Night performance bad?

I'm running AMS 2 on VR (WMR using Lenovo Explorer) and yesterday I spent the whole afternoon trying to adjust the graphics across multiple games. I settled on 200% Supersampling with most options turned to the lowest (yeah idk why but I recently upgraded from the RX 580 to this 5700 XT and I can't see a major improvement on VR). I went racing online and it was my first race at night on Interlagos (p1 class). Awful performance, lag everywhere.
I messes with the graphics, turned off everything and every option to low but awful performance anyway. The only thing that ensured me a lag free night race was everything set to the lowest and turning steamvr supersampling to 100%.
Anyone racing at night with a bad performance?

 

Supersampling is a resource hog, I use an RX 5700 XT and have it turned off.

Like yourself I upgraded from an RX 580, whilst it can be used for a lot of VR titles, it can’t hold its own in Sim Racing. The 5700 XT is a much better GPU, but still relatively low in the pecking order. As I said I use one too, most of my settings are set to low. Was a lot worse with the RX 580.

My settings can be found here, maybe they will help: VR Discussions, Questions & Feedback

 

Coincidentally I was just reading your post, thanks for sharing your configs. Idk if it happens with you but without supersampling the game just looks awful, everything blurry. And judging by the fps changes (using FpsVR), it doesn't seem to impact performance that much. Supersampling is really the setting that has more impact visually (idk about performance). But I'd prefer to set everything to minimum and having the supersampling turned high that vice versa. I tried many combinations, supersampling at >1.8 looks the best to me but at 1.8 with all the options turned to minimum I have plenty of frame drops, and when I talk frame drops I'm talking <45 because I never manage to get a steady 90fps (only with SS at 1.0x and everything set to minimum, and not at night racing).

 

Mate, as BillyBob says, supersampling in VR is a killer on performance. Setting it to 200% is pretty crazy regardless of what video card you're using, as well as being wholly unnecessary. People with cards far better than mine rarely go above 150% maximum, and even then it's quality-to-performance ratio is debatable. Then if you add night racing you have a load of lighting effects and shadows which kills performance even more, far more than during the day. So it's really not surprising your sim is running like crap.

If things are "blurry", try using the sharpening settings in graphics config files found in My Documents instead. It'll sharpen things up with minimal performance impact.

 

Well I understand all that and that seems to be the overall impression from what I've read online. I haven't tried increasing the sharpening settings though (since this blur problem seems to affect all games, not only ams 2). I've been spending hours trying to work this out and I managed to find the settings that work best for me, although they're very weird:
If I put my SS at 1.0x even SteamVR home looks fuzzy. At 1.3x everything looks sharp but on AMS 2 the visuals (not the menus) are very blurry. The minimum setting for things to look actually sharp is 1.7%.
With SS at 1.7% I went to fiddle with AMS 2 graphics' options. So it seems that no matter what I change, post effects, textures, shadows, etc, from Low to Ultra on all settings I only get a minimal increase in fps. I then tried turning off PostAA (it was set on the max) and turning on MSAA. This had similar results but performance is still greatly affected (to the point of being unplayable at night). I then turned of all kinds of AA and it runs good (45fps with an occasional projected frame at night).
So my "optimal" WMR settings (I copied your template BillyBob):
SteamVr Settings
Motion Smoothing: On
Reprojection: Auto
Super Sampling: 180%
Advanced Supersampling Filter: On

Performance Settings
Resolution: 1920x1080 60Hz
Windowed: No
Texture Resolution: Medium
Texture Filtering: Anisotropic 16x
V-Sync: No
MSAA: Off
Post AA: Off
Supersampling: Off
Reflections: Medium
Environment Map: Medium.
Car Detail: Medium
Track Detail: Medium
Pit Crew Detail: All
Shadow Detail: Medium
Enhanced Mirror: Yes
Motion Blur: Off
Render Frames Ahead: 1
Detailed Grass: Off
Particle Level: Low
Particle Density: Low

Visual FX Settings
Post-Processing Filters: On
Exterior Sun Flare: Full
Interior Sun Flare: Full
Bloom: On
Heat Haze: On
Exposure Compensation: 1.00
Rain Drops: On
Vignette: No
Crepuscular Rays: On
Screen Dirt: On
Cockpit Mirrors: On

But performance at night is still greatly affected, maybe something to improve in the future?

 

I get frame drops at night too. I try to minimise this by using slightly modified settings. These are similar settings/changes that I need to apply in a lot of Sim Racing titles, rFactor 2 for instance. Night racing is typically more resource intensive than racing during the daytime.

I drop SuperSampling to 80% and I turn everything to 'Low', with the exception of textures and car details which I leave on 'Medium'. The start/finish line is always hard, but once the pack splits things get better. The FPS does tend to bounce all over the place, much more than during a daytime race (rain is also resource intensive), so I adjust my target accordingly and aim to be stable at 45 FPS instead of 90 FPS.

You really should try looking at the Sharpening settings in the graphics configuration files, it really makes a difference.

Edit: I've got a spreadsheet with all my graphics settings in for my favourite sims. I'll see how stable/high I can get it and then share them with you. Might take me a couple of days.

 

This. I also use trilinear, shadows off kills the shimmer, and have p.p. turned off as I didn't see much (if any) difference.

 

Wow thanks so much for your help, if I get some miracle settings combo I'll share it as well! I just feel like WMR drivers and AMD drivers are at fault here and this hardware could perform way better, let's hope things get better

 

I've seen a couple of these threads pop up and someone above has alluded as to why people suffer from FPS loss at night; Dynamic Lighting.

Now I'm not that familiar with the Madness Engine (yet to properly Race at night), but the general rule of Thumb is that if there are Dynamic Lights in any game then you are going to lose some performance - this happens in all the Sims I race with Night Lighting (ACC & RF2 for example) and I've seen it in various other Game Genres over the years. Depending on hardware (as ever) your results may vary, for me its about finding that right balance so I don't end up with various Graphical Config files for different racing scenarios, I prefer to have One for All so to speak.

So, the more Dynamic Lights being used, be it from Cars Headlights or Trackside Lighting, will harm performance vs One Dynamic Light during the Daytime (The Sun). So don't be surprised if you have to lower some settings when you've got 20 Cars all beaming their headlights onto all manner of other cars & trackside objects

 

Makes complete sense, thanks for the explanation! I prefer to have a one config for all as well, I was benchmarking for rain scenarios since I never race at night (in AMS 2 I just joined a random online server which was running night races, there really should be more info about the server in the lobby) but now that I know night races are power hungry I'll setup my graphical settings to perform good at night races (which will mean lowering all the graphic settings xD).

 

Yes but there also needs to be a balance with regards to performance when such dynamic lighting is implemented. It's expected to lose some FPS at night but not anywhere near the 50% impact I've experienced on the newly updated tracks.
Kansai for example, on the main straight I've gone from a solid 90 to 45 FPS during a night race and that's not acceptable when it was a reasonably expected drop of around 20 FPS before.

With an already, fairly conservative setup to yield 110+FPS in daytime, I'm a little reluctant to have to lower them significantly for decent performance at night.

But, it's still early days, so not going to get too hung up on it as I'm hopeful we will see some optimisation in future builds.

 

You're dropping to 45fps on a 2080ti running triples? Damn, I thought the game would be better optimized.

 

Well triples at 7800x1440 so that in itself is fairly hard on the 2080ti but 110+FPS is easily achievable with decent settings.

 

Okay...I've put up the first findings it the main VR thread

 

I'm having massive issues with night performance. Daytime I run approx 75-90fps but night crushes the performance to roughly half, bottoms at main straights to ~30. No matter what settings I change, I get only few more frames here and another there.

Right now I'm having to settle into a situation where the game looks and runs good daytime and not race at night at all. This is obviously disappointing and I really wish the performance gets optimized heavily in the future.

I'm really enjoying the game and will support future content if Reiza keeps doing their great work with frequent hotfixes.

I'm running RX 570 6GB btw. Daytime performance is actually surprisingly good at 1440p.

Edit. I forgot to mention that the sudden fps drop seems to happen when AI cars switch lights on. Didn't take note but I'm guessing the track lights go on at the same moment.

 

I have generally good performance (playing in VR) but the night time racing as well as Storm/Thunderstorm weather hit fps so hard that with 21 car grid even the lowest settings cannot get you the required 80 fps (Index). Night time or Storm weather conditions (both not required) effectively double how long it takes to draw a frame. This can be seen in the performance graph provided by SteamVR easily.

Now, this would of course be expected as the cost one has to pay with this engine, but these conditions in PCARS2, using the Madness engine too, have a lot lower impact. Also normal Rain condition with pudless and all does runs a lot better in AMS2 although there is not visually much difference effects wise. It is like the darkness alone in Storm or Lightning Storm conditions compared to Rain is enough to cause huge extra load for some reason.

I noticed too that settings themselves have very little impact on this, so there is no way to cure this situation currently, except for avoiding night time racing and random weather condition option.

 

I did some comparing and the track in question has a lot to do with the impact of Storm and night conditions.

Car: SuperV8, 21 cars on grid. Storm weather. Time: 15:00

Donington National very good.
Ibarra it is still ok, heavy but pretty normal load.
Azure Circuit (Monaco), seems pretty normal.
Kyalami (new), very big slow down.
Hockenheimring National, very big slow down.

Latter two are the newest tracks and probably have most details.

Speculation 1:
Since the hit comes from the darker conditions the reason could be the amount of track light sources on the newer, more detailed tracks.
(I just noticed, just what MarcG mentioned already on this thread.)

Speculation 2:
One would expect Monaco being very heavy, but in the contrary, it does not have the long visibility range and lots of trees. Nor its trees are like on the other AMS2 tracks; they are real 3D models which makes me guess that it might have been inherited from PCARS2. (No licensing is required for street tracks so it could be a freebie or same origin otherwise.)
If 2D-trees are causing the issue, it might be that some purely fillrate specific limit for 2D objects gets capped in the engine.

 

I have tried to figure out how to optimize my configuration, but SteamVR just does some wonky auotmatic stuff with its supersampling rate and I had a bunch of issues trying to make sense of it all when it would do weird things. I even tried motion smoothing or reprojection or whatever, but I didnt really like the results I got with that. The more I tried to second guess it the more crazy the results got.

I finally just settled on letting steam do what it wanted to do, which means my GPU is only 65 percent used in normal conditions, and crying in agony when it rains at Kyalami (new).

90FPS for two different images is just hard to do consistently I guess.

Setup:
Ryzen 3600
RTX2070 Super
3200 MHz RAM
Samsung Odyssey+

 

I've just settled for after 8am and before 5pm for racing in AMS2 As we all know, this is a long term project and Reiza have stated on Twitter they have more shadows and AA improvements coming but improvements to the rendering pipeline take time. Hopefully that will bring performance improvements.

 

At the beginning of beta it was smooth... now it isn't. No VR, just an GTX950 that is supposed to handle this engine.