VR Guide - Setup, Settings and General tips

[Qwaszx]

Qwaszx, one thing I'm doing different is I'm windowing instead of fullscreen. You think that would drain more resources or cause problems?

I have found that Windowing does make a difference, I would recommend full screen after all tinkering is done.
Also, make sure to follow the general tips as stopping Oculus Home from running in the background is helpful too, among all other tips.

[Qwaszx]

latest drivers, 6700k, 1070, this is spa with the ford gte in overcast conditions sometime in evening/night time, its bad with the fog at night too

Would you please test the guide’s settings, as it will deal with shadows/flickering and other pop-ins, which might make things better. Report back when you can.

[whip]

Would you please test the guide’s settings, as it will deal with shadows/flickering and other pop-ins, which might make things better. Report back when you can.

everything is on low including shadows, your Nv control panel changes won't effect this

[Qwaszx]

everything is on low including shadows, your Nv control panel changes won't effect this

Sorry I can’t test it now as I am traveling abroad.
Will do as soon as I get home.

FOV settings helped me with pop-ins and flickering too, but I’ll get back to you soonest.

[Aldo Zampatti]

Stickied.

[oege]

@qwaszx , i saw your post at racedepartment. I have taken over your settings and with SS 1.3 , ASW Off i had 95% stable 90 FPS and sometimes 87 FPS with my 1080ti. Thanks a lot !!! Also the the tip with oculus home and the fov ... perfect !!!

[Qwaszx]

@qwaszx , i saw your post at racedepartment. I have taken over your settings and with SS 1.3 , ASW Off i had 95% stable 90 FPS and sometimes 87 FPS with my 1080ti. Thanks a lot !!! Also the the tip with oculus home and the fov ... perfect !!!

Thank you so much for the kind words.
Great that you’re enjoying it!

Have fun with this great sim.

[mshagg]

Hi guys. Great to see this thread stickied! Here is a post I made elsewhere on the interwebs which helped a few people out. This is from the perspective of a Vive user. Settings are specific to a 1080Ti, but the principles should apply to lower specc'd systems, just at lower supersampling levels:



If I can offer my own perspective - from someone who spent the last couple of years testing PC2 with the HTC Vive, keeping in mind that most of the VR guys in WMD were using a rift and could just fall back to ASW to keep things chugging along.

I've been meaning to do a big post or a video with FCAT graphs and charts and all that jazz, but it seems most people are finding their feet ok with VR performance. This post might serve as a useful reference if there is demand for something like that... too busy enjoying MP at the moment lol.

The Madness engine is quite CPU intensive in the way it renders scenes (not to mention everything else that's going on when you're simulating so many aspects in the cars and the environment). Using asynchronous reprojection places a very narrow window on the CPU to submit frames to the GPU for rendering to the HMD - SteamVR will literally force the CPU to idle prior to submitting the frame. The way we remove that restriction, and free up a bunch of CPU cycles for rendering, is to disable asynchronous reprojection and enable always-on reprojection.

If you want some more technical background on always-on reprojection, check out the croteam developer's definitive post on the topic here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/commen..._than/d8237fx/

We get a massive increase in performance with always-on in Project CARS 2 (and in the first game!) BUT the trade off is that you need to maintain 90FPS all of the time, because you dont have the safety net of asynchronous reprojection to fall back on. With that said, I think 1.6xSS is too ambitious, even for a 1080Ti.

My conclusions, that I've played with for 100 hours, but always ended up falling back on, are broadly as follows:

• Use SteamVR to force supersampling and keep 1.0 set in game. Because SteamVR uses a linear multiplier, it is a more granular scale than the logarithmic scale of the in-game slider. I use 1.5x in SteamVR with a 1080Ti. That would equate, i think to about 1.225xSS in the in-game slider (which of course cannot be selected, only 1.2 or 1.3 can). Note: the in game slider appears to be non-functional for the Vive anyway.
• Target Medium MSAA. I would say prioritise this over any other setting, before you crank up SS and before you start increasing any other setting. It is the most efficient way to improve image quality. Period.
• Detailed grass always off - it's a performance hog.
• Shadows always low. They're intensive but turning them off completely causes problems (and looks like ass).
• Environment Map and Particles low, the detail in the HMD doesnt warrant the performance hit.
• Screen dirt is a performance hog.

My graphicsconfigopenvrdx11.xml (found in your documents\Project CARS 2 folder) is as follows.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Reflection>
<class name="BRTTIRefCount" base="root class" />
<class name="BPersistent" base="BRTTIRefCount">
<prop name="Name" type="String" />
</class>
<class name="GraphicConfigData" base="BPersistent">
<prop name="Build" type="U32" />
<prop name="Version" type="Fct" />
<prop name="Mode" type="Fct" />
<prop name="Vsync" type="Fct" />
<prop name="FrameLatency" type="Fct" />
<prop name="AntiAlias" type="Fct" />
<prop name="SMAAFXAA" type="Fct" />
<prop name="Windowed" type="Fct" />
<prop name="TextureFilter" type="Fct" />
<prop name="TextureResolution" type="Fct" />
<prop name="Brightness" type="Fct" />
<prop name="CarDetailLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="TrackDetailLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="ShadowDetailLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="MotionblurLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="EffectsDetailLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="EnvmapDetailLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="MirrorEnabled" type="Fct" />
<prop name="MirrorEnhanced" type="Fct" />
<prop name="EnvmapReflectionDetailLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="GraphicsLevel" type="Fct" />
<prop name="SuperSampling" type="Fct" />
<prop name="LowSuperSampling" type="Fct" />
<prop name="VRSuperSampling" type="Fct" />
</class>
<data class="GraphicConfigData" id="0x42240880">
<prop name="Name" data="" />
<prop name="Build" data="866" />
<prop name="Version" version="2" />
<prop name="Mode" adapter="0" width="1920" height="1080" refresh_num="60000" refresh_dem="1000" />
<prop name="Vsync" vsync="1" />
<prop name="FrameLatency" framelatency="1" />
<prop name="AntiAlias" antialias="2" />
<prop name="SMAAFXAA" smaafxaa="0" />
<prop name="Windowed" windowed="0" />
<prop name="TextureFilter" texturefilter="5" />
<prop name="TextureResolution" textureresolution="1" />
<prop name="Brightness" brightness="10" />
<prop name="CarDetailLevel" cardetaillevel="2" />
<prop name="TrackDetailLevel" trackdetaillevel="3" />
<prop name="ShadowDetailLevel" shadowdetaillevel="1" />
<prop name="MotionblurLevel" motionblurLevel="0" />
<prop name="EffectsDetailLevel" effectsdetaillevel="2" />
<prop name="EnvmapDetailLevel" envmapdetaillevel="2" />
<prop name="MirrorEnabled" mirrorenabled="0" />
<prop name="MirrorEnhanced" mirrorenhanced="0" />
<prop name="EnvmapReflectionDetailLevel" envmapreflectiondetaillevel="1" />
<prop name="GraphicsLevel" graphicslevel="4" />
<prop name="SuperSampling" supersampling="0" />
<prop name="LowSuperSampling" lowsupersampling="0" />
<prop name="VRSuperSampling" vrsupersampling="0" />
</data>
</Reflection>

I run this with asynchronous reprojection disabled, always-on reprojection enabled, SS in SteamVR at 1.5, Post processing enabled, but will all of the effects off apart from crepscular rays. 5930K/1080Ti. This results in the occasional dip below 90FPS, which causes judder, but only at, say, a starting grid at night where everyone has their headlights on - by the 2nd or 3rd corner it smooths out and runs 90FPS the rest of the time.

One last point - during development there was a weird thing where if you loaded into the game without VR, it caused performance issues when you did load VR back up and it required a profile delete to fix. Im not sure if that is the case in the retail build and havent checked - but if you're chasing your tail trying to get good FPS on a high end system, with all of the eye candy turned off, and you have been playing in non-VR mode, it's worth a look.

[Mr_Eos]

If the devs are not already aware, SteamVR SS and in Game SS are not acting properly.

I'm not sure what just happened to the thread...

But the guy mentioned changing the compositor SS. You know, the one everyone was saying to keep turned down since it only effects the pop-up steamvr menu and hogs resources running in the background at all times?

Well guess what? That is the only setting that is having an effect on SS in this game. So I assume it's also increasing the amount of resources its pulling down in the background to run the compositor at a higher SS setting.

[poirqc]

I don't have VR, but that guide was still usefull for my i5 2400/ gtx960.

The graphic it give runs fast and looks well!