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I'm in the VR club!

Started by Father Ted, January 02, 2021, 01:19:46 PM

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Father Ted

...well, not quite fully yet, but my lovely wife bought me a headset (Quest 2) for Christmas/birthday.  Took me quite a while to work out how to connect it to the PC (had to buy a cable, upgrade to Win 10, upgrade USB 3.0 hub drivers, and install opencomposite), but I have had at last had a flight in Flying Circus.  My poor old PC managed about 10fps, but it was enough to show me the future. I knew my GPU wouldn't be up to the job, but part 2 of my Christmas/birthday present will be an upgrade on that front...

Gusington

Congrats, now you have your entry point to go down the new rig rabbit hole.

How did Flying Circus look/play other than the slow frame rate?


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

Jarhead0331

Congrats. The Quest 2 is a fine headset.

What are your system specs? VR does require a relatively beefy modern system, but there are always tweaks that can be made to improve FPS. Let us know what you're working with and maybe we can help improve your experience while you are waiting for the upgrade.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


Father Ted

Thanks for the welcome guys

@Gus: FC was (as everybody says) amazing in VR.  Apart from the VR-ness of it, what struck me was how bright and vivid and life-like the colours were.  Up to that point, all I'd played were a couple of games on the Quest itself, which are a bit like Wii games graphically.  Because of the framerate I couldn't really play - everything was very laggy.

@JH: I have an i7-3770k (which I'm hoping will be OK) and a GTX 1050 Ti (which I knew would be a problem).  I don't expect to be able to play using my current rig (although I had a surprisingly acceptable experience with Star Wars Squadrons) and will try to wait for a new graphics card before really getting into flying in VR.  Could be a long wait, though, so I'd certainly appreciate any tips.

Gusington

Once you get your new rig you won't even recognize the word 'lag' anymore.


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

Yskonyn

The 3770K might be getting a little old there.
I had a 4760K and it started to peak out at 100% load quite often with new games indicating it had become a bottleneck. Keep an eye on your CPU load, perhaps its sufficient for Flying Circus, but do know that VR not only places a burden on your GPU, it also increases load on your CPU.
The 1050 ti is definitely too light for VR.

At any rate, welcome to the club!
"Pilots do not get paid for what they do daily, but they get paid for what they are capable of doing.
However, if pilots would need to do daily what they are capable of doing, nobody would dare to fly anymore."

UN Weapons Inspector

I really do enjoy IL2 with oculus rift s .Actually best part for me is to  be just crew member (gunner in stuka for example) and let the AI do the piloting. Really immersive experience.

Father Ted

Again, thanks all!

New GPU* arrives Monday, so I've been reading up on how to best get IL2 running.  I wonder if you guys can give me a pointer...

Is OpenComposite still a better option for a weaker rig than Steam VR?  The threads I've found about this seem to be 1-2 years old, so I wonder if Steam VR has improved in that time.  Whilst OC seems to work, it doesn't have a UI for tweaking purposes and is obviously a little less user-friendly in general.

*it's an RTX 2070.  I realize that this is now mid-tier, but should suit my purposes.  I'm not that interested in maxed-out shiny new games and I'm still running at 1080p on a 27" monitor and that's going to change any time soon.  Besides, to get a 3xxxx card over here costs about as much as I normally spend on a whole PC, and that's not justifiable for me.   Also, it looks like I'll have to save my £££s for a new processor, according to Yskonyn.

Yskonyn

The RTX2070 will be enough for your VR setup and definitely for 1080p res on a monitor.
I have no experience with OC and come from the Oculus ecosystem, but since my G2 I am using SteamVR and have not experienced any trouble.
What were the complaints about it over OC before?

"Pilots do not get paid for what they do daily, but they get paid for what they are capable of doing.
However, if pilots would need to do daily what they are capable of doing, nobody would dare to fly anymore."

Father Ted

From what I've read it appears that Steam VR is a bit of a system-hog, occupying valuable CPU and memory resources, whereas OC is a more stripped down way of interfacing between headset and PC, and so offers a performance boost.

Obviously what I've just written is a pretty hazy take on the situation and probably has the wrong words in certain places, but I think the essence is right.

And I appreciate that you and Jarhead are both using other headsets, so will not have encountered the same issues

Yskonyn

Sure, I merely asked because I didn't hear about it before and always find it interesting to learn something new.
Speaking of which, I discovered that the SteamVR global resolution slider being different from the 'per App' slider causes some weird issues for DCS.
My initial idea was to set the global res to 100% which equals to about 1.4PD or 140% super sampling, cause all other games besides DCS run fine on that setting. I would then make a 'per app' profile for DCS to enable motion smoothing (effectively locking it at 45 fps and use motion smoothing to get smooth movement) and lower the res to as close to raw per eye res of the G2 as I can to get rid of supersampling and have decent performance. This would be around 54% resolution mark on the slider.

Yet, when I run DCS the actual resolution gets randomly set in the 70 - 80 % range. Which is puzzeling and probably the reason I did not get the same performance each time I loaded DCS. Even though its very playable, I did notice apparent changes in performance from one session to the other.

Now that I have set the global resolution slider as close to raw res per eye as I can, the game behaves much more stable and the res doesn't change around.
Weird, but there you have it.
"Pilots do not get paid for what they do daily, but they get paid for what they are capable of doing.
However, if pilots would need to do daily what they are capable of doing, nobody would dare to fly anymore."

Father Ted

Whelp, installed the GPU and have been flying.  Got the occasional bit of vertigo, but no motion-sickness, so that's good.  I am going to need to look at graphics-settings though.  I'm using Steam VR, but BoX doesn't show up in the games menu, so I'll have to use global settings I guess

Jarhead0331

Quote from: Father Ted on January 11, 2021, 01:39:02 PM
Whelp, installed the GPU and have been flying.  Got the occasional bit of vertigo, but no motion-sickness, so that's good.  I am going to need to look at graphics-settings though.  I'm using Steam VR, but BoX doesn't show up in the games menu, so I'll have to use global settings I guess

You have to run the program in order for it to appear in the SteamVR per application settings. In other words, run BoX and then tab out to the desktop to tweak the SteamVR settings.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


Yskonyn

To make it permanently show up under SteamVR go to your Library, right click IL-2, select Properties and tick the option 'Add to VR Library'.

This also works for non-Steam games added manually to your Steam library.
"Pilots do not get paid for what they do daily, but they get paid for what they are capable of doing.
However, if pilots would need to do daily what they are capable of doing, nobody would dare to fly anymore."

Father Ted

Once again, cheers for the help guys