glider1

The monitor fps setting in flyinside is just for the external monitor. It does not have any other function on the sim or the headset. I had my external monitor set to 1 FPS but found that 15FPS didn't load my GPU down too much. We don't need a very high monitor FPS because we aren't using the monitor for simming, just for setting up the simulator before flying. If you put the monitor on unlimited, that means the GPU is driving the external monitor really hard as well as the headset. That would be too much. I run at 4K supersample and almost all the important shadows as well as ultra water including receive shadows for simobjects. All those settings are GPU intensive settings. Doing that makes the GPU run at 100% but temps on water keep it at less than 60c on a 2.1GHZ overclock and there is no headset stutter even after many hours. Your idle temp of 64c is too high in my opinion. Boot up your PC from cold and watch the GPU temps when it is running the desktop only. There is no way it should be on 65c for doing that. If it is, there is something wrong with it in my humble opinion. It should be 35c tops under no load. If the GPU get's too hot, it will cause stuttering and even crashes. I would expect an aircooled 1080 to comfortably run default settings but upsampled to 4K res. Beginning to suspect something with your card.

I'm not at the PC now so can't test. The monitor settings you want as low as practical since your GPU is having to drive both the headset and the monitor and the headset FPS is far more important than the monitor FPS. You could try reducing the FOV field of view right down to see if that cures your stutters. For the purposes of testing, lock your internal frame rate at 30. ATW should work very well in the gap between 90 fps headset and 30 fps sim. For the purposes of testing, fly the exact same scenario on your 2D monitor with VR off and compare performance. It is possible that some sceneries cause the sim to stutter, which is easily confused with headset stutter when it is actually sim stutter. I'm a bit concerned about how hot your 1080 is running that could be a factor. You mentioned it is at 100% load and 80 degs C? Mine is 90-100% load at 54 degrees C. If it over heats it could cause all kinds of throttling issues that end up as stutter. Try running flyinside without upsampling to see whether the half second screen lock goes away when the GPU is under less load.

Are you distinguishing between the headset FPS and the simulator FPS? In your posts you seem to be talking more about simulator FPS. With the 1080 all that will happen is that it will lock to a headset FPS of 90-93 almost all the time. The simulator FPS is only marginally improved because it is largely CPU limited. The 1080 might allow you to turn on more GPU intensive settings compared to the 980ti. At the end of the day, the 1080 is there for maintaining full headset FPS lock. A 980ti will probably not hold the headset FPS lock as often as the 1080 does. It is just a matter of degrees and what CPU load you have on the simulator.

I have the Rift but principal is the same. If you can't improve it with the brightness/darkness/saturation settings in Flyinside, it is time for you to try the PTA tweak assistant. http://1coder.ru/PTA/ The results improve the night depiction in VR so much both day and night. (EDIT: but not the actual light sources, just ground textures and shadows) All the tips you use for PTA apply to VR except not to use any of the HDR tweaks on the HDR tab. Read this forum: http://www.avsim.com/topic/489018-prepar3d-tweak-assistant-pta/page-1 EDIT: Sorry, I just realised you were talking specifically about night lighting sources in P3D. PTA mod does not help with that.

PTA is a shader tweak you can use to adjust things like texture and shadow brightness. It's not worth stuffing around with on VR until everything else is sorted. The perception of brightness is different for everyone. For me, Rift is far from ideal but just barely good enough to stick with VR permanently and pack away the monitor for good. It will be interesting to decide whether to go leap motion or wait for the rift touch controllers. Leap motion sounds ideal but I worry about the CPU consumption. Cheers

Yeah it would have been too dark for me as well because flying GA and gliders I do like natural looking light levels. But since Flyinside 1.6 you can control brightness and saturation in the settings. I turn brightness up on full inside Flyinside settings then use PTA shader on default settings except turn off the options in the HDR tab. I also have a 1080 so can turn on most of the shadows to get back the overcast-sunshine brightness effects they give. Doing that gets the Rift brightness up to a minimum acceptable levels for me personally. It's the same deal with the resolution, 4K supersampling inside flyinside gives minimum acceptable resolution for GA but you need a decent GPU or SLI rig as well as a decent CPU setup preferably overclocked if you want ORBX. EDIT: It's amazing what they have achieved with the VR headset in terms of brightness considering it is being powered off only a USB port.

I managed to improve the naturalness of the light and scene shade by using the PTA tweaker reshader and turned off any HDR options. It's very acceptable now.

Yeah, that res will be working your 980ti really hard probably too hard to keep it judder free. The 1080 is in theory only what 30% faster? but in reality for VR it makes more difference than that. Once you get your 1080, try locking the sim on 30fps and leaving it there. I even locked it at 25fps and been happy with the smoothness even when the aircraft is turning, because the async time warp still works (huge difference between 90fps in headset and 25fps in the sim). I don't understand how, but it does. So the upside is that VR uses a 1080's full capacity and the depiction is smooth. The downside is that the resolution is on the very lower limit of acceptability on 4K supersampling but good enough on ORBX for the fact that you are seeing the world in 1:1 scale no matter where you look. The downside is that the 4W limit of USB 3.0 means that the luminance of any headset in the forseeable future is going to be limited unless they change the power source driving the displays. On a TV flatscreen the luminance can sometimes mimic day time brightness. In VR, you always have to imagine that you are wearing pretty strong sunglasses (which you do in the real world anyway). I have all the brightness /darkness settings turned up in flyinside, saturation left on medium setting. It is ok, but nothing in VR really shines bright like in the real world. The screen power input is just too low to mimic real world brightness unless they build in a battery in the headset or develop a new VR connector standard that can supply more power. Despite the drawbacks, I'm sticking with VR. It's not just that depiction is 3D, but that the world scale is 1:1 as it appears to your brain no matter where you look.

Yeah if you want 4K resolution upsampling in Flyinside to get bare minimum acceptable resolution for Orbx sceneries, a 1080 or SLI 980ti would be the way to go. (EDIT: the GTX970 minimum spec is for very basic sceneries flying a simple pattern at an FSX default airport). I made the decision to go VR and went straight to the Gigabyte 1080 waterforce. On a i6700k OC47 rig that enables me to fly over dense cities at 25 sim frames and locked solid 90fps VR frames. At 4K upsampled, the 1080 will be working near 100% most of the time but watercooled it sits at a low and stable 54degsC overclocked to 2GHZ. Can set most of the GPU heavy settings back to how I had it on flat panel including most of the useful shadows. No stuttering in VR smooth as. Much smoother than flat panel and incomparably better than trackIR. I don't think watercooling is necessary though. Aircooled temps might be a bit higher but shouldn't be a problem. Main problem for me was that aircooled would pump too much heat into my case for the situation I am in (not much ventilation around the case). The main hardware weak link in the chain is the CPU main sim job which can mean frames down to 25fps in the sim but without vsync/trackir issues 25fps is still really nice for most types of GA flying when the headset is pumping out 90fps. However I am running 20% road traffic and good amounts of air traffic and with those turned down 30fps would be normal. Flew over Melbourne city at night in the Rift. Wow! The city comes to life with the road traffic. The main software weak link in the chain is Flyinside windows import for putting your flightplan and maps on the seat next to you in the plane. That feature is still in beta (edit: in my opinion). It works but it has lots of issues in flyinside 1.6. I can only set my radios with a detailed PDF flightplan at the beginning of the flight. Then I turn off the PDF window import and use the internal sim panels like the kneeboard.

Be really cautious about that headset. 60Hz is too low for VR according to the theory.

Yep, that is probably because of GPU issues if you have up-sampled too high (like the 3840 whatever setting is). It won't be the simulator. To isolate simulator stutter from headset stutter, put your plane in a turn over the scenery you fly and keep your head still. If the terrain stutters during the turn, that is because the CPU is overloaded. Unlimited frame rate is good if you are flying in a straight line most of the time. Problem with unlimited frame comes when you need to do a lot of turning, because then the frame rate will fluctuate wildly as the scenery moves. Locking the frame rate internally is fine in VR. Don't be put off by locking at 25fps because in VR 25fps is still smooth since the underlying framerate of the headset is (should be) locked on 90fps. 25 frames a second is 1/25 of a second slices which is even good enough for aerobatics. In combat simulators, 25fps would be too low though.

Well done for pushing through the rebuilding of your VR system. It inspires me as I also do the same. I think VR is actually designed for people that want to fly GA. Tube liner pilots really don't need VR. On the sharpening/clarity side of things, the resolution of both vive and rift are the same. The only possible difference is if there is something in the focus mechanism of either headset that improves focusing. Here is the crunch. I'm almost sure that if people want to fly ORBX quality scenery in VR, they are going to need either an SLI rig or a preferably overclocked 1080. The reason is that the image quality is just barely acceptable on FlyInside max resolution (3840 res). Any graphics card lower than those specs would be fine for default scenery without adding a lot of shadows etc but not Orbx scenery. On a water cooled 1080, I'm finding that the Rift can lock to 90fps pretty much everywhere and on full P3D GPU settings (not the CPU settings) including most shadows. You have to split your thinking between CPU and GPU limits. In VR they are largely separate problems. On my overclocked i6700k I have had to drop from 35 internal limit to 25 internal limit to keep the same CPU settings in P3D (traffic etc). This is exactly what Dan said would happen. Flyinside chops off 20% or so in CPU limited simulator frames. BUT. Since the headset framerate is locked on 90 (GPU), head panning is so smooth with no stuttering or juddering, that it doesn't matter if the simulator is internally locked at only 25. All the eye strain I used to get on flat screen, was because I was focusing on a flat image close to my head that stutters away on a low GPU frame rate as well as low CPU framerate with all sorts of monitor refresh dramas and TrackIR dramas that go along with a flatscreen. In the Rift, I'm finding that focusing on infinity is much more relaxing for my eyes, my distance vision is improving in the real world, and because the flyinside GPU frames are locked at 90 on my 1080 rig, there is virtually no eye strain. The other really good thing is that since we don't need Vsync, there is no input lag problem, and locking the sim internally at 25fps is actually very smooth and responsive (for the purposes of general aviation). At 25fps internal lock, the CPU can keep up better with the work load and you can start adding more CPU intensive stuff like traffic. Best of luck with setting up VR. Honestly, if you want ORBX and visuals similar to how you had it on a monitor (but with just barely acceptable resolution clarity) an SLI rig or 1080 preferably overclocked rig is needed so that you can enable the flyinside 4xoversampling and lock to 90fps headset frames. NOTE: the flyinside "import panels" feature can have a seriously bad impact on frame rates. I only use the built in simulator panels (kneeboard etc). Importing panels is too much load on frame rates unless you are flying in default scenery or on lower upscaling resolutions.

The Rift ATW framerate is on the right. Yours is showing 48. That is too low. It should be 90 maybe down to 75. The number on the left is the simulator FPS. Yours is 46. You don't need it that high. Suggest heading over to Flyinside forums and also getting back to basics. Use default flyinside settings; making sure the frame rates are correct; Only one external monitor connected to the GPU. Later on, you can tune the AA and reduce blurries once everything is stable and you totally have your head around the software and what and what isn't possible.

It is early days for me as well on VR. I knew the resolution would be the downside and it was humbling to have spent so much money on my rig to get a resolution that is equivalent to what we were seeing a decade a go on cathode ray tubes. People underestimate how much the brain adapts though. I made the decision to push through the low res pain barrier and now find that there are many more upsides than downsides - heaps more. The resolution on VR is pretty good! I'm not making any suggestion on single 1080 verses two 980ti's, just offering the suggestion that plonking in a second 980 might be cheap and quick and simple to get more power. Depends on how much money you have. A single 1080 was the way I went because I had come from a GTX760! On lighting, I have got cloud shadows, cockpit shadows turned on and am happy. Not sure about terrain shadows yet. HDR is missing but honestly it is only a small loss. As for the other eye candies, it is so ironic! With the lower resolution you don't need really high eye candy. We were obsessing about all the eye candy because we looking at a flat panel like a dissatisfied painter looks at a painting and unconsciously thinking "oooh this painting needs more houses or more trees" when in fact we were actually dissatisfied because we were not inside the simulation but looking at it from the outside. Resolution scaling is in the Flyinside settings it works like DSR does. On the 1080 I currently am running the Rift as if it were on 3840 whatever 4K res it is. Flyinside then downscales it back to the resolution of the headset. One of the other Avsimmers has two 980ti's and is doing the same plus SGSS 4 AA. I think too much AA is no good because it merely converts the depiction from being blocky to blurry. Blurry is not what you want either. What you want is your brain to accept what it sees as normal and good. That is what it is to be inside the simulation which you are on VR. Accept the depiction and then go flying. Affinity mask situation has not changed much in VR. The main sim job carries an extra burden in VR and so as the documentation says, there is a 20-50% hit on frames depending how you set up your settings. In VR we don't need all the eye candy so moderately good settings are more than enough to recover the extra frame hit. For me, I think there was only a 20% hit tops on an i6700kOC4.7GHZ. I used to be an Affinity junky. I tried them all. I don't need to worry about VAS personally so I use HT and let P3D control the affinity itself. The one thing that is really important is to allocate at least a couple of cores to all your addons and get them to run well away from the main sim job. My addons run on LP 6-7 (the last core on only two LPS) including AS2016 and then I let P3D run on whatever else it wants. I am on W10 which might work better on HT in any case. Forget about VSYNC. That settings was for flat screen monitors. In the Rift, ATW is all that matters. There is some talk that you want to get the simulator running at a fraction multiple of the ATW. So if the ATW is 90, put the simulator on 30 or 45. I don't think it matters much. The way to think of it is that the ATW keeps the head panning totally smooth if it can maintain it's own frame rate of 75-90. The simulation frame rate keeps the simulation smooth and nothing else. Putting the simulator on unlimited may or may not keep the simulator running smooth. For me, it doesn't. I'm still experimenting. Realise that we don't have any ability to run an external frame rate limiter in VR, but that doesn't matter since ATW is keeping the panning much smoother than anything we have seen before, and then just set the simulator up to run itself smoother. 25FPS internal limit is also reasonable. It depends on what you need. If you are flying in a straight line most of the time, you only need 25FPS. I fly VR gliders and so a lot of the time in a turn, I want a higher FPS but I fly in rural areas so a higher FPS is fine. In a tight turn, the pixels on the screen have to travel a further distance so a 30FPS limit flying straight a head appears more like 15FPS in a turn even when it is still locked on 30FPS. On EZDOK, I just don't run the executable and let P3D rebuild the cameras.cfg and let flyinside rebuild it's own P3D config. EZDOK is off if the executable is not running and there are no special camera settings. I have not uninstalled EZDOK. I haven't touched the aircraft.cfg's. You only need to do that if you are not happy with the default seating position in VR. In my case I fly A2A and an Aerosoft ASK21 which is already perfect for VR. I do reset the seating position with CTRL-space when I feel like it and other internal P3D keys for adjusting my position with respect to the cockpit. Give yourself a few sessions. Hopefully you will come through the pain barrier the better for it. It has taken me at least two three full days to set up P3D settings and buttons so that I am happy in VR flying without needing to look at buttons in the real world, but feel it like braille.

Same here. I'm sticking with VR too, the benefits outweigh the resolution drop. Just to mention one I didn't expect, in VR, you really notice the light level changing at sunrise/sunset very much like you would in the real world which is really immersive. On setting it up, definitely put all your P3D config settings back to default. Since I was running EZDOK, I had to remove my camera config and remove the Flyinside P3D config file and let the software rebuild fresh new copies. Since VSYNC is irrelevant in VR, you only have to worry about either running unlimited or limited frames inside P3D take your pick. I have chosen to limit the frames. I don't think there is much point in affinity mask unless on your hex core you are worried about VAS. If you are getting flashing, could be GPU struggling. I think you might want to remove the SGSS settings in NI and put it all back to default. I use the resolution scaling tool in flyinside for AA smoothing. There is a setting in flyinside for adjusting ATW that reduces the framerate but removes the flashing. You might also want to look into picking up a second hand 980ti to complement your first GPU since flyinside supports SLI. You do have a 1000W PSU so should be fine. I'm running a Rift on a single 1080 and it allows me to have good settings including the most important shadows. You have the right plan by making sure your hardware setup is thoroughly stable so that you can isolate any issues to particular software settings.

It still does work with P3D3.3 but only an older version. Think the version you want is 1.331. It still works for me but I think it doesn't work for everyone. There is also a payware recorder - forgot the name. I do use the built in instant replay as well. Pity that the newer FSRecorder versions are busted with P3D.

Great news Skywolf it is good to have a person crossing over from flyinside group and avsim. I've taken the plunge on the rift and will stay inside P3D from now one. Have even managed to be able to boot the computer straight into P3D/flyinside 1.6 with the headset and have a dummy flatscreen monitor plugged in and turned off under the table (personally don't need it). Really like the way flyinside gives you access to the virtual desktop without needing another program to do that. Although the drop in resolution and image quality is exactly as dramatic as what the community have said it would be, all in all I'm sticking with the VR benefits which exceed the loss in eye-candy for me. It is a really expensive hobby though! Biggest problem with the Rift is that I need an air-conditioned room other wise the headset fogs up. Using the rift reminds me of snorkeling!

It is great news about SLI support. Did you get the brightness/contrast/colour controls working in 1.6 flyinside? Let's keep fingers crossed that HDR support will happen one day.

Yep. One good way of seeing what controls are possible for avatar is to go into P3D settings->controls and in the search box type "avatar". I think running is crtl+shift+E for avatar then R. I'm constantly running around in Avatar even in 2D. I've ordered the Rift its in the mail. I'm committed to 3D now!

Good to hear Skywolf. I use first person Avatar all the time even in 2D. It is better than worldview in Ezdok because the Avatar stays in correct height with the ground no matter where you go. Have fun and run up a mountain in the Rift or jump out of a plane and skydive Avatar man in first person! What about shadows? Which shadows either don't work or are unusable in P3D in your opinion?

Thanks for that KTFO. How about first person avatar mode? Like the way it puts your head at about the correct height of an average adult inside the 3D world. Replays with the plane flying over your head should be good.

Wildlife+ does have an effect even on modern PC's because the sim objects it injects end up being managed by the main sim job (usually core zero) which is already busy managing the sim. Even a 12 core processor is being bottlenecked by the work done by the main sim job on the first assigned core. But it works brilliantly in rural/wilderness areas which is exactly what it was designed for. What Wildlife+ users need to do in rural areas is make sure they limit their frame-rate so that the main sim job isn't flooded with work pumping out an unnecessary 60+ frame-rate in rural areas. If the main sim job is overworked pumping out high fps, their simulator goes into stutter. Typically the main sim job needs to be sitting at 50%-70% or so load in rural wilderness area for Wildlife+ to have no effect on smoothness. On my i6700k OC4.7, I find that a 35-50fps limit keeps the load on the main sim job down low enough in ORBX rural sceneries. Another cool feature is that it can be turned on-off in the sim and the quantity and type of sim objects controlled through the interface.

Thanks Skywolf nicely put. Do try Avatar mode if you can. It is working really well in the latest P3D. It used to be bugged but is now a really useful way for interacting with the world and seeing your replays in 3rd person. You turn it on under general settings and then use a hot key to switch back and forth from pilot to avatar view. There are also a few keys for moving around. They are all listed in the control settings if you search for avatar. It would be a great feature to know if you can view the VR world in the Rift from the Avatar's perspective.

So Skywolf what you are saying can be summarised as this: the immersion the Rift brings by far exceeds the loss in eye candy. Good summary? Can you switch into the Avatar and see the world from the Avatar's point of view in the Rift?

There are many apps for that now. I use Dxtory. I'm not sure it even matters what app you use? I think that for the 10XX series GPU's, resolution is not the limiting factor because our frame rates are usually not pegged to 60Hz. In P3D we are usually forced to run a lower frame rate because of the CPU, and so the GPU has plenty of headroom. I bought the 1080 because I need the GPU headroom for VR. Limiting to 30Hz (1/2 refresh) can be done any number of ways. I'm currently using an external limiter (Dxtory) with VSync and TB enabled in P3D and adaptive 1/2 refresh set in NCP. The advantage of that is the main sim job has less chance of overloading to cause microstutters. Disadvantage is that the sim job can fall asleep too much and cause slow loading textures. I personally find 30Hz too low for smoothness and find custom ways to bump it up to 32-35 range still locked to monitor refresh rate. The bottle neck in P3D is totally the CPU. All LM have to do is offload more CPU to our 10xx series and we will then see much better performance. Our problem will come when in a couple of years or so, when P3D is a genuine 60Hz simulator but our 10XX won't be able to run full eye candy. The simulator is not even close to that yet though. At that stage, all we will have to do is buy a cheap second hand 10XX card and SLI our system.