VR Discussions, Questions & Feedback

Is it possible to hide the drivers torso in VR, so that just the hands would be visible? Or set the minimum rendering distance farther away?

Because in many cars, the virtual driver is nowhere near to the position, that I would sit in that particular car.

If the driver is really far from the wheel, it does not really matter.

But for example in the GT1 Mercedes, the driver is so near the wheel, that the drivers suit gets in the view, if I adjust the seating position to my liking.

And the driver in GT4 McLaren is a giant, that has the shortest possible legs . If I set the VR "head position" to where the drivers helmet should be, I am way too close to the wheel, and way too high.

 

You can move your seat position in the car, I think WASD are the default keybindings. The drivers limbs stretch to account for the change, once you have a spot that feels right, then you can just recenter your VR view.

I usually push my head back a touch extra and then press recenter, so that clipping through the body isn't noticeable. And there is a clipping distance setting that you can play around with as well, I think it's in the VR settings tab in the main menu.

 

I just enable driver body in VR to record videos.

Try drive with just animated wheel. After a while, believe me, it's more immersive and save few FPS too. And you can set freely seat and head position.

 

Alright so many more tests later and i seem to have been having an issue with the VR performance because i was running the graphical settings TOO LOW ! Once i set everything to HIGH / ON, i am now having much better performance ? Could it have been because i was causing a CPU bottleneck as my GPU was not properly / fully utilized ? I am not having a fully smooth framerate but the game is running super good at 80 hz , 1.0 resolution ratio . Also turning off ASW seem to improve performance too. Still using vertical screen scale at 0.5 .

 

Thats good to hear.
Theoretically could have been a cpu bottleneck, yes.
Turning off ASW aids performance as per the example:
Native Refresh of Headset is 90 Hz, game drops to 85 Hz, ASW would then drop down to 45 Hz in terms of real frames and interpolate the other 45 Hz. This depends on the headset in question and their implementation of ASW, some may be more lenient to frame drops below native, others more aggressive and will drop to 50% FPS pretty much immediately.

 

Have you tried the Helmet cam with VR? It looks the helmet overlay is covering too much screen no?

 

I came from the real old-skool 80s/90s way of thinking, where simply lowering graphics boosts frame rates. Getting back into PC gaming 6 years ago(for VR), after dropping it in the late 2000s, I've had to learn the dynamics of CPU/GPU bottlenecking, that was totally opposite to what I grew up learning.
Lowering the graphics too much for GPU speed, meant that the CPU could no longer keep up, so I also learned that turning some graphical settings UP yields better overall performance, as the CPU & GPU were more in sync. I'm now running at 120Hz in the headset, and it's running better.

 

With anything higher than a Ryzen 7 5800X and a 3060Ti - Oculus Quest 2, If someone want to get 120 FPS in all circuits with Full Grid at 120 FPS (no headlights and heavy rain) and no less than 60 FPS in rain or night with headlights, with good visuals, some settings to start:

Quest 2:

Max resolution in 120Hz mode;

FOV at .675 horizontal and .275 vertical. Auto ASW. Link at default settings.

AMS 2:

Change settings like you desire, but don't go lower SHADOWS MEDIUM - TEXTURES HIGH - TEXTURE FILTERING ANISO 16X - AA MSAA MEDIUM. I like keeping reflections at least medium, for nice visuals in wet track, and bloom effect on too. Remember to keep vsync off in VR.

And I disable driver body in options and in camera settings, original head moviment (1), 25 smoothing, and ALL G-forces effects at 25 - better immersion and feeling of car moving in VR.

 

Unfortunately the drivers limbs do not stretch at all. At least not for me. The drivers position is given absolutely as is, and I have not found any way to change it. And by the "drivers position", I mean the virtual rendered driver.

With recentering the VR view, or by "moving the seat position" one can only change the point of view.

Try the GT4 McLaren, and you will surely notice what I mean. If I position my view on top of the virtual drivers collar (neck), my view is so high, that I cant even see the backlights of the car in front of me in the starting grid (the roof of the car gets in the way). And the view is so near the windshield, that I can see the bonnet. Breaks the immersion totally.

And if I position my view to my liking, I can see the drivers collar (neck) right in front of me partly blocking the wheel.

Yes, there is a setting for this, but I already have it in max setting. Does anyone know a way to increase it more by editing some config file or something?

I just hope, that some day, in some VR focused sim, you could actually configure the virtual driver with your own measurements and it would be rendered by those measurements. And then allowing to actually move the rendered seat and also move the rendered wheel, as you would do in a real car.

 

I can't understand how you don't get shimmer/flicker on those shadow details from having the high/ultra shadows. That's the main reason I don't want to keep it higher than low. (I actually don't notice huge effect on performance on having it high).

As for Quest 3, which I have, at the moment it's capped to the 90fps with the link cable, and at least with that the ASW sucks and just causes stuttering, it's unusable.

Unlike you, I have to increase the sharpness quite a bit to make it bearable, even though it causes additional shimmering too, which I hate. On default values, (0) the game is not nearly sharp enough in the distance to be enjoyable if you have tracks where you see far into the horizon like Le Mans.

Those FOV values are definitely close to what I'm running (about 0.8 / 0.3 for me), as that makes the biggest difference with performance being smooth and I don't made "helmet" limited vertical fov in a sim at all, especially in a non-open wheeler.

Still haven't got it be good enough picture to ditch my ultrawide in favor of VR in more serious racing (I'm just using it occasional for some immersion and casual racing).

 

The best thing to fix the VR performance is buying a 4090. I was blown away by the difference. (Previously had 3080)

I run a Quest 3 via Link cable. 940mbs and 5408x???? @ 72hz (ASW Disabled). All settings in AMS2 are either HIGH or ULTRA. I have that extra sharpening fix in the XML settings as well.

Code:

<prop name="SharpeningStrength" sharpeningstrength="1.100000" />
<prop name="SharpeningClamp" sharpeningclamp="0.090000" />

I am able to race with 20 AI cars, at midnight, starting at the front at Nurburgring Veedol in Thunderstorm, wet track. My frame rate dips to 65fps until turn 1 when it goes to full 72fps and stays there for the rest of the race no matter what happens. I could probably run 80hz without issue but I use 72hz (ASW) for MSFS, so can't be bothered changing it per game.

BTW, If I start at the back of the pack, there is no frame rate issue EVER. Same scenario but just starting at the back of same size grid gives me full frame rate. Wish people would actually listen to actual test results. The new "Max Rendered Vehicles" setting is pretty much useless to me. Who wants to watch cars in front disappear when they don't have any impact on performance.

They just need to add a setting for controlling the number of cars rendered BEHIND you (cars in front have no effect for me so I want the max rendered in front hence why I test by making sure I start in first position on the grid).

Oh, and VR Sparks are still broken!!

 

The max visible vehicles is getting improvement (priorize better those in front), it's being tested at the moment.

I have tried/experimented using different bit rates (with 3080) and frankly, I don't see clear difference between let say 500 and 940 (too low is problematic though). Now sure in what situations it would actually make difference or would it need beefier gpu/cpu to actually take use (or is the bottleneck in the headset).

I was testing on Le Mans, 31 cars, max visible vehicles at 20 starting at 8pm with x20 accelaration and the fps didn't really dip that much for the whole time. Only in the early race when all the cars were around me and sun was coming down, I my headroom of 30-40% (given by oculus debug tool) went down to enough that it dipped slightly to negative.

I had 80fps, rendering resolution slider at max. I didn't have game graphic settings very high, as what I'm looking for is mainly clear enough picture. Limiting the FOV a lot (especially limiting the vertical fov to 0.3) gives so much performance benefit that you don't need 4090 to get smooth fps... The thing that annoys me more, is just the clarity at distance, shimmering/flickering issues and nothing seems to improve that aspect even if I forget all fps requirements.

Virtual desktop with fast wlan might help with that, because If I understood correctly, it can go beyound what is now possible with the oculus link that is still limited by the max settings set by Quest 2. I don't have a good enough wlan to even try that unfortunately.

ps. I also found it weird that in VR I get pop-in (some trees / building in distance) but if I run the game on monitor on those same (quite low) settings, I don't get that (this was tested on Long Beach). I wonder is it the the game resolution difference that is causing that.

 

Any sharpening editing config files induces more shimmering far away, that's the reason I give up of using It - it's blurred but like the engine is designed to work. Without this, shadows in ultra are perfect. Shadows in low are terrible, and at night, the cars don't block headlights like medium - ultra.

For me, the coolest thing in VR is use the g-forces in camera settings without the fixed driver body, because this way I can really feel the car movement.

 

I fully agree with your statement about the "Max Rendered Vehicles". In the current form, it is not helpful for performance gain. It should be separated to limit the number of cars displayed behind your vehicle. I'm on RTX3080 / HP Reverb G2 and was hoping for performance boost at night, but in the current state, it reduces immersion (because cars in front are also cropped), but does not help with fps.

 

This is great news, thank you!

 

I have pretty clear visuals in the distance tbh. Perhaps you are seeing compression artifacts that you only notice in the distance and thats where 940mbs is helping my distance visuals.

I can run high/Ultra (mostly Ultra) but the most important thing is I can run MSAA high. This helps with the visuals too. I run with link cable and tbh I think this probably helps with sharpness.

Hope this new “Max Visible vehicles” setting thats being worked on actually allows you to only effect cars behind. When I was querying this setting before the patch release, I was told to basically stfu and wait and see because its working well. As I expected, it doesn’t work at all well for me (and others).

Next time they work on Sparks, I really hope they take the opportunity to fix them for VR.

 

It does however work well for others, including me even in daytime bright sunny conditions limiting the cars infront helps my performance. Of course, as stated, it's not perfect and they're working on it right now to help improve it further, which is what Reiza do.

 

There is shimmering without the sharpness filter being used too unfortunately (on normal monitor too, but less).

I tried to take it off and did a race with shadows on ultra and it was actually pretty fine on a track where you don't have such visibility to long into the horizon (it was Imola). I guess the blurriness on the distance annoys me if you have track like Le Mans...

I personally can't use those camera momement settings at all without feeling ill.. quite sensitive to those things (kinda suprised to learn that I can actually race in VR at all actually).

 

I have to play around more with that bitrate to be sure (and maybe with trying that MSAA with high again), but I can't remember it helping with the clarity at all. Not sure is it compression or maybe related to the resolution as what suggested here as possible cause: Reddit - Dive into anything

"Update: I have now discovered that the max render resolution the Oculus PC app can set for the Q3 is still the same as the Q2. They haven't bothered toupdate it. No wonder my impression was about same between Q2 and Q3, they both render at the same max resolution 5408 & encode res 3664 , while the Q3 is capable of rendering at 6092 & encode res 4128. So if you read this perhaps hold on if you dare to be patient until they update the app."

btw. even when you can technically give higher encode res value in the tools now, it doesnt' seem to be used according to the performance overlays.

 

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