Hi 

I've posted some more technical stuff about the above recent upgrade I've done in the Hardware section - but I've now started experimenting with the VR settings to see what, if anything, it has done for me and thought it might be of interest to any folks pondering the same upgrade.

I say, 'what, if anything, it has done for me...' as I am fully aware that GPU and CPU upgrades are inter-dependant in a sort of CPU/GPU Shuffle.  Having sold my soul last year to get a 3080Ti GPU, this CPU upgrade is more about planning for the next GPU when and if I can ever afford one than any expectation of major gains at the moment.

So, basically the upgrade was:

- Ryzen 7 5800X, achieving around 4.6GHz max on my system to a Ryzen 7 7700X with an expectation of up to around 5.5GHz

- The 7700X, needing an AM5 slot meant a new motherboard.  I went for the 'budget' ASUS Prime X670-P which all the reviewers seem to hate 😉

- And the X670 Motherboard needs DDR5 RAM.  Hmmm...those are faster!  In for a penny... 32Gb of 5600MHz DDR5's

I got a spare M.2 SSD and Windows 10 Licence just in case, but decided to stretch Window 10's capabilities by using the original Windows boot up M.2 SSD and seeing if I could get it to work with the new architecture CPU and Motherboard.

And it did 🙂

 

Most things just worked straight off - even the hard drives and SSD's, when I reconnected them after the initial boot up test, kept their original drive letters!  X-plane 12 worked straight off (no better in VR, though).  MSFS threw up an error - and it was missing from my Microsoft Store account - but I traced it down to the fact that, although Windows 10 was running, it wasn't activated.  I re-activated Windows with the original Licence number then 'Repaired' MSFS in the X-box App and it appeared and booted up fine.

Even the relatively quirky Reverb G2 worked straight off!!

Big Phew!

Early days performance-wise, but I've started experimenting with those settings that I know impact mainly on the CPU (the GPU is running pretty much full chatter) - the Terrain and Objects LOD's were the obvious first to see.  And BIG improvement:  

- So far, I've been able to raise VR Terrain LOD from 170 to 300 and VR Objects LOD from 140 to 200.  The visuals are much better than before and the flight seems just as smooth over some of my regular flights in both GA aircraft and my favourite bigger beast, the A310.

- Generally, I've avoided London centre as the morphing and stuttering even at medium heights used to break the immersion.  So with the above settings, I took off at EGKK London Gatwick and then went for a CAA not-approved A310 flight at 2500 feet and around 220 knots, following the Thames right over central London.  No stutters and visually great!

Very relieved (I'm not the brightest spark when it comes to dabbling with the innards of PC's and their software) and well pleased.

I'll do some more experimentation and see what else I can tweak without hitting the smoothness and start finding out what the going rate is for a kidney to see if I can't get a new gen GPU (prob 4080) sometime later in 2023  🙂

If I get any more tangible improvements - or, of course, any difficulties - from the CPU alone, I'll feed back here.   

 

 

 

Edited December 21, 20223 yr by AJZip

Well, against my expectation, there are tangible benefits from the upgrade even without any changes to the GPU.  

Today, with the increased LOD's still in place, I have been stress testing it further with FSLTL running, live weather and operating the A310 at and between three of the UK's busiest airports - EGLL London Heathrow; EGKK London Gatwick and EGCC Manchester.

On initial spawning, it took a little while to settle down but, after that (couple of minutes) everything was smooth, inside the cockpit and out throughout start-up, take-off- cruise, landing, taxi and parking.

With the 5800X, I couldn't run FSLTL at any of those three airports with anything like decent numbers of aircraft and radius operating.  It also used to struggle with live weather and FSLTL at the same time.

I'm very pleasantly surprised and pleased.  There's enough of an improvement for me to be able to be much more patient ref the GPU.  Hopefully, that give some time for prices to come down a bit or my savings to recover a bit.  🙂  

Well, I've done quite a few more flights and continue to be surprised at the results - both visually and in terms of the FPS resilience as I've continued to up the complexity of flight scenarios.

I'm not sure I fully understand how to interpret what I am reading when it comes to the Developer Mode FPS info panel, but the visuals seem to match the overall numbers that the info panel is showing.

Latest Scenario:

All in VR with HP Reverb G2

-  Inibuilds A310, take off EGKK London Gatwick, flight over central London down to around 3000', land at EGLL London Heathrow and taxi off the runway

- FSLTL injecting up to 30 IFR AI aircraft + 5 VFR AI aircraft + 5 static at 100km max radius

- Live Weather

- VR Terrain LOD at 300; VR Objects LOD at 200

 

Results:

Visual:  5-10 seconds of 'settling down' of the VR view on initial switching to VR mode.  After that, no movement stutters or micro-stutters either inside the cockpit of in externally panned views.

Excellent visuals with good clarity and negligible morphing while low over central London

 

FPS/Temp / Max single thread freq / CPU/GPU limit warnings:

FPS

- At end of runway ready for takeoff at EGKK in 2D FPS avge = 33

- As above, but after switching to VR = 30

- Above central London, 2500' dropping to 1800' at 185 knots, FPS Avge=38

- On Finals into EGLL, London Heathrow, FPS Avge = 33-34

- After turnoff from Runway and taxiing to parking = 25fps (multiple active FSLTL ground movements of aircraft at the same time)

 

Max CPU thread freq:

-  up to 4.9MHz max, generally on two of the threads except when switching back to 2D after landing when it spiked at 5.4MHz

Temperatures:

I'm sure there must have been some spikes from time to time but generally around 62 degrees

CPU/GPU Limited?:

CPU, throughout flight.  (and that was a bit of a surprise...)

 

Conclusions so far

- I am surprised that the GPU wasn't the limiting factor at any of the phases of the flight...especially when low over central London.  It certainly takes the pressure off needing to upgrade GPU at the moment as that test scenario is getting close to the most taxing I am likely to personally need and the visuals were pleasingly good - and MUCH better than with my previous 5800X processor.

- I am also surprised, even though the CPU was the limiting factor, that it didn't seem to get to its 'design' peak of 5.4MHz more often than the couple of spikes.  Clearly something else limiting stuff - latency somewhere either side of the processor itself.  It's my first experience of DDR5 and such a fast RAM clockspeed so there maybe a bit more tweaking to be done there.  It bodes well, though, for eking a bit more out of the new set up

- I remain very pleasantly surprised how much visual improvement the change has resulted in.  I've tried all sorts of aircraft - they have all improved the same in terms of improved visuals with no impact on smoothness.

- Very pleased with the temperatures.  My 5800X ran a LOT hotter than that...    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aside from the motherboard and ram speed, you and I seem to have virtually identical hardware. I, too, am running a 7700X w/ a 3080 Ti. I'm nowhere near running my VR LOD at 300 or my VR Objects LOD at 200.

It would seem that I've got quite a bit more work to do on dialing in my settings.

Are you using OpenXR Toolkit to tweak VR settings at all or are you just using OpenXR Tools? Are you using TAA or DLSS?

 

47 minutes ago, Malaromane said:

 

Are you using OpenXR Toolkit to tweak VR settings at all or are you just using OpenXR Tools? Are you using TAA or DLSS?

 

Hi

Neither. to be honest.  I have never been able to open OpenXR Tools - I think it's a Windows issue but even with updates and re-activating, etc, it still won't run on my system.  I get the opening screen but the Demo won't run and any attempt to open a tab crashes it all.  I have the OpenXR toolkit but have had it deactivated ever since the DLSS and similar options became available.

At the moment, while DX12 with DLSS gives me the best FPS and outside view, I can't do with the loss of sharpness of the instruments.  So as the alternative, until they hone that a bit more, I'm using DX11 and TAA.

These are my settings if it's of any help:

I don't have a rolling cache on.

 

Oh - and because I am using the FSLTL 'live' traffic injector, I have all of the native AI aircraft turned off, as suggested in the FSLTL instructions

Thanks for sharing your settings. I really appreciate it.

I recently experimented with upscaling the rendering resolution using OpenXR Toolkit with reasonable results. Helped overcome the blurriness of DLSS a bit. The text still wasn't quite as sharp as TAA though so I'm likely going to switch back.

I also see that a lot of your graphics settings are medium or low where I have them as high or medium. 

So plenty for me to play around with. 

Yes - anything that doesn't make a visible difference I keep low or off.  For example, the grass doesn't look great when you're on the ground let alone when you're more than 10' above it and looks no different whatever the setting so there's no point in wasting precious Hz on that... 🙂

On 12/27/2022 at 4:18 PM, Malaromane said:

 

I recently experimented with upscaling the rendering resolution using OpenXR Toolkit with reasonable results. Helped overcome the blurriness of DLSS a bit. The text still wasn't quite as sharp as TAA though so I'm likely going to switch back.

 

Yeah I've been going back and forth with OXR rescale anywhere from 150-180% but using DLSS.  I think even at 150% and DLSS, that 100% and TAA is still clearer...  but I get about 10-15% more fps at 150/dlss.  Tonight I was flying in SoCal and I tried no AA at all.  Obviously it was pretty shimmery but not horribly bad for night flying.  Daytime was a no go.

I also run medium-ish VR settings in the sim.  Clouds I try to run at high because they look so much nicer than medium.  Ultra is fine in 2D but really hurts the fps in VR.

I think if I'm using glass like G1000 or G3000 I really try to use TAA - it just beats my 150%/DLSS combo.  But for analog the DLSS is fine.

I have given up on getting sharp focused instrument panels in VR with MSFS.  For me using any form of AA in VR leads to no win scenarios in this regard.  I've learned to the accept my less than perfect compromise, and get back to spending my time enjoying the sim flying VR experience.  I'm done chasing rainbows here.

BTW, Happy New Year! 🍸 🎉 🎇

Edited December 29, 20223 yr by TheFamilyMan

On 12/29/2022 at 5:20 PM, TheFamilyMan said:

I have given up on getting sharp focused instrument panels in VR with MSFS.  For me using any form of AA in VR leads to no win scenarios in this regard.  I've learned to the accept my less than perfect compromise, and get back to spending my time enjoying the sim flying VR experience.  I'm done chasing rainbows here.

I fully understand the sentiment.  I had a try this evening, just in case the extra CPU power gave me a better result with VR DLSS on and sharpening walloped up a touch.  But no, it didn't. I think on my system that's going to have to wait for a new GPU which, as the phrase goes, maybe some time.

Have a Great New Year too!  🙂

23 hours ago, AJZip said:

I think on my system that's going to have to wait for a new GPU which, as the phrase goes, maybe some time.

I don't think that applying more GPU power can correct the problem with the VR blurry instrument readouts in MSFS.  I've tried bringing my 3080 ti to its knees with high levels of supersampling coupled with TAA and some instrument text blur is still there.  But there is a fix for this blur though its side effects are unacceptable:  an AA setting of None.  No joke, this works (for me at least), and this is why I made my first statement.  IMO the problem is that the AA algorithms in MSFS fuzz up text in VR, and unless the devs implement AA differently for VR we'll have to live with either less than perfect instrument readouts or jaggies dancing along nearly every straight edge everywhere.

Edited December 31, 20223 yr by TheFamilyMan

1 hour ago, TheFamilyMan said:

I don't think that applying more GPU power can correct the problem with the VR blurry instrument readouts in MSFS.  I've tried bringing my 3080 ti to its knees with high levels of supersampling coupled with TAA and some instrument text blur is still there.  But there is a fix for this blur though its side effects are unacceptable:  an AA setting of None.  No joke, this works (for me at least), and this is why I made my first statement.  IMO the problem is that the AA algorithms in MSFS fuzz up text in VR, and unless the devs implement AA differently for VR we'll have to live with either less than perfect instrument readouts or jaggies dancing along nearly every straight edge everywhere.

I think that probably summarises the challenge that both we and the wizards at Asobo and MSFS face - everybody's system impacts different things differently. 

For me, with DLSS on with Quality at the PC settings, and for the VR settings, DLSS on but with TAA, it is all pretty smooth - decent external view and crisp cockpit text (yes - even the glass cockpit stuff!).  The lower FPS to full DLSS in VR isn't really an issue but there does remain a small amount of horizon shimmering.  But whatever I do with sharpening, whenever I turn from TAA to DLSS on in VR then all glass-cockpit stuff becomes pretty unreadable.  Quite different to your own experience, @TheFamilyMan. 

And I am aware that other folks with very similar kit will be experiencing quite different results from either of us.  

That said, all of it is beyond my wildest dreams of less than 5 years ago...

Edited December 31, 20223 yr by AJZip

4 minutes ago, AJZip said:

and for the VR settings, DLSS on but with TAA,

You can either have DLSS or TAA but not both enabled at the same time. Which one are you using in VR?

1 hour ago, Reset XPDR said:

You can either have DLSS or TAA but not both enabled at the same time. Which one are you using in VR?

Apols - my bad terminology.  In VR I am using TAA.  In 2D it is set at DLSS / Quality.  I am using DX11 (I get micro judders with DX12 even with all the same settings as above)