VR - experimental support

[plykkegaard]

... both my games crash when I try to load my profile.

Please pot your game log when a crash occurs, it is probably something else other than VR

[Utgard]

Hi Guys,

I'm new to ATS/VR and looking for help/tips and tricks.
I'm following this guide - https://youtu.be/4j3WsycbPU4
I'm able to play the game in VR, but it's a bit pixelated and the quality is low.
I did some changes in my ATS config file:
uset r_msaa "0"
uset r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale "2"

In Oculus Rift S:
Аsynchronous Spacewarp - Disabled

My Rig:
Oculus Rift
I5 9600k
32GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 1070

Am I missing something here?

Cheers

[FormelLMS]

Rise your supersampling as far as your graphics card could handle. It’s the only way you can get a good image. Shadows and lines always look bad.

[PioneerX]

I have over 90hours in the game now with all but one of them in VR. I love the experiance of ETS2, it's very medative for me. I love to drive but dont get much chance since I work from home so no commute.

Anyway when I got the game I read a lot of things about how best to setup for VR to get the best experiance. At the time I was running i9-4970K, 16GB RAM, Samsung EVO840 SSD and Asus ROG GTX1060 6G. I did notice that the game stuttered in VR (Rift CV1) from time to time. I ran OculusTrayTool to turn off AWS and manually set SuperSampling to 1.5. I have the settings in game set to high in most cases (low for mirrors & shadows), AA turned off and SSAO disabled. I have now completely rebuilt my machine with newer hardware and expected a better result......am I expecting too much?

The new machine...

AMD Ryzen 9 3600X
32GB Corsair Vengence RAM (Ryzan approved)
512GB M600 NVMe SSD (PCIe gen4)
RTX 2080 SUPER (latest nvidia driver)

Even with the game settings the same I still get he same stuttering especally in fast moving scenes or towns (the same with Mods enabled or disabled). Running OculusTrayTools performance overlay I see that that stuttering conicides with frame rate drops and that my 'performance overhead' is always 0% or negative. Running HWiNFO64 shows that my GPU is running at ~76% capacity while in game yet I still get the issues. I expected a RTX2080S to handle the CV1 better but doesnt seem to the be the case, I'm now worried that performance and quality will get even worse when I ask it to run on the HP Revert G2 arriving in october.

Can anyone point me in the direction of where my issue might be coming from as I just cant seem to work it out?

Thanks

PS: Even with SS set to 1.0 I get the frame drops and performance overhead in negative numbers

[electricz]

Hey Pioneer, I've got a less powerful rig than you and get pretty smooth performance with most of the gfx settings set to high or ultra. (i7 7600 w/regular 2080, ss set to 1.7 in the config file) What I would do to troubleshoot is to lower all of your settings to the absolute minimum and see if you still get the stutters. If it's still bad, concentrate on your Oculus setup. If it's smooth, go down the settings screen and start bumping up each one and see if you can isolate a particular one that's tripping up your system. It's a pain in the butt, but you might find one in particular that you can leave off and still maximize your experience. Good luck!

[keem85]

Q: Also, if I set Weather to High or Ultra, the stereo reflections of cars and landscapes on the road are duplicated, looking really weird in stereo VR.

A: Currently there is a known issue with the rain reflection when using OpenVR. The game renders the reflection just once and uses it for both views without any reprojection which breaks if each eye has a different FOV values. Oculus API supports overriding the FOV values so the game can force a symmetrical ones however OpenVR does not have such capability.

Is this something that can be fixed in the ETS2 engine itself? Since you say it's a known issue, is it fixable, or is it just an unlucky "feature" of OpenVR we just have to live with?
I'm currently owning an Oculus Rift S, but I use OpenVR for D-BOX motion compensation, that's why I prefer OpenVR over Oculus API.

[JonDadley]

PioneerX, I seem to remember that ETS2 is 'CPU bound' in certain instances (in cities for instance) meaning that the bottleneck is the CPU. I may be wrong but I don't _think_ that ETS2 is a highly threaded game either so it's unlikely having a CPU with many cores will help especially either. Again, this is information I'm half-remembering so I may be wrong but if that is the case, there are changes that would need to be made at the engine level by SCS and even getting an RTX 3090 wouldn't solve the problem.

[PioneerX]

Thanks for the feedback all. I have done some testing and found that almost all settings make very little difference with 2 key exceptions.....These two are the SuperSampling and the Texture Quality. Making changes to almost all the other settings makes very little difference but the stuttering occurs (frame drops) when large amounts of textures are loaded or moving fast within the scene. This shows itself most moticably in cities as the number of textures is much more than on the open road (especally if you have traffic).

My game is not CPU bound but does seem to like to reside on a single core (not maxing it out though), however I do see large spikes in the use of VRAM while in cities (sometime maxing out the 8GB or my RTX2080S). This is where the trade-off between SS and texture quality comes in. If texture quality is reduced then the load time of textures and the usage of VRAM is also reduced leaving more time to process the scene. I personally like the game to run with as high texture quality as I can and then reduce the SS to a point where the stuttering is at an acceptable level. I have been unable to eliminate it in large builtup areas with traffic (unless I reduce the texture quality to what is for me an unacceptable level).

So what is my conclusion.....well all my evidence is anacdotal so I cant really conclude too much but what I can say is that for my specific setup the best settings are.....

SSAO : Medium
SuperSampling (via OculusTrayTool) : 1.4
TextureQuality : High
Mirror Quality : Low
All other settings : High

I still get dropped frames (between 1 & 6 frames at a time) in most cities but I can see this is not a GPU (never goes above 85%) or CPU (never above 90%) overload but appears to be wait time on texture loading. Everywhere else the game is butter smooth. I have to assume that this is something to do with the way the graphics engine is managing the texture cache as pulling the data from the NVMe (PCIe Gen4) shouldnt be the bottleneck give it's read speeds.

For those interested this is what my system actually benches at https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/33042709

As for how this will run once I get my new headset (HP Reverb G2) I looked into that too. OculusTrayTool's SuperSampling setting actually effects the 'PixelDensity' parameter. The CV1 panel resolution (both eyes combined) is 2160x1200 however the default pixeldensity of 1 renders 1600x1344 at the scene. With my current 1.4 setting the scene render resolution is 2224x1872. The G2's native resolution is 4320x2160 so equal to a 2.7 SS setting on a CV1 headset. In order to drive this I may need to drop SS to 1 and TextureQuality in order to maintain the framerate. I guess time will tell.

[Komat]

Is this something that can be fixed in the ETS2 engine itself? Since you say it's a known issue, is it fixable, or is it just an unlucky "feature" of OpenVR we just have to live with?

It is fixable however it requires a large change to how that effect works. It will be fixed eventually.

[electricz]

50 MB update to the Oculus branch on Steam... Bugfixes from the main branch, or something else?