33 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Nope, it's there. It seems to depend on the direction of view. Could be related to dusk conditions though, as I can't reproduce it in the middle of the night. Made a quick video: 

 

That actually makes sense based on what I've read and seen... the flickering happens on dark scenes, but not black.  In my cockpit last night, it was flickering on the portion of the screen that was the ground and not on the sky which was lighter (pink/orange glow).  In fact, apparently LG's solution was to add a slider to the game panel to adjust the black levels (crush the dark tones) to eliminate the flickering. Very poor solution.  

I doubt you can capture this flicker on a video unless you use your phone... it's the TV doing it... not the sim... and I imagine your video is capturing data before it gets to the TV?  Your video shows some flicker on the control backlighting in your cockpit if I'm seeing what you're seeing. That's a different issue 😄

The problem has something to do with the way OLED pixels are driven at low light output using PWM and the combo of VRR creates a flicker on very dimly lit pixels. Pure black is ok and brighter pixel areas won't have noticeable flicker.

Edited August 25, 20223 yr by Virtual-Chris

10 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

In fact, apparently LG's solution was to add a slider to the game panel to adjust the black levels (crush the dark tones) to eliminate the flickering. Very poor solution.

Agree. 

10 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

I doubt you can capture this flicker on a video unless you use your phone... it's the TV doing it... not the sim... and I imagine your video is capturing data before it gets to the TV?  Your video shows some flicker on the control backlighting in your cockpit if I'm seeing what you're seeing. That's a different issue 😄

Ok, I get what you're saying. Didn't think of watching the video before I posted it, lol. 

So far no flickering during pitch black night. At dawn though it is noticeable near the ground. Next step I'll try without VRR and check if it's gone. Although - with locked fps, will we need to disable VRR on the TV?

58 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Agree. 

Ok, I get what you're saying. Didn't think of watching the video before I posted it, lol. 

So far no flickering during pitch black night. At dawn though it is noticeable near the ground. Next step I'll try without VRR and check if it's gone. Although - with locked fps, will we need to disable VRR on the TV?

Not sure what the best/easiest way to disable VRR is. I tried from the TV Game Mode Control panel while in the sim and that locked up the input - got the LG screen saver. So you may be able to do it from the TV before starting the sim, or may need to do it from NV control panel, or both. Not sure.

1 minute ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Not sure what the best/easiest way to disable VRR is.

From what I've gathered so far: turn it off by disabling G-Sync / Freesync in Win. 

Further testing at dusk and I find that it's not so easy to reproduce. While panning the flicker is there. But when not changing the view it's not. To be continued. The ultimate goal is to "fix" this before you get home from work 😉

7 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

From what I've gathered so far: turn it off by disabling G-Sync / Freesync in Win. 

Further testing at dusk and I find that it's not so easy to reproduce. While panning the flicker is there. But when not changing the view it's not. To be continued. The ultimate goal is to "fix" this before you get home from work 😉

LOL.  I first noticed it when I was using the view behind the plane and the sky was still a bit lit after sunset but the ground was fairly dark.  I also put the drone up over my plane on the tarmac after dark and could clearly see it on the ground and the sky. Anything brightly lit, like the cockpit displays or the airport in my drone view, will not show it, but the dark peripheral areas did flicker a lot. Now it's probably one of those things that you may not notice but once you do, you can't unseen it. 😄 Sorry to doom anyone coming across this. 😛

 

28 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Sorry to doom anyone coming across this. 😛

No worries, I'm not doomed. Yet 😉 And indeed there are some things that once seen cannot be unseen. A good example is ReShade LUT settings. Once I've grown accustomed to it, my eyes hurt when I return the sim to default with it's exaggarated green/yellow levels and that horrendous white haze. Or perhaps an even better example:

"If you don’t mind screen tearing turn it [VRR] off. If you have never noticed screen tearing then no big deal. If you don’t know what screen tearing is...don’t look! Once you see it, you will never be able to unsee it again 👀"

So I investigated this a bit further (i.e. went further down the rabbit hole). And there is a way to reduce/mitigate flickering by gamma tweaking the dark areas in the TV menu (picture=>additional settings=>fine tune dark areas). The problem with this is that, while you may be able to reduce the flicker by increasing this value, this comes at the cost of black levels being elevated and near blacks being washed out. Which is NOT something we want on our precious OLED panels. By doing this we are effectively reducing our OLEDs to a lowly IPS panel. And while the flickering might be reduced or even gone, our eyes will hurt 😉 

So then there's the option of turning off G-Sync and thereby disabling VRR (as I mentioned I find NCP's fast V-sync has the least amount of tearing but your mileage may vary). There could be other options out there, but I think I'll throw the ball over to you for now 🙂

I'll post the timestamped video from HDTVTest discussing this below. 

EDIT: One more thing. On the LG OLED panels there's a "secret" menu option that displays the VRR status. On my CX panel I hit the green button repeatedly. This is useful to check if the TV is in VRR mode or not. 

Edited August 25, 20223 yr by Cpt_Piett

Thanks. I’ll play around with it this evening. That gamma tweak is exactly what LG proposed as a fix but I’m not going to crush or elevate my blacks - that’s a case of the cure almost being worse than the disease. 

Will report back later. 

So I turned off G-Sync in NV Control Panel and left V-Sync on Fast... no tearing (I'm usually at 50-60FPS). I think this will work fine. I tried testing for flicker on a dark evening scene, and while it looked good, there was too much ambient light in the room to be sure.  I'll have to check that the flickering is gone later tonight.

It makes me wonder what's all this hype about G-Synch and VRR is. Why bother with VRR?

As for HDR, @Cpt_PiettI know you're running some custom mode on your LG OLED... can you remind me what you've got it set to?

I played around with different TV tone mapping settings (On, Off, HGIG) and On seemed to offer the best picture while HGIG was noticeably darker.  I don't think Windows and especially MSFS provides any tone mapping info to the TV does it?  Windows doesn't offer any kind of HDR calibration to set the blacks and highlights. MS needs to get their act together on HDR.

Well as everyone’s preferences are different, just choose what seem best for you. My custom settings (and the reasons behind them) are here:

16 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

So I turned off G-Sync in NV Control Panel and left V-Sync on Fast... no tearing (I'm usually at 50-60FPS). I think this will work fine.

Perfect 👍🏻 

16 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

It makes me wonder what's all this hype about G-Synch and VRR is. Why bother with VRR?

Yup, I’ve had the same thought too. It could be that G-Sync is even more smooth and fluid than V-Sync, but to be honest it can be hard to tell. If you ask the CEO of nVidia you might get a different answer though.

16 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

MS needs to get their act together on HDR.

Indeed! As I switch between SU9 and SU10 I’m getting increasingly worried that despite their claims that HDR is fixed, it doesn’t seem to be fixed properly. And I’d hate it if they release SU10 with broken HDR. And we need native HDR controls.

 

Edited August 26, 20223 yr by Cpt_Piett

On 8/17/2022 at 10:58 PM, RJC68 said:

I actually have a 65 inch X90J in my family room that has VRR, while it isn't an OLED set I was thinking about lugging my PC up from the basement to see how it looks.

Lol, that’s exactly what I did more than a year ago. And the PC is still in my living room. It’s just too hard to return to the monitor. And a huge part of MSFS is the visuals, so…(I’m sure my girlfriend would agree on that lol). For a long time I even had the PC mounted on a bench table which looked pretty outlandish with everything exposed. This summer I decided to do something about that and found myself a decent Lian Li case that matches the rest of the room 🙂

And @Virtual-Chris, congrats with your OLED panel! I didn’t realize this until now as I started this thread at the end. 

@Cpt_Piett... focusing in on your HDR settings. Do you know much behind these setting recommendations for Mastering Peak and MaxCLL?

From what I can gather, Mastering Peak tells the TV to override any tone mapping meta-data and use a curve for 1000 nits.

This post from the AVS OLED calibration forums would seem to support this, since MSFS and Windows don't provide any HDI meta data... 

Quote

 

If the game has a peak brightness setting, use HGIG and set the game to 800 nits.
If the game has a luminance matching calibration screen, use HGIG and match the luminance.
If the game has no settings but correctly outputs HDR metadata for 1000 nits, use DTM Off.
If the game has no settings but correctly outputs HDR metadata for 4000 / 10000 nits, use DTM Off.
If the game does not output metadata and the TV is stuck in the 4000-nit curve, use DTM Off and set the Mastering Peak to 1000 nits in the HDMI Signalling Override menu. There's no easy way to differentiate between this and the previous case other than the image appearing too dim.

When using HDR on the desktop in Windows, HGIG or a 100% roll-off custom curve are technically the most accurate. I just use it for YouTube in HDR, so I use DTM Off and set the Mastering Peak to 1000 nits in the HDMI Signalling Override menu because there is no metadata and the 4000-nit curve is too dim.

 

I'm not sure about the relevance of MaxCLL.  From what I've read, MaxCLL is normally a parameter in the HDR metadata that tells the display what the maximum brightness of the content is. I think we know from this video that MSFS outputs 10000 nit content.  It would thus seem like the correct settings would be Mastering Peak 1000 for the tone curve to apply, and MaxCLL of 10000 as the peak brightness of the content. But I'm just in the early stages of learning about this. 

What are your thoughts?  Where did you come across MaxCLL setting to 1000 as the recommendation?

Ok, so now we’re getting even deeper into that rabbit hole. Guess we both picked the red pill, right?

58 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

From what I can gather, Mastering Peak tells the TV to override any tone mapping meta-data and use a curve for 1000 nits.

 

That’s the essence of it, yes. 

Ive done a fair bit of reading over at the official forums as HDR was not working for a while after a beta update. Well, myself and others claim that it’s still not working after the “fix”. That coincidentally led me into a discussion of nits and how specular highlights in MSFS (when HDR is in fact working) is overblown, leading to loss of contrast and detail. 

As per my understanding this is a MSFS phenomenon, so these custom HDR settings could very well be inappropriate when using the OLED for other things.

If you’re interested, you can find more info in the thread I’m referring to. Think I linked to it in my thread over at the tips and tweaks subforum. 

And I’m sorry I wasn’t of much help with this VRR flickering issue, as I sort of dived into it head first without getting a proper overview, and spent a while reaching the same conclusion as you did (re the suboptimal LG menu fix). I should have spent more time researching the issue and reading your post properly. 

 

Edited August 26, 20223 yr by Cpt_Piett

But - as a decent side effect (for me), the hunt for a fix for the VRR issue has coincidentally led me further towards a solution for my incessant CTD issue. So it might not have all been in vain. 

36 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

 

And I’m sorry I wasn’t of much help with this VRR flickering issue, I sort of dived into it head first without getting a proper overview first, and spent a while reaching the same conclusion as you did (re the suboptimal LG menu fix). I should have spent more time researching the issue and reading your post properly. 

 

Ha... no worries... thanks for helping out. I think we share similar systems and have similar expectations so you're usually the first person I think of when I have a technical issue. 😄

I can confirm that turning G-Sync/VRR off fixed the flashing. Image looks awesome. Never seen such black blacks on a TV or monitor. Love it. I don’t see any benefit to VRR at all.