What are the preconditions for FFR to work?

[elin77]

Good morning everybody

I once again like to highlight FFR not working reliably in some / a couple of games, i.e. my Truck Simulators or Elite Dangerous, at least, when played via SteamVR and with Parallel Projection enabled. When played with an older PE version via Oculus-mode and without PP, it worked. (Unfortunately I cannot play it this way, since command line parameters and launch of imported games in PE is broken for ver. 0.86.)

SteamVR Home itself, in contrast, works with FFR, and I even can adjust FFR level on-the-fly, I see the difference between the four possible options (off up to aggressive) right away.

=> @PimaxUSA, @PimaxQuorra :
Except owing a NVidia RTX GPU, what are the further preconditions for FFR to work?

Are there similar requirements as for NVidia’s VRSS, i.e. MSAA support by the game, or anything else?

I am really curious and cannot understand, why it doesn’t work properly.
Especially as I got the ATS to work one single time - 1x - with FFR one or two years ago with my former 2080 Ti, SteamVR and PP, and the performance gain was huge (50-60 FPS up to 80!). But since then: Absolutely no chance, no matter what settings I change (NVidia control panel, PiTool, in-game). I once again spent 1-2 hours yesterday fiddling around with different settings (level of AF, AA, Mapping, SuperSampling) - no success.

Thanks for some investigation and answer in advance

[neal_white_iii]

I have seen reports of FFR not working with Elite D, but the few times I tried it, it worked fine. Others have reported success.

I have an RTX 2080, but my thought is that it may depend on the video driver version. I liked the framerate increase of FFR, but I didn’t like the blocky visuals on the periphery. I tried using Smart Smoothing, but didn’t like the weird visual artifacts.

In the end, I decided to use Small FOV. The FOV is sufficient to see the entire cockpit controls and I just pretend that the edges of my vision are blocked by my spacesuit helmet. I get a good balance: A decent framerate with fairly high super sampling, so the cockpit controls are easy to read. It’s the best I can do, until I can get a better video card.

[elin77]

@neal_white_iii :

When enabling it with Elite Dangerous, I get a fairly large blocky image all over the complete FOV, not only the peripherals. Completely unplayable.

When watching it in SteamVR Home or that one and single time in ATS (or when playing in Oculus-mode as long as it used to work…), I only get some unsharp image in the periphery, as it is intended to be. But they are not really blocky, just a bit blurry, and of course, the more the more aggressive FFR is set.

Apart from that, with FOV ‘normal’ and SS set to 100%, I don’t have any problems to read anything in any of my cockpits - everything is 95% sharp and smooth. But of course to the cost of FPS - I sometimes get 75 FPS, but most of the time, I get only something between 50-70, depending on the area. And since the ‘normal’ FOV is increasing immersion for me very much - and I’d even like to go to ‘large’, if FPS drop wouldn’t be so immense -, ‘small’ isn’t an alternative for me.

So I am just curious, why FFR is causing so much problems … it was promoted being an innovative feature allowing everybody to play with larger FOV’s and/or higher SS - but in the end… well… you know yourselves

Not at least, besides my personal curiosity and being annoyed a bit, this really would be one of THE arguments and features for Pimax to promote their headsets even more, since many people certainly would like to try out larger FOV’s, but only own 2060’s/2070’s/3060’s/3070’s and therefore hesitate due to the lack of GPU power. And as we know, even a 3080 or 3090 comes to a limit with FOV ‘normal’ or ‘large’ when it comes to certain demanding and high-detailed games.

So, investigating on that problem and reliably implementing FFR could help pushing Pimax headsets.
I can understand, that VR is still a niche, that’s why NVidia isn’t investing too much money into VR and features such as VRSS besides the absolute minimum for the moment.
But for Pimax, VR is THE key product… the better the technology and the better such features, the more they will convince people to buy them

[Octofox]

@elin77

When enabling it with Elite Dangerous, I get a fairly large blocky image all over the complete FOV, not only the peripherals. Completely unplayable.

My experience is the same as Neil’s for ED. FFR (conservative) works, but looks pretty horrible on older headsets unless you crank up the SS. The 8KX was not so bad, and now I use small FOV + FFR + MS to get the best framerate possible.

That said, I have had the exact same problem you are experiencing - but only when I have some AA settings enabled in ED for VR. It goes away when AA is disabled. I mentioned this a few times on here but no one else confirmed seeing the same thing. It seems ED’s rendering doesn’t like AA in VR anyway, so I just left it off.

[Yata_PL]

ED - FFR works in all modes in my system. In most racing sims also no problem.

[elin77]

Okay - with the new Odyssey DLC, I just went back to E:D for the first time since October/November last year.

And indeed, FFR seems to work meanwhile.
So having it not working in the truck sim’s apparently isn’t related to Parallel Projection (alone), but perhaps to the game’s graphics engine and AA mode it uses, similar to NVidia’s VRSS… (?) Might be, that E:D did some adjustments there during the last months since I played last time. Just an idea…

[elin77]

Okay, short update, really weird:

As I got an “orange sidewinder” error after three days of playing ED Odyssey, I tried a workaround and launched simply Elite base game for some kind of “reset” of my savegame.

=> And: Elite base game doesn’t work with FFR, blocky visuals as I was used to before Odyssey.

When going back to Odyssey: FFR working. Well - at least no blocky visuals, I did not any FPS comparison yet.

Quite a bit weird: The basic game of Elite isn’t working with FFR, Odyssey is…
(Haven’t tried Horizon).

Just for further information and perhaps confirmation and /or investigation:

Base game: V 2021.05.24.268907 0.4.6568.0 FD
Odyssey: V 2021.05.24.268936 0.4.6568.0 FD