VR - experimental support

[KingOfTheRoad77]

I have "-openvr" in front of everything else.

[KingOfTheRoad77]

Well, today, a new 4080 arrived, and I did some last trials, comparing one last time 3080, 4080 and 4090.

tldr;
=> I'll go for the 4080.

Only benchmarking route: Dallas-Lufkin, all settings as before.
Except: OpenXR FSR 99% (instead of 90%) => as close as possible to image quality of 100% (90% does look quite blurry already in VR), but hopefully a bit more performant than 100%.

FPS Results (this time without a graph )

GPU: FSR 90% / FSR 99%

3080: 60 / 55
4080: 68 / 66
4090: 70 / 69

In the past days, I learned to closely watch always in the same specific directions and at same specific objects along the route while passing them by.
Of course, the 4090 did it the best, outside of cities a lot of areas with stable 75 FPS already (though some stutter still occur now and then). But the 4080 isn't so much away from it, although it can't maintain it everywhere where the 4090 does. But when talking about the 3080 - not one single second (feeling) with stable 75 FPS -, already the 4080 is a big big gain. It already maintains smooth 75 FPS at the crossroad next to my starting point, all cars passing by without a single stutter - whereas the 3080 just provides stutter, stutter, stutter with every single vehicle.

I think, with a little bit of tweaking in the in-game settings and perhaps a slight dose of UV/OC, I can bring it even closer to the 4090's level.
Furthermore, I really hope, SCS will improve the engine somewhen and somehow - implementing FSR 2.0 would be nice, having DirectStorage along with DirectX12 would even be nicer I think.
Last but not least, both - 4080 as well as 4090 - still do not reach stable 75 FPS always and everywhere. But if one day, due to engine improvements, the 4090 would reach stable 75 FPS, the 4080 already is close enough to reach it as well. It's not that far away - +10-15% would already be sufficient most of the time.

So, at least for a Pimax 8K-X, I think the 4080 is a little more reasonable and cost-efficient - although I'd gladly keep the 4090 if it wasn't that much more expensive

[morse]

I have been hoping for a long time to be able to enjoy ETS2 in VR in a smooth and beautiful way, I hoped at the time of oculus DK2. Without stopping trying to upgrade my PC and my VR headsets, I finally reached my goal with a 4090 and the 13th generation of Intel.

I know you mentioned some of your settings in another post, but would it be possible to give a more complete rundown of your settings - Nvidia Control Panel, ETS2 in-game settings, Steam VR settings, as much as you possibly can. I also have a 13700K, (3080ti still waiting on a 4090), and I would really like to get ETS2 running as well as possible too, so anything you can add would be appreciated.

Thank you

[AS1C]

Hi all, is it possible to output in uset o_oculus_mirror_mode "1" not the right and left eye, but a picture in monitor resolution, as it is done in the same Beat Saber. Yeah I know about the existence of oculus mirror, but it's not that and will require more resources compared to inline rendering.

[Appusle]

I have been hoping for a long time to be able to enjoy ETS2 in VR in a smooth and beautiful way, I hoped at the time of oculus DK2. Without stopping trying to upgrade my PC and my VR headsets, I finally reached my goal with a 4090 and the 13th generation of Intel.

I know you mentioned some of your settings in another post, but would it be possible to give a more complete rundown of your settings - Nvidia Control Panel, ETS2 in-game settings, Steam VR settings, as much as you possibly can. I also have a 13700K, (3080ti still waiting on a 4090), and I would really like to get ETS2 running as well as possible too, so anything you can add would be appreciated.

Thank you

I might be of some help to you. as someone who is very sensitive to inconsistent frametimes on a normal monitor, imagine having it in VR... I am using a HP Reverb G2. this has a per eye resolution of 2160x2160 I'm also still tweaking the settings here and there.

My Rig:

CPU: i7 13700K
GPU: EVGA RTX 3080 FTW 3 Ultra Gaming (Can I get a moment of silence for the departure of EVGA? FOr they shall be sorely missed, chased away by the greedy paws of Nvidia.)
RAM: 32GB 3600MT/s CL16

In game settings

Set Everything to its Maximum value beside those below:
Fullscreen: Unticked
Vertical Sync: Off
Scale: 100%
AA: Disabled
DOF: Off
Shadow Quality: High
Mirror Quality: Medium
Mirror Distance: Medium

in SteamVR I am using the following settings:
Advanced Settings: Show
Render Resolution: Custom
Resolution Per Eye: 150%
Advanced Supersample Filter: On
Overlay Render Quality: High

Pre-Aplication Video Settings - This can only be accessed in game. ETS2 is not yet recognized as an official VR game and will only show up in this menu when the game is running.
Resolution Per Eye: 300%
(I am running 500% as a test after using 300% for a while, I see no performance or quality difference so i'm unsure if the resolution is applied at all. I might try to set the Global Resolution Per eye to 500% to see if that does anything.)

Config.CFG
uset o_openvr_interleaved_reproject "0"
uset r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale "1.3" -> Can be any value you like.. this seems to work the best for me though you can try raising it. the higher the value the better the quality of the image but the heavier the load.
uset r_mode_height "1080"
uset r_mode_width "1920"
I am unsure if these last two do anything for quality or perofrmance, I ran this at the lowest resoluton available in the game, all the way up to 2160x2160 and even matching the 6692 x 6548 resolution I saw in SteamVR at 300% but nothing really happened for me.. so do with these 2 settings what you will. I picked 1080P In case I need to use F11, this makes it better readable on my desktop from the Playseat I use.

Source of these settings: viewtopic.php?t=283680
It lists everything, but what I mentioned is that I use given a lot of option he mentioned should be done aren't available anymore, Or haven't found the config file for.(tho with some I decided to not look at all.)
There is a plethora of VR Guides on this forum you can try with different ranges of success.

FSR Mod I use
Then I installed this mod: https://github.com/fholger/openvr_fsr this allows you to upscale the image using FSR.
I am using a render scale of 0,5 this means it halves the resolution essentially, so if you are using lets say, 2000x2000 it renders it at 1000x1000 and upscales it using an AI algorithm with next to no fidelity loss.
This mod is a Must for me. this nearly doubles my framerate (I think, my frametimes go from around 13 to 9MS to around 5 tot 10MS)

This mod is superseded however with this one: https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit
Sadly I have not gotten this one to work, Unsure what I'm doing wrong, it could be that ETS 1.46 is incompatible as I have seen someone doing it successfully on r/trucksim

I also tried messing about with Nvidia Profile Inspector to alter Nvidia's profile of the game. If I remember I will attacht it to this post.
Though, I have seen someone say that ETS/ATS doesn't use this profile at all in VR. although I'm inclined to not believe that. as me forcing a framerate cap using using NPI did work.
Then I will also upload my Config.cfg. so you have exactly my graphical settings as a base.

Relevant side note:

I have no idea how ETS2 works in VR. As mentioned I messed with the resolution scale but it doesn't seem to increase or decrease at all in game.
At 500% I have a SteamVR resolution of 8640x8456. But in game.. it doesn't seem to be applied at all. But in ETS2 I don't see a clear way of knowing if a certain resolution is applied. I have tried restarting steam VR and the game after trying. I do have SteamVR set up to handle OpenVR/XR games also. so this shouldn't be a problem.

I've also noticed the engine is severely under utilising the CPU, it only uses 1 core, and maybe offloads some tasks to other cores but only 1 core is actively being used. my 3080 is always hovering between 60 to 80% GPU utilisation even when the game is struggling. Using the Frame time graph in steam VR I can see that nearly all frames are either missing or delivered late when entering cities and such but on the highway and such the game is really smooth.

To help it I've also read that you should put Motion Smoothing to Force Always On in Per-Application Video settings, but this hasn't worked for me... all it does is halving the frame rate but doesn't exactually fix the slowdowns and such.


TL;DR is that, as it currently stands, you can't expect ETS2 to be 100 smooth. it's not using the hardware available to it effectively and I also feel the current Rendering Engine is very inefficient, especially in VR. Luckily they are working on a new Rendering Engine, but.. this was announced in 2021(iirc) and since then there hasn't been any news about it, I tried looking it up. So, Until this new Rendering Engine is out we have to live with getting it 95% of the way there. But its playable right now at least.

Regards,

Appusle.

EDIT 13-FEB-2023 2:15pm:
Here is a download to the Config.cfg and Nvidia Profile Inspector.
https://mega.nz/file/ccswiSgD#jer-FFfI6 ... g67IoL2b8I

[Uxot]

lmao at my post getting deleted.

[AfxTwn]

[/quote]


I might be of some help to you. as someone who is very sensitive to inconsistent frametimes on a normal monitor, imagine having it in VR... I am using a HP Reverb G2. this has a per eye resolution of 2160x2160 I'm also still tweaking the settings here and there.

My Rig:

CPU: i7 13700K
GPU: EVGA RTX 3080 FTW 3 Ultra Gaming (Can I get a moment of silence for the departure of EVGA? FOr they shall be sorely missed, chased away by the greedy paws of Nvidia.)
RAM: 32GB 3600MT/s CL16

In game settings

Set Everything to its Maximum value beside those below:
Fullscreen: Unticked
Vertical Sync: Off
Scale: 100%
AA: Disabled
DOF: Off
Shadow Quality: High
Mirror Quality: Medium
Mirror Distance: Medium

in SteamVR I am using the following settings:
Advanced Settings: Show
Render Resolution: Custom
Resolution Per Eye: 150%
Advanced Supersample Filter: On
Overlay Render Quality: High

Pre-Aplication Video Settings - This can only be accessed in game. ETS2 is not yet recognized as an official VR game and will only show up in this menu when the game is running.
Resolution Per Eye: 300%
(I am running 500% as a test after using 300% for a while, I see no performance or quality difference so i'm unsure if the resolution is applied at all. I might try to set the Global Resolution Per eye to 500% to see if that does anything.)

Config.CFG
uset o_openvr_interleaved_reproject "0"
uset r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale "1.3" -> Can be any value you like.. this seems to work the best for me though you can try raising it. the higher the value the better the quality of the image but the heavier the load.
uset r_mode_height "1080"
uset r_mode_width "1920"
I am unsure if these last two do anything for quality or perofrmance, I ran this at the lowest resoluton available in the game, all the way up to 2160x2160 and even matching the 6692 x 6548 resolution I saw in SteamVR at 300% but nothing really happened for me.. so do with these 2 settings what you will. I picked 1080P In case I need to use F11, this makes it better readable on my desktop from the Playseat I use.

Source of these settings: viewtopic.php?t=283680
It lists everything, but what I mentioned is that I use given a lot of option he mentioned should be done aren't available anymore, Or haven't found the config file for.(tho with some I decided to not look at all.)
There is a plethora of VR Guides on this forum you can try with different ranges of success.

FSR Mod I use
Then I installed this mod: https://github.com/fholger/openvr_fsr this allows you to upscale the image using FSR.
I am using a render scale of 0,5 this means it halves the resolution essentially, so if you are using lets say, 2000x2000 it renders it at 1000x1000 and upscales it using an AI algorithm with next to no fidelity loss.
This mod is a Must for me. this nearly doubles my framerate (I think, my frametimes go from around 13 to 9MS to around 5 tot 10MS)

This mod is superseded however with this one: https://github.com/fholger/vrperfkit
Sadly I have not gotten this one to work, Unsure what I'm doing wrong, it could be that ETS 1.46 is incompatible as I have seen someone doing it successfully on r/trucksim

I also tried messing about with Nvidia Profile Inspector to alter Nvidia's profile of the game. If I remember I will attacht it to this post.
Though, I have seen someone say that ETS/ATS doesn't use this profile at all in VR. although I'm inclined to not believe that. as me forcing a framerate cap using using NPI did work.
Then I will also upload my Config.cfg. so you have exactly my graphical settings as a base.

Relevant side note:

I have no idea how ETS2 works in VR. As mentioned I messed with the resolution scale but it doesn't seem to increase or decrease at all in game.
At 500% I have a SteamVR resolution of 8640x8456. But in game.. it doesn't seem to be applied at all. But in ETS2 I don't see a clear way of knowing if a certain resolution is applied. I have tried restarting steam VR and the game after trying. I do have SteamVR set up to handle OpenVR/XR games also. so this shouldn't be a problem.

I've also noticed the engine is severely under utilising the CPU, it only uses 1 core, and maybe offloads some tasks to other cores but only 1 core is actively being used. my 3080 is always hovering between 60 to 80% GPU utilisation even when the game is struggling. Using the Frame time graph in steam VR I can see that nearly all frames are either missing or delivered late when entering cities and such but on the highway and such the game is really smooth.

To help it I've also read that you should put Motion Smoothing to Force Always On in Per-Application Video settings, but this hasn't worked for me... all it does is halving the frame rate but doesn't exactually fix the slowdowns and such.


TL;DR is that, as it currently stands, you can't expect ETS2 to be 100 smooth. it's not using the hardware available to it effectively and I also feel the current Rendering Engine is very inefficient, especially in VR. Luckily they are working on a new Rendering Engine, but.. this was announced in 2021(iirc) and since then there hasn't been any news about it, I tried looking it up. So, Until this new Rendering Engine is out we have to live with getting it 95% of the way there. But its playable right now at least.

Regards,

Appusle.
[/quote]

Thanks for posting your system specs and very specific settings, this helps a lot. I have an i7 9700K, RTX 2070 Super and 16GB RAM (3000MHz) so I am not expecting to get as good performance or quality as you, plus the game's limitations in VR are going to be an issue for everyone.

I also use that FSR mod you linked to, can I ask what other settings you use within that? Such as do you use AMD's FSR or Nvidia's NIS? What true sharpness setting do you have, mine is at the default 0.9 (I left everything at default as I wasn't sure what to change). If you could copy and paste which settings you have changed for this and what difference it made that would be great.

I followed this guide about using the Nvidia Profile Inspector: https://roextended.ro/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1000 I think it made a bit of a difference although it's hard to tell. If there was a way to be able to get a screenshot or video of exactly the image you see through the headset that would be great. Then you could take multiple screenshots for each setting you change and compare them to see any differences.

I see you are using the game config's manual stereo buffer scale and SteamVR's per-app, resolution per eye for super sampling. For me it has to be one or the other, I seem to struggle particularly if I use the stereo buffer scale in the config and can just about get it to 1.3 but my frame timings in the fpsVR app show the bar graph for the GPU into the orange with timings in the mid to high teens of ms, the CPU is generally always ok and in the green. I have tended to use the SteamVR SS at around 200-250% for the game with similar settings to yours. I have Valve Index so I am not sure how much the screen door effect comes into play, I think it's definitely noticeable (but not as bad as on my old Vive) and combined with the relatively low res image, makes the game look quite poor.

I have always had generally smooth gameplay (as long as I don't use much super sampling) and I always have my headset's refresh rate set to 80Hz and combined with motion smoothing always on, this halves the frame rate to 40 fps but that's fine as it's not a fast-paced game. The main issue for me is just the very low resolution I experience and all the flickering and jagged edges (very noticeable on power lines, edges of highway barriers, distant objects, shadows etc). Most things in the distance are blurry and low res but I have gotten used to it over the years and still much prefer to play in VR than on desktop.

Perhaps I need a better GPU and/or CPU. The maximum CPU I can get with my current motherboard (Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Pro Wifi) is an i9 9900 and I am not sure I am going to see that much of an improvement over the 9700K. Prices are just way too high for me at the moment in the world of computing so I think it will be a while before I get anything big.

[Appusle]

@AfxTwn No problem! I've been tinkering away with the VR settings, I am sensitive to wonky frame times and VR doesn't make it better. But once you go VR in ETS2 you can't really go back, it just doesn't feel the same.
I still have some red/orange lines but not nearly as much. But you do make a good point here

I see you are using the game config's manual stereo buffer scale and SteamVR's per-app, resolution per eye for super sampling. For me it has to be one or the other,

I will try to set uset r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale to 1.0 rather than 1.3 and see if the resolution is applied then or if it smooths out even further. I also really do not believe the ridiculous 500% render scale of 8640 x 8456 is applied as I see no performance difference between that and 20% even after a full reboot of the computer(I.E. the next day)
300% for me is 6692 x 6548 which is what I used before, now I'm testing with 500%.

here is a download link to my Config.cfg and NPI settings. I didn't use the guide from roextended because I felt it catered more towards multimonitor use. I wasn't sure if this was at all helpful for VR.
The files:"
https://mega.nz/file/ccswiSgD#jer-FFfI6 ... g67IoL2b8I
(Also added the link to my original post)

It is zipped so you will have to unzip them first.

As for the 9900K, I don't think it will make that much of a difference and I wouldn't recommend doing it. The game is very single threaded and thus can only really use 1 core at a time with maybe 1 extra thread or core for some tasks but most things run on a single core. I wouldn't be surprised if your 2070 is bottlenecked in VR to some extend. Personally, even if I enter a city and my frame time graph becomes more red than green, my GPU utilisation never goes up. it does when I raise the Stereo Buffer Scale I tried 1.5 but that just lowers my frame rate and increases my frame times across the board.

Given a new rendering engine is in the works I don't think the aliasing will be fixed until the new Rendering Engine will be here. it's mentioned here: Engine upgrade and DX12 coming to ETS2 and ATS!, the OP has provided a livestream SCS has done where its discussed, so that is exciting. But there has been no ETA on when it will be released... a part of me is hoping they will do it on the 1.5 update of the game as that would be a nice round number to release such a thing on but one can be hopeful! The aliasing is very distracting and this is what makes distant objects very hard to see in VR. Once this is resolved than it's a non-issue.

I really hope they are going to implement FSR2.1 to the game with the move to DX12/Vulkan on the new rendering engine. This is platform and vendor agnostic meaning it works on pretty much every GPU out there to further boost performance and clarity for those who need it. DLSS/FSR/XeSS are godsends and also handle Aliasing as it upscales. It's usually also a lot more accurate than lets say TAA while offering a sharper image in the end.

The FSR mod I linked you uses FSR 1.0 to upscale, this is just a "simple" upscaler with a sharpening filter over it. I say "Simple" because it does it a bit more intelligently than just stretching the image and applying sharpening. but its not FSR 2.1 given FSR 2.1 needs data the mod doesn't have access to.

If you have more questions I will try my best to answer them

Regards,

Appusle

EDIT 13-02-203 9:53 PM - UPDATE!!

So I tested it with uset r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale "1.0" without changing anything else from my normal set up, this essentially lowered my MS from around 5 to 6 MS in that area to 3 to 4 MS but the image became VERY blurry.
To solve this I went to look in the different setting opens of the Steam VR and "Windows Mixed Reality settings for Steam VR" on the SteamVR dashboard.

So, Opening "Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR" and navigating to "Graphics" there is an option that allows for high resolutions than "Recommended" unsure what recommended means but I think this is the native resolution of the HMD that is in use. In my case 2160x2160 per eye. (Windows sees this as 4320x2160)
I enabled this setting and when I launched ETS2 it immediately crashed SteamVR, so.. it worked! SteamVR settings now finally applied! and having a resolution of 8640 x 8456 per eye(so it has to do this twice) was clearly too much, so be warned when enabling this option!

I continued my testing and tried a Global Resolution of 150% 3864x3780, and a per application setting of also 150% this crashed in a city with traffic but otherwise worked smoothly. Then I tried 130% this also crashed in the same city.
So then I decided to keep it on a per-application setting of a 100% this is the same as what you set in Global, in my case the 150%.

At a resolution of 3864x3780 per eye it ran smoother for me than having uset r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale "1.3" even though it should be a higher resolution(I think) so that is a good sign.
But... This still makes me crash.

Now you might be wondering why I crash, well.. my GPU only has 10GB of Vram and at 3864x3780 i'm on 90% vram usage from what I can tell. So I think that is the reason.
Although.. I also added these launch options:

Code: Select all

-mm_pool_size 4096 -mm_max_resource_size 32 -mm_max_tmp_buffers_size 1000

I tried to do half my ram, which would be 16384MB but sadly the game refuses to go higher than 4096MB. I tried 8192MB but even then it doesn't launch so maybe this doesn't help so tomorrow I am going to do a test with out -mm_pool_size 4096 in the string and see what it does. Though I doubt it would matter much.

Another test I can do is set the global slider to 100% this for some reason, uses a resolution of 3152x3088(I would expect this this to be 2160x2160 but apparently not... also much higher than the native resolution of the Index which is lower than my Reverb G2)
This would give me the same resolution in ETS2. this resolution is roughly 1,4 times higher than 2160x2160 (1.45 on the width and 1.42 on the height) so this should look the same as r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale at 1.4. I think..

Anyhow, the TL;DR is that I got it to work using the SteamVR resolution options and it seems to be much better than using r_manual_stereo_buffer_scale "1.0". The bar is a lot more green and even when the frame times are struggling it's not nearly as bad.
I am sad that the increase in resolution doens't help with the aliasing at all but I suppose that is the way VR works. But I wanted to give this update.

Oh, also keep in mind that any resolution mentioned is being halved with FSR.
I have my FSR mod set to a render scale of 0.5 so this halves the resolution and upscales it from there!
(This is all I have changed in the file)

[supric]

I continued my testing and tried a Global Resolution of 150% 3864x3780, and a per application setting of also 150% this crashed in a city with traffic but otherwise worked smoothly.

Try to set
uset r_buffer_page_size "30"
instead of
uset r_buffer_page_size "10"
in config.cfg.

[AS1C]

What does the "-dummy_oculus_hd" parameter mean or do in the launch options?