Hello.

I'm very disappointed with the VR-performance on my newly built high end system on Prepar3d v4.5 ( most current version 😞

 

Here are the specs:

- i9 10900kf ( NOT overclocked )

- RTX 3080

- 32GB RAM (DDR3200)

- MSI Z490 Gaming carbon WiFi

- 1200W power

- Oculus Rift S

- WIN10 ( completely up to date )

- latest nvidia driver 461.09

- no nvidia profile inspector tweaks

- nvidia control panel set to "prefer maximum performance"

- NO P3D.cfg tweaks 

 

I've installed the following add-ons:

- Oculus Tray Tool ( Supersampling set to 1.6 / ASW OFF / HIGH CPU PRIORITY )

- ORBX Global Base pack

- ORBX Open Landclass Europe / Africa

- Active Sky for P3D v4 & v5 ( max 3 cloud layers / max visibility set to 80NM )

- Active Sky cloud art ( all cloud textures set to 512 x 512 DXT / Overcast models set to high performance )

- Ultimate traffic live ( airline traffic set to 80% / general aviation set to 0% )

- PMDG 747-400 & -8

- FS2CREW 747

- FS2CREW Ultimate Ground Crew X

- several Big-Hub Airports as addons ( Flytampa / Aerosoft / Flightbeam / ORBX / etc. )

 

Before I've been running a 4770k with a 980ti and 16GB RAM.

 

Now to the point: on smaller airports ( such as ORBX ESGG Goteborg or ESMS Malmo ) with PMDG 747, FS2CREW, Active Sky, Ultimate Traffic I do see a considerable improvement compared to the performance of my old System ( 4770k / 980ti ).

However, I do prefer to fly longhaul with the 747, so I do serve major hubs only. 

The disappointment is, that on major hubs ( such as Aerosoft EGLL or within the greater Tokyo area ) the supposedly increased power of the new high end 3.000$-system is almost not perceptible when compared to my old system at all!

 

One example:

Today I flew from RJBB to RJTT.
In Tokyo I've installed the Drzewiecki Design RJAA and the Technobrain RJTT.

Admitted, the traffic was high in Tokyo ( I've set Ultimate Traffic to 80% ) but the sky was clear, so no clouds to be generated.

As soon as I was within around 40NM of RJTT, the performance crashed to an unacceptable value:

I've attained between 15-25fps... Serious stutters when panning around in the cockpit, especially when leaning left or right ( not turning the head left or right, but leaning shoulders left or right whilst looking forward ), heavy stutters when the aircraft was turning, at times I've even seen a short hourglass and the screen freezed for a brief period. Also, when turning the head quickly from left or right, the FOV seemed to narrow down ( black edges left or right ).

I know that there are still some limitations to VR, but, frankly, this is an unrivalled very high end system and it shall perform considerably better than my 8 year old previous system. But it doesn't, at least not when operating at major hubs.

My P3D v4.5 settings are as follows:

FXAA: OFF

AA: 4xMSAA

Texture filtering: ANISOTROPIC 16x

Texture resolution: ULTRA 4096x4096

VSYNC: OFF

Tripple buffering: OFF

Target frame rate: UNLIMITED 

Mipmap VC Panels: ON

Level of detail radius: HIGH

Tesselation factor: ULTRA

Mesh resolution: 10M

Texture resolution: 15CM

Use high-resolution terrain textures: OFF

Scenery complexity: EXTREMELY DENSE

Autogen and scenery draw distance: VERY HIGH

Autogen vegetation density: DENSE

Autogen building density: DENSE

Dynamic 3D auto vegetation: OFF

Water detail: LOW

Water reflections: ALL TICKED OFF

Special effects: ALL TICKED OFF

HDR: OFF

Dynamic reflections: OFF

Dynamic lighting: OFF

Landing lights illuminate ground: OFF

Lens flare: OFF

Shadow quality: LOW

Shadow draw distance: MEDIUM

Shadow casting and receiving: LIMITED TO INTERNAL & EXTERNAL VEHICLE AND CLOUDS

Cloud draw distance: 80NM

Cloud coverage density: MAXIMUM

Detailed clouds: ON

Volumetric fog: ON

Detailed precipitation: ON

Windshield effects: ON

 

WINDOWS SETTINGS:

WINDOWS Power Plan: ULTIMATE PERFORMANCE 

UAC: OFF

Windows gaming mode: OFF

Geforce experience: NOT INSTALLED

P3D.exe: DISABLE FULLSCREEN OPTIMIZATION / RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR 

 

I'd be very happy for some assistance and/or experiences with a similar system / setup / configuration. 
 

The point that irritates/bothers me most is the fact that the new system does not perform noticably better than my old system, at least not at major hubs / complex situations. On smaller ( even though very detailed and complex ) addon-airports, I see a good perceptible improvement.

What irritates me even more is that when I move my head from left to right ( I'm NOT turning the head, I just look forward and move/lean from left to right ) I got pronounced stutters. This is independent of the scenery/situation complexity/System load. When I'm just turning my head around instead, the motion is very fluent, at least on smaller airports/system loads.

By the way: I've already deleted the shaders folder, the prepar3d.exe, added several exclusions to the windows defender ( all P3D related stuff ) and added an affinity maskk for my 10 core CPU ( 349524 with Hyperthreading ON ). No major improvements...

Thank you all in advance and best regards,

Toto

 

Edited January 7, 20215 yr by Sonne

A quick glance at your setting tells me they're too high. I know you think a beast system like yours should be able to handle it, but it's p3d. It stutters over London even without VR. Drop the settings.

I would drop the texture res back down to 1024, the lod to medium, the autogen buildings to normal and only medium autogen draw distance. Turn off cloud shadows casting. Reduce tesselation, mesh and textures a notch or two as well. The usual suspects. You don't need all that clarity in a Rift S anyway. You won't see the difference.

It kills in VR to go too high on these regardless of machine. It's p3d that's the problem, not the machine. Pushing quality settings above what was max in old FSX never really worked well, and adding vr only compounds the issue.

Bite the bullet. Lower the settings. Oh, and drop the supersamling down a notch or two With the S I can go as low as 1.2 and still read most of the displays. I keep it at 1.5, though (but with all other settings lower)

Hope you can fix it.

 

Edited January 7, 20215 yr by andreh

agree, set SS with OTT at 1.2 & try ASW at Auto initially...

this applies to most of the sims,

get a quick dial-in & then tweak...

Hello and thanks for your feedback/suggestions, really appreciated.

Today I've updated my BIOS and and all Drivers ( Drivers update with iobit Driver Booster 8 Pro ). No improvement at all, so I think I really need to reduce/refine my settings.

To your above suggestions:

ASW MODE AUTO: I've tried this before, but I get blurred/distorted indications on the PMDG 747 upper EICAS Display ( the vertical N1 and EGT indications get distorted when my head moves just a tiny bit ).

OTT SS: anything lower than 1.5 renders the 747 Instruments unusable to me.

 

One more question: CPU-Z is showing me a Core-Speed of around 5.000MHz ( whilst the system is in idle ) although the base speed is just 3.7GHz. I've never applied any kind of overclocking anyway, as I have no clue about how to overclock. The BIOS is showing a clock-speed of 3.7Ghz ( Busspeed 100MHz / multiplier 37 ). 
So: is the CPU overclocked...?

I recall that on the factory setup there was MSI's Dragoncenter installed. I've selected something like "extreme/maximum performance" within Dragoncenter. However, I've uninstalled Dragoncenter a few weeks ago. Could it be, that Dragoncenter overclocked my system and left the settings during uninstall, thus CPU-Z is still showing a corespeed of 5.000MHz?

Furthermore, I've altered my Windows10 powerplan to "ultimate performance" and set the "minimum processor state" to 100% within the "processor power management" options of windows power plan. Could this be the cause that my CPU is running at 5.000MHz?

Thank you again,

best regards

Toto

Edited January 8, 20215 yr by Sonne

As others have said, lower your settings. Especially autogen settings seem too high to me to be able to attain reasonable performance. The addon aircraft you use, the volume of traffic etc. are also things that noticeably affect performance.

I get decent performance overall, but I will only call it that and not perfect because in large urban areas with lots of traffic, a detailed addon airport and flying a complex airliner I still don't get the performance I would ideally want. It's enough however and I'm enjoying the experience a lot. We need to wait a few years more for even better hardware and perhaps another P3D performance improvement to get there. Even with the highest end hardware you won't get a super smooth experience in this type of area in P3D.

What I can recommend is P3D 5.1 (HF1). The performance gain in VR I'm seeing coming from 4.5 is substantial. While the frame rate has slightly improved as well, it's the smoothness which has significantly improved for me. P3D v5 has had its issues with stability but at this point I'd call it a winner. I was never able to get a performance boost like this in any of the v4 versions.

Edited January 8, 20215 yr by threegreen

Hello threegreen.

Many thanks to you as well!

Regarding the p3d v5.1 option: I've installed the latest p3d v5.1 as well and on my system I find it to be inferior to p3d v4.5.

I always get microstutters when panning around in the virtual cockpit in VR, whilst v4.5 seems to be noticeably smoother regarding this point ( except for high density areas such as Tokyo or London ).

I'll go ahead and try to lower my settings this weekend, although I'm really disappointed to be forced to run such a system at medium to low settings.

Best regards,

Toto

1 hour ago, threegreen said:

What I can recommend is P3D 5.1 (HF1). The performance gain in VR I'm seeing coming from 4.5 is substantial.

This is not my experience. I have a Rift S like the OP and I have found it impossible to get smooth with the Oculus software driving VR. It's unplayable. With SteamVR it's a lot better, but still nowhere near the smoothness I can achive in 4.5.

 

9 minutes ago, Sonne said:

I always get microstutters when panning around in the virtual cockpit in VR, whilst v4.5 seems to be noticeably smoother regarding this point ( except for high density areas such as Tokyo or London )

Exactly. I have tuned 4.5 to perfection. Depsite having only 1070 it's remarkably smooth in almost all circumstances. But 5.1 I can't get smooth regardless of settings. Try using SteamVR instead of Oculus with 5.1. I have found it to be smoother. If you have the time, report back the results.

Hello again, Andreh.

Would you please be so kind to post your settings in v4.5?

And could you briefly describe on how to run the Rift S on v4.5 with Steam-VR?

Thanks again and best regards,

Toto

2 hours ago, Sonne said:

I'll go ahead and try to lower my settings this weekend, although I'm really disappointed to be forced to run such a system at medium to low settings.

That's unfortunately the downside to VR flight simming at the moment. It's a trade-off between high settings on a screen or lower settings in VR. Give it a few more years. VR in a complex sim environment with addons and high settings while totally smooth just isn't a thing yet, but we'll get there eventually.

Edited January 8, 20215 yr by threegreen

1 hour ago, Sonne said:

Hello again, Andreh.

Would you please be so kind to post your settings in v4.5?

And could you briefly describe on how to run the Rift S on v4.5 with Steam-VR?

Thanks again and best regards,

Toto

Sure.

Running through SteamVR is easy. I only do it in 5.1, not in 4.5. 4.5 runs very well on Oculus. You just activate VR in P3D chosing SteamVR from the VR menu instead of Oculus. That should be it, provided you have SteamVR installed. It will open Oculus home as well in the background. You may want to not open the Oculus Tray tool as I have found it may conflict.

4.5 settings:

Ani 16x / AA 4MSAA

Textures 1024

Vsync off

Unlimited frames

World - think medium. Medium draw distance, autogen, mesh, textures 1m, etc. Scenery complexity is the only thing I run at max.

HDR is on

Shadows, all receive is on, cast only internal. All reflections off. Dynamic Lights on but I turn off all DL in airport sceneries and have to limit how many aircraft lights I turn on during night. Only taxi light for taxi, only inbound landing lights for T/O or landing etc. Too much just brings it to halt.

Weather is Active sky. Max visibility 75nm. A bit longer cloud draw distance.

Traffic. very modest. I use My traffic and with 6 for airliners you get enough. That's about 60 without a traffic addon. GA off. AP vehicles off. Boats a few, cars 15. 

That's it for P3D I think.

OTT SS is 1.5 with 30hz ASW.

ORBX Vector: Tertiary roads and powerlines off. Traffic only major roads

Also note, I fly PMDG airliners. If you fly planes that are less demanding you could increase some settings

Edited January 8, 20215 yr by andreh

12 hours ago, andreh said:

OTT SS is 1.5 with 30hz ASW.

Hello Andreh.

Thanks again for your support.

How did you manage to set OTT to 30Hz? Mine is only offering ON/OFF/AUTO/45Hz.

Btw., what CPU and GPU are you using?

Best regards,

Toto

2 hours ago, Sonne said:

Hello Andreh.

Thanks again for your support.

How did you manage to set OTT to 30Hz? Mine is only offering ON/OFF/AUTO/45Hz.

Btw., what CPU and GPU are you using?

Best regards,

Toto

I'm on a 6700k and 1070, so much less juice than your system.

You have to update to the latest version of OTT. I had to download the full installer again as the update function of my old OTT didn't work. 30hz may not be for you if you have a 3080 with a lot more juice my card, but it worked wonders for my 1070. You might be able to bump up a few settings for that reason, but as you have already experienced, better system is almost always a disappointment with P3D.

Dear Andreh.

Thank you, I've found the setting and played with it a little bit:

It seems to help in very complex scenery and situations ( PMDG 747 / Technobrain RJTT / Active sky / lots of Ultimate Traffic ), where I cannot attain 30fps, especially when panning my head around in the virtual cockpit.

However, in far less complex environments ( PMDG 747 / ORBX ESGG / Active sky / Ultimate traffic ), where I attain 40fps in VR anyway, it seems to be counterproductive, as it induces stutters on the scenery ( whilst being butter smooth within the VC ).

I've set up a joystickbutton command for OTT which cycles through the different ASW modes, so I can adjust the mode according to my requirements.

Somethings weird anyway: when using the OTT HUD and setting ASW to 30Hz, I get a fps-readout of steady 20fps on the performance-HUD ( instead of the expected 30fps ), no matter where I am and how complex the scenery is.

Furthermore: although I've set SS in OTT to 1.6, I get a readout of 1.47, 1.47 in the OTT-HUD...

Best regards,

Toto

Edited January 9, 20215 yr by Sonne

OTT @ 30hz works for me because I have relatively weak GPU. It makes sense that you go higher with a 3080. Best of luck

I achieve the best results with ASW off. Any other settings result in stutters.