With VR I'm seeing flight sims in a new way!

[Lewis - A2A]

The VR the HP Reverb can give is like going from a CRT to a 4k monitor at times. Its out of this world amazing, but as noted its power hungry to push that many pixels even within the VR industry. If you go that route, id love to hear your thoughts.

thanks,
Lewis - A2A

[vtracy]

WILCO, Lewis and LouP!
BTW: My PC has a GTX1080ti with 11GB DRAM. Is that enough? What does the 2080(ti) give me more that the 1080ti?
So far, i. e. flying with my Oculus Rift, I seem to have no shudders, even when flying at 100ft over land or water. My i/7700K ist at 4.6GHz, and I use SSDs only for everything.
Again, so far, even the additional load by the video capture software has not lead to noticeable performance degradation.
Its more the functioning of the Video Capture software (Movavi Gecata) that annoyed me; it crashed and did not 'close' the videostream properly. Result: My VLC cannot read/open the 2.6GB file.
I had hoped to capture such a nice flight in my Spit! Manston - Calais and back, all at treetop height! When I tried to edit the stream, it failed
So, I will try elgato (external box) next time. Or OBS Studio... Any suggestions?
Volker

[Lewis - A2A]

When I dipped my toes into streaming I used OBS, it was free and easy to use. I would totally recommend it for streaming and/or video capture. I only stopped streaming when I moved to an area with an upload speed that wouldn't allow me to stream.

cheers,
Lewis

[vtracy]

What?! In the south of England? I'm in Eastbourne once every year (Glyndebourne) and I am used to good quality WLAN.
Hmpf!
Volker

[Hook]

I've got a VR question.

I use external programs for various things. SkyVector.com gives me real world charts, I previously used FS_FlightControl for airport diagrams so I could find my parking spots. Next flight will use Little NavMap.

How do these work with VR? Do they show up in the VR world or do you have to remove the headset to view them?

I'm trying to find out how to do the things I normally do in the sim in VR, or what people use as alternate methods.

Hook

[BrettT]

Hook,

If you use Fly Inside for your VR in FSX or P3D you can bring in windows from your desktop and interact with it with the mouse. It even has a button you can use to turn the windows off and on within the VR viewport to declutter and you can resize and zoom in with it in the VR viewport. If you are using an Occulus headset they have there own way of doing this through their software though I am not certain of the limitations and have no experience with it.

Hope this helps,

Brett

[vtracy]

@Hook,
I read and/or saw (in youtube) somewhere that if you use FlyInside, you can open an additional windoe displaying checklists etc. and place it on your copilot's seat.
I have not done that yet. So far, I have used the native VR built-in P3Dv4; but I may be forced to use FI because I want to be able to klick on switches etc. during flight, in VR.
But that is a next step.
Volker

[Skycat]

Regarding Oculus+FlyInside for FSX Steam, all of the VR interface happens within FlyInside. I think the Oculus suite needs to run in the background so the headset and hand controllers can function. Otherwise, the Oculus suite is invisible to the FSX user.

I have nothing to compare the Rift S to, so with "not knowing what I don't know" I can only say the Rift S provides a fantastic experience. After reading reviews of it vs. other systems I still think the Rift S was a solid choice for my current hardware. But I also foresee getting a whole new system in a few years and it will be interesting to see how the VR industry advances.

[LouP]

One of the many things I like about the HP is that it is designed to flip up very easily. It comes in handy when I want to take a peak at my monitors to check a map or other program like FierfighterX .

LouP

[vtracy]

@louP,
or to avoid having to blindly feel for the right key on the keyboard...
Volker

[Alfredson007]

I am tempted to buy Rift S as my first VR device. However currently i only have poorish PC, i5 4670k 16gb ram and 1070gtx. Can anyone tell me can i get good experience in lighter sims such as afs2 and warthunder? And i mean proper stable 80fps with good detail.

I am planning to upgrade my PC when fs2020 is launched, then move to better sims as DCS world and fs2020 if it has VR support.

Thanks

[Skycat]

I found this elsewhere on the web:

Oculus Rift S minimum PC requirements
•OS: 64-bit Windows 10.
•CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200, FX4350 or greater.
•RAM: 8GB.
•GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti / Radeon RX 470 or greater.
•USB Ports: 1 USB 3.0 .
•Compatible miniDisplayPort video output (miniDisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter included with Rift S)

Oculus Rift S recommended PC requirements
•OS: 64-bit Windows 10.
•CPU: Intel i5 4590 / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or greater.
•RAM: 8GB.
•GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 480 or greater.
•USB Ports: 1 USB 3.0 .
•DisplayPort video output

Having a higher-end setup for the Oculus Rift S makes a significant difference in overall quality, so while the minimum requirements you see here for the Rift S will absolutely get the job done, you may want to aim a little higher. With the recommended hardware, you'll notice better lighting effects and much faster interactivity when switching between the Rift UI and whatever game or app you're in, making the entire experience feel that much more natural and immersive.

-------------------------------------
Somewhat related, check out Beartooth's comments on Rift S vs. HP Reverb on his older i7/1080ti machine.

[Alfredson007]

I believe those requirements are for casual vr games such as beat sabre etc

[Skycat]

@alfredson007,

It looks like our CPUs are fairly close, with tradeoffs: i7-4790 vs i5-4670k

Your graphics card beats mine: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 vs Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 EVGA FTW.

We both have 16GB RAM.

I can't speak to performance for the games you mentioned, but I've been able to dogfight and strafe ground targets in IL-2 Great Battles without much problem with 'judders' or other display anomalies. DCS has hiccup moments depending on what map I use but it is mostly stable in free flight and instant action modes, and I fly with higher than recommended scenery settings and leave chimney smoke and shadows turned on. FSX with FlyInside is also usually mostly stable but it can suffer from dense scenery and/or complex aircraft models. Probably none are running 80 fps in the simulator with or without VR, I know FSX isn't, but perception-wise I'm not feeling cheated if that makes any sense...

[AerialShorts]

I love VR and can never go back to monitors for flying and driving. There are quirks, though. Keyboards and other peripherals you need to look at are tough in VR. For me, a Thrustmaster Warthog helps to keep my hands in the cockpit and minimizes having to peek through nose gaps or feel for key bumps.

VR rendering tries to hit a target framerate. If a frame isn’t going to be ready in time to display it gets dropped and the last completed frame gets stretched and shifted using the new head position to approximate the layout of the frame-to-be that was dropped (reprojection), but being old data it may not line up properly. You can see this effect if you are dropping frames and look at your leading edge against the tarmac popping forward and back as you taxi or scenery twitching behind a spinning prop. Motion smoothing forces those intermediate frames and helps VR with slower computers maintain good frame rates but those visual discontinuities are the result.

For those new or considering VR, the best experience comes from being able to hit the target frame rate without reprojection especially in scenes where there are big relative motions - the norm in low aircraft or fast cars. In headsets that allow selecting the desired frame rate it can be better to just go with a lower frame rate with no reprojection than to try to go high and get lots of reprojection. Don’t be shy about turning down visual detail to get solid framerate, either. Skipped and reprojected frames can be jarring even when you don’t really notice them.

High native frame rates are the bedrock of good experiences. I also run a Valve Index and much prefer 120 fps over the more standard 90 but just can’t do it in everything. There is a whole other quality to 120 fps that can only be described as “feels more solid” or “feels more real” but it’s hard to do.

Resolution is important especially in detailed cockpits but high resolution makes it hard to hit high frame rates. That’s the only thing that keeps me from springing for the HP Reverb. 2160x2160 (Pro) per eye is a siren song. The Valve Index I run is 1440x1600 per eye, acceptable but I keep holding out hope the industry will get us the best of both worlds with high resolution displays but only render at high resolution where we are looking - where it matters - with eye tracking and foveated rendering. That’s the real solution for better VR without requiring multi-thousand dollar computers to run it.

It all takes lots of horsepower especially in simulations. The 900 series Nvidia cards are missing a very key feature for VR where scene is rendered once and each eye view gets cut out of that scene - single-pass rendering. The 900 series has to render each scene for each eye which really bogs performance. The 10 series has single-pass rendering while the 20 series has better performance overall and multi-view rendering which is better for displays that are canted (Pimax/Index) instead of coplanar. I don’t know if current software uses multi-view rendering or not, though.

There are firming rumors of 3000 series Nvidia cards with a 7nm finFET process that are even taking special manufacturing techniques to meet signal integrity requirements at the higher data rates being used within the cards. Backdrilling vias to eliminate reflections is one thing I just saw being discussed as board partners ramp up for the new cards. The details don’t matter for us but it shows the new chips may bring a significant jump in performance. Pricing not announced (or even cards/chips for that matter) but with a significantly smaller feature size, chips will be smaller which reduces cost. Special manufacturing increases costs, though.

As for CPUs, the best single thread performance and not so much more cores probably still wins, but as programmers work around processor bottlenecks and better utilize multiple cores, more cores will become more important. They are parallel computers just sitting there waiting to be used. The Windows Task Manager is handy for seeing how lopsided or not loading is on CPU cores. But for applications that basically bury one core and leave others unused, you want virtualization turned off in BIOS. Virtualization pretends there are twice as many cores as there are physical cores and periodically swaps a process running on a core out so another process can be swapped in. That hurts processes that keep a core buried since there is no free time to spare. It just slows it down.

VR is unfortunately a bit complex if you want to push performance. There is lots to know and lots of knobs and handles to adjust - oversampling, supersampling, antialiasing, texture resolution, etc, but you can get significant improvements if you experiment. The effort is worth it, though. You can usually get a frame rate display and see the effects settings have and optimize your own rig.

Just putting this out there for those interested. It’s daunting but VR is so worth it. For me it’s now somewhat jarring to take the headset off and leave my fantasy world of flight and racing. What makes it ok is I can always go back. I think there is literally an aspect of escapism and addiction to VR. I love it.