it all worked well but not as clean as i would of liked, vrperfkit has improved things tremendously!
Its worth a try, what do you have to lose?

 

[aXeL]

I started using vrperfkit yesterday, https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit
Amazing difference in clarity in OD using steam set to windows openxr, so much sharper, cleaner looking and better performing, the difference is huge.
I had Steam at 124 and ingame SS and HMD at 125 it all worked well but not as clean as i would of liked, vrperfkit has improved things tremendously!
Its worth a try, what do you have to lose?

This looked like a good prospect to me and then I got to the build instructions and thought, "Yeah.... I'll wait for some industrious individual to create the dll".

 

[CMDR Is Fat]

?
You dont need an installer

Release VR Performance Toolkit v0.3 · fholger/vrperfkit

Changelog: Add preliminary FFR support in games which render the eye textures separately vrperfkit will try and guess when the game is rendering which eye if the default guess does not work, the ...

github.com

Download the zip
Extract the files to game directory, edit the config to your prefs and run.
done.

 

[aXeL]

?
You dont need an installer

Release VR Performance Toolkit v0.3 · fholger/vrperfkit

Changelog: Add preliminary FFR support in games which render the eye textures separately vrperfkit will try and guess when the game is rendering which eye if the default guess does not work, the ...

github.com

Download the zip
Extract the files to game directory, edit the config to your prefs and run.
done.

o7 The zip I DL'd only contained the source code so thank you kindly

 

[CMDR Is Fat]

I often have the same problem with Github, I know its there somewhere but end up going around in circles.

 

[aXeL]

Just had a very quick test with FOVeated rendering but nothing yet. Not saying much because I was only in for a few mins. Didn't know there was a hotkey for it so maybe it's off by default and I have to turn it on. Maybe I have to enable upscaling for foveation to work, lots of stuff still left to try but won't be gaming for a few days. BTW, I can't set SteamVR to OpenXR. I can set it to WMR and then use the OpenXR toolkit to make it it the runtime for WMR but that's not saying the same as 'Set Steam to OpenXR' so maybe I did that wrong.

 

[CMDR Is Fat]

This is my config in openxr and steam, its easier with pictures

Spoiler: images

 

[silence please]

Happy to report that the latest OpenComposite works great with Elite - you only might need to add admitUnknownProps=enabled to your opencomposite.ini

OpenXR Toolkit with full control over post processing colours, fixed foveated rendering, control over motion reprojection target FPS and FSR/NIS upscaling works as well.

And I must say the performance gain is substantial. Now if only Frontier fixed the reported VR glitches/bugs. The toggling shadows on planetary surfaces are killing me.

 

[CMDR Is Fat]

I wanted to give that a go but could only find Occulus versions, saying that very happy with the vrperfkit performance.

 

[aXeL]

Got it working with your settings thanks. My base settings before this were SS 1.0, HMD 1.0 and Steam SS at 352% which is about as much as my 3090 can handle for my G1.

I suspect I'll need to turn the vrperf renderscale settings much much higher to match the quality I'm getting with Steam SS. Foveating rendering seems to yield ~13% improvement on my rig when using your base settings and comparing on/off. If I haven't done my math wrong, and I probably have, I need to set my renderscale to 2.5 to match the effect that Steam SS is applying at 352%. Not quite a straight comparison as they're different methods but I need to start somewhere.

Update: vrperf certainly does what it says on the tin and it give me no errors that weren't of my own making. Unfortunately the image quality, even in the highest resolution section, isn't even close to what I can achieve ( albeit over the whole panel ) with my SteamVR SS settings. I had vrperf renderscale at 6.0 at one point. I even tried augmenting that with in game HMD which certainly helps but the combined effect is lower performance than Steam SS on it's own and it, maybe, looked about as good as Steam manages.

If the Dev, "somehow" can make it do upscaling the same way Steam does and apply foveated rendering to that, then they're onto a winner IMO.

 

[CMDR Is Fat]

Out of interest did you adjust the render\scale settings in openxr?
My system isnt as powerful as yours but could max everything but shadows out with all at 125, it just wasnt sharp enough for me, im happy with it myself, maxed shadows included

 

[aXeL]

Out of interest did you adjust the render\scale settings in openxr?
My system isnt as powerful as yours but could max everything but shadows out with all at 125, it just wasnt sharp enough for me, im happy with it myself, maxed shadows included

Good thinking - I haven't tried that so I'll give it a go tonight. BTW, I can max everything out just fine including Shadows.

Actually, just a thought; forgetting frame times for a moment, I get that we have different rigs. Try the same settings I've been using, i.e. EDO SS 1.0, HMD 1.0 and Steam at 352%. I would be interested in how you think they compare it terms of image quality. For me, vrperf with the settings you gave is still an aliased mess compared with my normal settings. Don't get me wrong, vrperf is about 3x faster with your settings but, for me, the image quality is very bad compared to my settings.

 

[aXeL]

I tried upping renderscale in OpenXR but it made no difference at all. OpenXR was definitely running because I used it for the frametime display in-game and also tested the demo to make sure it was all working. I fettled some more with vrperf but just can't get around it's poor image quality so I've removed it for now. If vrperf did SS quality like SteamVR does then it will be in the EDO player's standard toolkit IMO. I will definitely be keeping an eye on it so it was still a good spot on your part.

 

[CMDR Is Fat]

I have tried so many different combinations of settings but always ends up around the same output, im pleased with it, does what i want it to, i cant brute force the image quality so finding the best balance with this works. Only thing I did notice is screen shots are off like the shaders have been replaced or filtered but that could be EDHM.

Its cool mate, if it works great, if it dosnt it dosnt, im more than happy with what it does for me