AMS1 working in VR

Thanks for the info. I misunderstood it from the instructions.

 

I've been able to add AMS to my steam VR Library by following Sparten's instructions
Can you tell me how to set the resolution individually ?

 

Looks like I found the tab to adjust the resolution individually per application . within the StearVR settings

 

I seem to be having an issue with HZ and FPS. If I choose a 72 hz refresh rate I get a locked 36 fps in game. When I up it to 80hz I get a locked framerate of 40fps and when I up to 90hz I'm locked in at 45fps. I have V-Sync off so I can't see why framerate would be cut in half each time. I'm I doing something wrong , anyone having this issue ?

Oculus Quest 2
Windows 10 Pro
I7 9700k
16 Gb DDR4 3400mhz
RTX 3070 OC

 

Looks like that you forced reprojection to be always on. Usualy this only kicks in when the cpu or gpu is not able to handle the peformance, but your system should not have any issues.
So when forced it will always run half the frames and reproject the other half. Not sure where you set this setting on the oculus (ASW).
With the index this is directly set in steamvr ( motion smoothing)

 

Ok , I will try that. Should I be setting (motion smoothing on of off ?)

 

The in-game resolution settings looks to only have influence on the size of the mirrored window on the monitor?

Am now using 800x 600 not that is is saving much fps. Only disadvantage I see are the mouse cursor is a little harder to control due to the smaller window.

 

I have it off but no harm in trying both on and off to see what you prefer.

 

Any VR hands mod? I havent tried it because i dont think i can enjoy playing in VR without driver arms/hands

 

In the car showroom you can turn on the hands & arms in the cockpit preferences. They are not great looking, but once you are positioned correctly in the cockpit they do the job ok.

 

In Steam do I need the beta or vanilla version of AMS?

 

Vanilla for now, once the beta goes "live" I will update the binaries.

 

After testing the VR implementation a few runs (on Valve Index) i must say this is really an impressive start bringing AMS1 to VR!

It always waited and dreamed for an VR implementation to come some day as AMS is a true gem and with currently available hardware its better in VR than most modern racing games out there. It runs at resolutions that look amazing downsampled. This paired with the crewchief, alowing to play without distracting hud elements and replacing them with voice commands its pure immersion hard to surpass. Thanks for all the involved for this and I hope you get more recognition for this milestone achievement for Sim Racing.

Still there are some things I noticed (most of them you might be already aware @Sparten ):

Near Clipping Plane (zNear) is to far away from the eyes clipping the ceiling of the car etc. with feels like racing a cabrio for some cars.

• This is a tricky one to solve as this can result in z-fighting (polygon flickering) on distant objects, especially when only using a 16 bit depth buffer as the precision is not linear along the distance. There might be some DX11 feature that can be used here that was not present with the DX9 renderer?
• The clipping planes in AMS are set per scene (track) in the *.scn or per car in the *.cam as far I could find out.

Outside Car model not redered for some cars and looks odd for some that you can not see the bumper.

• Each car uses a different mesh for the cockpit view and the exterior views to highlight important aspects based on the view and to save peformance, so this might not be fixable.
• Not sure if in AMS it would work to show the exterior mesh for the cockpit view so solve it and it it is as detailed as the cockpit mesh for the instruments. I remember that when making screenshots with the free cam that the meshes looked as detailed in the inside as the regular cockpit view. But not sure if the LCDs and gauges where woring.

View Frustrum Clipping out elements to early not taking the field of view into account what VR headsets can offer.

• AMS is limited to a max vFOV of 100 but even that is not enogh to prevent objects, cars etc from being removed from the scene as they would not be part of the view frustrum.
  
• Might there be a workaround to extend the vFOV over 100 to fix or the ability to set a hFOV?

Menu Aspect ratio and resolution to low which makes it impossible to controll a few UI elements due to overlapping text etc.

• Using a predefined render resolution & aspect ratio for the menu that feel good in VR should be enough to make it usable.

Menu Transparency is bleeding though the background crew image on a certail color range

• It seems that the texture blending is incorrecty set up for the vitual screen (menu) causing that colors etc. are used as alpha bleding. But it might be that its already caused by the dx9 menu rendering. I remember I had issues when creating a reshade preset for AMS when not using the widescreen UI.
• As a quick workaround the crewchief images could be hidden?

VR late frames on the CPU even when the CPU load is low. Causing that the GPU does not get the frames prepared in time for rendering it.

• Not sure what is causing this but no process is hogging one of the cpu cores. Still it often happens in the pit box where many other AI cars seems to have an effect on that. So it might be that the logic updates do delay the rendering frame preperation.
• Higher resolutions will increase the ms the cpu need to prepare a frame. which is sad as the GPU as a lot of headroom for more SS.
• FpsVR helps to debug and analize this issue and the frame analizer from SteamVR which shows the late frames. When checking the FpsVr History Viewer I noticed that the GPU start rending before the CPU has the image prepared which is usally the other way around for other VR games. Check out the graphs below compared AMS1 vs AMS2.

Automobilista 1:


Automobilista 2:

​

• Getting this resolved has a lot of potential to unleash the peformance headroom for the CPU and GPU.

I guess many of these issues are not fixable as this is how the engine and the assets are created to save peformance or to keep the visuals from creating issues. Let me know if I can be of assistance helping out resolving them, or testing some elements that lies beyond the VR Implementation itself.

Keep up the amazing work!

 

I guess by now you know it doesn't matter as the Beta ams.exe are the same as the 'normal' ams.exe.
I use my beta as VR and the normal version for monitor use but pretty much only use the VR version.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Retrolux - here are some answers to you questions:


Near Clipping Plane (zNear)

We can't fix this. Modifying the projection matrix in our VR code to override the z-near distance creates other issues. I have tried and it *does* have the expected effect but it also has some pretty bad side-effects

Outside Car model
I think this is just what the game renders in cockpit view

View Frustrum Clipping

The next version will override the game's FoV (past 100) using the FoV calculated from the headset's projection matrix. For Valve Index this is 109 degrees if I remember correctly (other headsets will vary of course) - it completely eliminates clipping (at the expense of a little performance). So this will be fixed with the next release

Menu Aspect ratio and resolution

Can't fix this - for me, the main issue here is the font rendering but without access to the source we've done all we can

Menu Transparency

I don't have this issue. There are issues with the 'grid walk' phase rendering but the rest of the menu seems OK for me. Again though, without access to any source we're very limited in what we can fix

VR late frames

We're brute-forcing this. We get the HMD VR poses (WaitGetPoses) then derive the left eye camera translation and allow the game to do a render pass with that camera, copying the resulting back-buffer to a surface. We repeat this for the right eye then submit the two surfaces to the compositor. The CPU will do some work to prepare the left eye frame, then the GPU does some work to render it, then the CPU does more work to prepare the right eye frame and the GPU does its work to render that, then we pass the resulting images to the compositor which makes the GPU do more work to manage the final VR transform / distortion / render. So the FPSVR timings aren't as straightforward as a more conventional render path.

Performance wise, I see some dips with big grids and some specific corners (like the final turn at Ibarra). I also see some dips associated with kerbs / grass. Not sure what to make of them. Any performance monitors looking at the Dx11 work the GPU is doing will only see the final compositor step.

[edit] having said all that, I still get great performance on my Ryzen 3700x + RTX3080 box. Frame times are only >11ms at the start of races with big (>25) grids. And this is with 4xMSAA and most details on medium or high, and the game looks stunning.

I think the current implementation has gone about as far as it can go (once the FoV stuff is released). We're waiting for some feedback from Reiza but they've been flat-out with AMS2 for the last few weeks - so there might be opportunities to do more here

 

Yeah I guess its very tricky to get all implementations working without having access to the source code. Who knows if Reiza might step in, to help to intergrate the VR mod into the engine directly? It definetly would give AMS1 its well deserved attention especially for simracer that exclusively play in VR nowadays. Fingers Crossed.

But I can agree that apart from the mentioned issues the current VR mod is already working great and looks amazing. Its interessting that I have the same slowdowns sections as you have mentioned but with a way weaker hardware than you have. (2070S + 4790K @ 4,8 & index at 170%SS over the default 100%) Most noticable when many different objects/cars are visible(Full Pit boxes, race start) at the which increases render batches that occupy the CPU to much and delaying the work for the VR frame preperation.

For me I will play AMS1 more than 2 until the hardware is capable to play AMS2 in VR in the same visual glory as AMS1 currently has with the mod. I was already dissapointed that most VR racing games on a 2070S + Index could not run steady 90fps without all the uggly aliasing on low resolutions. Thanks for that!

For the Menu transparency issue I will try to get a screenshot or video that shows how it looks. I also dont see the intro video as it is fully transparent but when using the desktop overlay it is visible and the menu looks good there as well. Do you have a open source repository for the VR mod yet?

 

mr belowski

Can you share your AMS config , in-game and steam VR settings. I have the same GPU and a little better CPU and would like to tweak the visuals to match your experience.

Thank You

 

Its not open source yet, and i'm still debating if it should be, but you can apply for access here
https://gitlab.com/ThaSparten/ams_vrplugin

 

I would wait for Reiza to be honest, maybe this will be part of the base game (I am looking for a cheap VR headset in the main time).

About the slowdowns....those are quite common on flat screen too, some points are well known for this so I am not entirely sure it is due to VR mod...

 

Yeah, we wanted to hang on to this until Reiza had a chance to offer their opinion on it, but there's been no feedback since we asked back in November so I'm guessing it's not something they're particularly interested in