Euro & American Truck Simulator from SCS - discussion & optimizations

[elin77]

Just opening this new thread here because it got a bit off-topic in the 8K-X category

@mmorselli

@elin77

Anyway, I probably could try to increase backlight to “90” or “100” and try deactivating HDR once again.

Also try a counter-intuitive setting by lowering the backlight, not raising it.

currently with:

backlight: 45
brightness: -1
contrast: +3

I get a really blue sky (the sky was my reason for choosing HDR), with a vibrant, but natural, green vegetation

The perception of color is very subjective so I can’t guarantee that you’ll see the same things, but also I thought I had to raise the brightness to have more vivid colors, but the risk is to burn them and lose contrast.

Okay, tried, drove from Pueblo to Burlington.

Personal impression:

1. FPS didn’t increase significantly, at least not that I could see it, barely measurable:
   
   
   
   => Still having down to 30 in crowded and traffic city areas.

Just for comparison: Here is a FPS monitor of a transport from Grand Junction to Denver and further on to Colorado Springs three days ago with HDR on (but SMAA only “low” instead of “medium” since yesterday):

=> almost the same FPS level

2. With regard to brightness, contrast and colours: When starting, I had clear blue sky and sunshine, and your suggested settings are way too dim for me. After having made a U-turn with my truck, I directly switched back
   brightness to “0”;
   contrast to “2”;
   and backlight to “80” on-the-fly in PiTool.
   But HDR still off.

Dawn/dusk and night-time are okay, nothing to complain about.
But even with backlight up to “90”, daytime still lacks quite a noticeable bit of real daylight imho.
Okay - right now in Autumn, I have applied Grimes Early-Autumn-mod, which makes the whole lighting a little duller - but even in Autumn, when the sun is shining, days in reality are brighter than they are in ATS with HDR off. Not to mention if I go down to backlight “45” as you suggested - I would need headlights whole day long

Strange to say, that all in-game menus look much brighter with your setting than the rest of the game… So normally, after having started the game and having been in the menu, I would have expected a far better result. But … well… it isn’t… I haven’t installed any other graphics mods than Realistic Graphic Mods, Grimes Early Autumn and Grimes Darker Nights, so …
Which reminds me… : If we are talking about Grimes Season Mods, it generally might be worth a try to disable that mod. But even if everything looked more natural then with HDR OFF, I would lack all four seasons, which would be quite a pity, too.

So, I think, for the moment, I’ll stick with my former settings and HDR on…

Hopefully, SCS is reading some of our and other discussions about VR in their games as well and will implement some ingame brightness, contrast and gamma sliders for VR; the existing brightness slider only works for flat monitor gaming.

[mmorselli]

The only environmental mod I use is the Realistic Graphics Mod, I tried the autumn mod, but it has very sad tones, I love vivid and bright scenes. A little bit better the spring one, I like all the flowers it adds, but in the end I get the best visual result using only the Realistic Graphics Mod

The Realistic Graphics Mod has very bright tones…

It’s very surprising that you don’t get a strong FPS increase by disabling HDR, I have more than 15 fps of gain with 2080Ti, and it’s a common idea also on Reddit that HDR is computationally very heavy (I didn’t look though if it weighs on CPU or GPU).

Tested in game with fpsVR

Which CPU / GPU are you using?

What settings on PiTool and SteamVR?

I’m using quality 1 on PiTool with 100% on SteamVR

I have done the most of the tests in the new DLC Colorado ( awesome)

[elin77]

@mmorselli

The Realistic Graphics Mod has very bright tones…

Ok, so it might be that Grimes Autumn overrides the brighter tones of Freakn’s mod.
But generally, I like the seasonal atmosphere Grimes mods create. And with HDR on, I think, the tone fits as well very good. And especially with 8K-X backlight now
BTW: I have put Bloom to “0.0” in ATS config-file - I cannot endure the game’s default bloom.

@mmorselli

Which CPU / GPU are you using?

What settings on PiTool and SteamVR?

I’m using quality 1 on PiTool with 100% on SteamVR

CPU: Ryzen 5 2600X, stock, non-OC
RAM: DDR4-3200, @3200 MHz, non-OC
GPU: Gigabyte 2080 Ti Gaming OC, slightly UV/OC 1905 MHz @0.931V, running in-game after some time when “hot” (65-72°) constantly @1860 MHz

PiTool: 1.0
SteamVR-SS: 100%

[elin77]

I just did another driving and monitored the FPS with MSI Afterburner:

As you can see, in the desert from Albuquerque to Farmington, I am very close to 70-75 FPS. The more it gets towards Colorado, the lower they get.
But from driving side it still feels largely smooth enough. It only gets a bit annoying when it goes below 30 FPS.

Furthermore, I made some more image adjustments:

After having found this thread here:
https://community.openmr.ai/t/my-8kx-review-problem-solution/31886/72
and the calibration image, I found out that my display, too, is 1 level too redish @default.

So I gave the following setting a try:
Contrast: 0
Red contrast: -1
Brightness: 0
Backlight: Increase from 80 to 90

=> I think it turns out very well. Neither does it lack any colours or contrast, nor does is it too strong and does burn any of them. Of course, contrast 0 instead of +1 is noticeable, it feels a little less vivid than +1 - on the other side it feels a little bit more realistic to me. Especially the sky sometimes turned out very blue with +1, which isn’t fitting for autumn allways when the sky tends to be a little bit more pale than in summer. And due to contrast =0, the HDR effects are noticeable weaker than with +1, which also feels more comfortable and realistic.

I’ll see how I can adapt to this now after having played two months with increased contrast - but it seems as if activating backlight solved the main part of the former issue And a minor part is always due to the specific game itself if it isn’t adjusted properly to VR anyway. It would need very sensitive sliders to fit everything.

BTW, @PimaxQuorra, @SweViver, @arminelec :
During this calibration and adjustments, I found out that both, PiTool as well as Pimax Home Experience, aren’t applying colour-specific contrast and brightness values correctly - it seems as if it is always the specific colour tab which is open which applies its values and overrides the others as if they were all set to “0”. At least, it was not possible for me to put i.e. contrast to “1” and afterwards, additionally, reduce only the red contrast to “-1” - it always reverted the entire contrast in the HMD’s image back to “0” although the general contrast tab still showed the “1”. Being in that general contrast tab again and applying that “1” immediately increased the contrast again, but the image turned out much more reddish again as if it had applied that “1” to the red contrast as well even if that one was still set to “-1”.
Might be related to beta PiTool .086 only or perhaps some general behaviour; haven’t tried a fall-back to .084.
I’ll see how I can describe this better and post it in the appropriate category.

But to me, it seems as if colour-specific deviations in addition / on top of the general colour contrast / brightness setting needs a completely different GUI and application behaviour to work properly.

[elin77]

Just for comparison a FPS chart from ETS2 right now:

=> ETS2 behaves very slightly better than ATS but mainly feels a bit smoother and more constant… probably because I drove in “good old Europe” which is the oldest part of ETS2. I am on my third way to Instanbul, so I am expecting average going down a bit when crossing the frontier to latest DLC “Road to Black Sea”

Second, in ETS2 I am using “Fael Environment” since the beginning instead of Freakn’s “Realistic Graphic Mods”, don’t know really why So it might be, Fael is a little less demanding than Freakn.

Anyway, in total, I think we are speaking of positions after decimal point, max. 2-3 FPS.
Could run fpsVR next time additionally.

[Jien1963D]

Thanks for posting the link. I hope my post was helpful in some way.