ACC VR - The definitive VR Performance Guide

DevlNando · Dec 29, 2021

BrightCandle said:
y because it runs the game rendering well below the resolution of the headset and it makes the entire image soft which damages far objects with fewer pixels more than it does closer ones. But deeper under that is why hasn't Kunos really improved VR and its performance and look and the answer to that came in Aris's stream today where he blamed VR and its need for high resolution and users being unwilling to tweak things themselves. So you definitely guarantee while he is about its not getting fixed and at this point it definitely wont be. Alas the game just doesn't run if you put that resolution up. For the same resources ACC looks substantially worse than every other racing sim.

wow sad to read that, I will be sticking to the original AC for now

BrightCandle · Dec 30, 2021

ARC_Marcella said:
I'd love to see this, don't suppose u know the timestamp in his stream, was it marathon 2? Thanks

Yes was near the beginning of Marathon 2 by that I mean within about an hour or so. It annoyed me a lot when he said it, was just horrified with their attitude to their customers. I mean we have seen the same with their FFB where he condescending dismissed all the arguments against why ACC's FFB has issues, its just a pattern of behavior that is really concerning me about AC2 now.

Rebel_488 · Dec 30, 2021

Today kunos finally spoke up about vr, here are the two devs repsonses

Georgo Panker

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say, our assets are already optimized to the best of our knowledge/abilities/resources. I jokingly said I didn't feel qualified because you're throwing around thousands of dev hours as if it were piss easy to achieve substantial additional improvements in a project that's been through 3+ years of active development, so I don't think those expectations could ever be possibly met, and any response would be quite futile, including this one.

Earlier in the project we experimented with VR-specific asset optimization but the extra dev time and effort was not worth the marginal gains.
Regarding some of the VR-oriented tech now available in UE4, unfortunately they are out of question due to the constraints of deferred rendering and/or DX11. And even where they are a possibility, often the reality is a lot different from uneducated expectation or wishful thinking (see DLSS in VR vs pancake).
And frankly with the general diminishing returns with developing anything for VR specifically, especially in the current climate and identity crisis of the tech itself, the share of players is too small (single digit, like it or not) for the same amount of dev time not to be spent on something that can benefit all or most users instead.

And regarding expecting anything new to be done/added, as a general advice, even if a developer is known for long-term support of their products, if you don't like something on the day you purchase it, just get a refund while Steam allows it, leave a review, maybe get it again later and change your review if things turn better; you might think that you're advancing the game's development by insisting and offering your unsolicited 2 cents on how things are supposed to be done around here, but believe me the end result is likely gonna be the opposite, especially in the long run. Not only does it alienate developers from engaging but this entitled attitude will also stop niche passion projects in all genres materializing to begin with, as there are less painful ways of making a profit.

And Stefano added this

AC "1" engine was designed to run "well" on a nVidia GeForce 560 video card, a card released in 2011... it was our "minimum spec" while working on the AC1 engine. It's not a surprise it can deliver today enough performance to hit the magic 90fps needed in VR. On a modern PC at 1080p you'll probably hit the hard coded limit of 300+ fps with it.

AC1 engine is also a "forward" rendering engine that relies on MSAA as antialias tech.

MSAA means the engine is taking advantage of special hardware to render the screen at 4X the resolution and then downscale to the final resolution. This is very important in order to obtain a final image that is defined and smooth at the same time. But this hardware processing advantage is only available as long your render things in a "simple" and predictable way.. which doesn't include the kind of processing needed to have some "modern" effect.

"Forward rendering engine" means triangles are just written directly on the screen (not 100% correct but bear with me) as opposed to "deferred rendering engine" used by UE4 that works in a different way: triangles are rendered to different buffer representing the different properties of the triangle and then subsequent passes are applied in order to calculate the final lighting for the scene.

Why u no use Forward engine in ACC?

The reason why pretty much every modern game engine moved to deferred can be recapped with:
1) Deferred engines are much more efficient if you render a scene with MANY light sources. Orders of magnitude faster. AC1 only came with a single light source (the sun).. night was never considered so forward was a reasonable choice for the engine. Adding multiple light sources to a forward engine means inevitably running into performance problems.
2) Deferred engines are MUCH better at creating screen space effects such as reflections or blur. In AC1, turning on blur and MSAA at the same time means paying a huge price in performance because the blur calculation is done on the 4X render target.. that's a lot of pixels and you won't be getting the hardware support behind MSAA in those passes. Every technique done in screen space would suffer the same performance hit when combined with MSAA. That's why in Unreal if you enable the forward engine you instantly loose all these screen space effects that rely on the deferred buffers to be filled with info.

Finally.. take a look at the amount of details in the typical AC1 track or car and to the typical car in ACC... ACC has easily 10X more details everywhere.. bigger textures, full blown 3D trees, animated spectators and so on. You are comparing a game targeted at 2011 class hardware to a game targeted at 2020 class hardware.. there's almost 10 years between them.. it's not a fair fight.

BrightCandle said:
Yes was near the beginning of Marathon 2 by that I mean within about an hour or so. It annoyed me a lot when he said it, was just horrified with their attitude to their customers. I mean we have seen the same with their FFB where he condescending dismissed all the arguments against why ACC's FFB has issues, its just a pattern of behavior that is really concerning me about AC2 now.

Yeah after the scam they pulled twice with the console port I’d happily not buy ac2 or anything from kunos going forwards but acc is so good in every way except vr and perhaps the lack of organised races that I’d struggle to play any of the other sims lol, so I bought a g9 and will set it up this weekend

DevlNando · Dec 30, 2021

they need to hire the custom shader patch developer for assetto 2 otherwise its gonna be another vr disaster

MaxH_SimRacing · Jan 4, 2022

I followed every step in the latest guide (only left out the engine.ini file
I use HP Reverb G2 with slightly bigger resolution but not much more.
But i dont get stable 90 fps with my overclocked RTX 3090. RenderResolution in Game is 60%.
I decreased VR pixel density from 135% to 120% and RenderResolution to 50%, then I get 90 fps with 80% GPU but every some seconds i have dropped frames where it gets lower than 90 fps. CPU (Ryzen 5900X) usage is about 15-20% all the time, RAM is at 3600Mhz.
I dont know why these framedrops happen even with 80% gpu load. It happens when i am sitting in cockpit, not driving, not looking around, still the same things to render. What is the problem here? What reason could be? I have nothing else open. When i reduce VR pixel density to 100% which looks ugly like standard settings, then i have 40% gpu usage and nearly no dropped frames.
How can i prevent dropped frames?
Thank you for hints!

LynxSec · Jan 6, 2022

MaxH_SimRacing said:
I followed every step in the latest guide (only left out the engine.ini file
I use HP Reverb G2 with slightly bigger resolution but not much more.
But i dont get stable 90 fps with my overclocked RTX 3090. RenderResolution in Game is 60%.
I decreased VR pixel density from 135% to 120% and RenderResolution to 50%, then I get 90 fps with 80% GPU but every some seconds i have dropped frames where it gets lower than 90 fps. CPU (Ryzen 5900X) usage is about 15-20% all the time, RAM is at 3600Mhz.
I dont know why these framedrops happen even with 80% gpu load. It happens when i am sitting in cockpit, not driving, not looking around, still the same things to render. What is the problem here? What reason could be? I have nothing else open. When i reduce VR pixel density to 100% which looks ugly like standard settings, then i have 40% gpu usage and nearly no dropped frames.
How can i prevent dropped frames?
Thank you for hints!

Make sure you run your G2 in SteamVR at 100% SS, if that doesn't work, lower it even more.

Set ingame res to 50 or 60%, play with VR Pixel density, you have to find the sweetspot for your setup on your own like this.
Also, are you using OpenVR_FSR?

Let me know what the results are and we can keep troubleshooting if needed.

Mekonrider · Jan 13, 2022

This a depressing read. People with a 5900x and a 3090 still can't get a decent look out of the game...I'll go and cry in a corner with my 3060ti

At the same time it's annoying given how good PC2 and AMS2 look and even how good the community has made AC.

LynxSec · Jan 15, 2022

Mekonrider said:
This a depressing read. People with a 5900x and a 3090 still can't get a decent look out of the game...I'll go and cry in a corner with my 3060ti

At the same time it's annoying given how good PC2 and AMS2 look and even how good the community has made AC.

I got a 3070, and i drive daily, you can get it to look good and perform well with some effort. Although, it takes some time to get there.

Spunky Sloth · Jan 15, 2022

Spent the last week trying to get ACC playable on my G2. First with a 3070, then a 3080. Using the base presets + and including this guide resulted in an unplayable and horribly blurry experience that made the game unplayable IMO. Last night I took a different approach and did get the game to a very nice and stable place at a pretty solid 90fps (with the occassional spikes as it seems to be inherent to ACC regardless). Hopefully this will help someone else.

The big change for me was adjusting pixel density to get actual clarity. I used a 15 car AI quick race at Nurburgring & Barcelona for testing as there are a lot of terrain assets and FPS can vary heavily around the tracks and they stress test differently so you might be solid at 90 at one part and you think your good and then on the backside of the track you're at 70fps. Get it stable here in this scenario and my testing at other tracks has been nicely optimized.

Specs: 5600x, 3080 (mild overclock), 3600mhz 32GB, HP G2 V2.

I did use the OpenFSR dll mod from this guide. Just highlighting the settings that made a big difference for me in gaining performance and clarity. I tuned with vrFPS and if you're getting low GPU utilization (I was originally at 50% SteamSS and like 54% GPU utilization) it's directly linked to resolution more than anything. With this setup i'm sitting between80-90% GPU utilization.
I wasn't able to get DLSS to do anything other than kill performance. It does look better than FSR but FPS is king.

*NOTE* - For SteamSS to take effect you must exit and restart ACC. You can't switch on the fly with your VR controller.

*Edit* There is some kind of bug with the settings though as I had pixel density set to 200% all dialed in. I restarted the game an hour later and was getting 60fps and had to get it down to 120% to get back to 90fps. So not quite sure what is going on there. *Edit*

The only immersion breakers I think are really low car LOD's and draw distance on Low for popping in assets really noticeably so those were adjusted accordingly.

Framerate Limit: 90
V-Sync: Disabled
Steam SS: 60%
Render Res: 80% (Vary this to get your optimial performance - I was adjusting between 50-80% to dial things in and it's directly tied to your GPU useage).
View Distance: Med
Shadows: Low
Shadow Distance: Low
Contact Shadows: Enabled
Anti-Ailasing: High
AA Type: KTAA (doesn't seem to be a big performance difference between the types but I feel like KTAA handles the shimmering better than TAA/FXAA)
TAA Gen5: Disabled
DLSS: Disabled
FSR: Enabled
FSR Quality: Custom (links directly to your Render Res setting).
FSR Sharpening: 100% (Play 80-100% - I found this can have a staggering amount of perceived detail into the scene but does increase the jaggies as well)
Effects: Low
Post-Processing: Low
Foliage: Low
Texture: Low
Mirror Quality: Low
Mirror View Distance: 50M
Mirror Framerate Limit: 45fps (does seem to actually bump up performance over auto)
Mirror Resolution: Low
Opponent Visability: 12
VR Pixel Density: 135%
Virtual to Real Scale: 100%
Materials Quality: Low
Temporal Upscaling: Enabled
Bloom Quality: Disabled
Fog: Disabled
Foliage LOD Quality: Low
Car LOD Quality: 100%
HLOD: Enabled
Advanced Sharpen Filter: Enabled
Motion Blur: Disabled

Your results may vary but I hope it helps someone!

Rebel_488 · Jan 15, 2022

Try this

VRToolkit

Modular shader to enhance you HMD clarity & sharpness with minimal performance impact.

vrtoolkit.retrolux.de

noviembre · Jan 17, 2022

i had stable 60 fps with g2 (6800xt, 5900x) with relatively quality settings. but this week i had performance drops with the same settings and need to lower render resolution. i nearly tried every track with that settings and never had an issue before but this week i have fps drops in every track. do you have same issue, is it just me?

LynxSec · Jan 17, 2022

noviembre said:
i had stable 60 fps with g2 (6800xt, 5900x) with relatively quality settings. but this week i had performance drops with the same settings and need to lower render resolution. i nearly tried every track with that settings and never had an issue before but this week i have fps drops in every track. do you have same issue, is it just me?

I dont have any issues no, it sounds like something on your pc.
Make sure you dont have any malware or anything like that.

Also, when i play VR in ACC, i shutdown everything non essential. Basically i only run Steam, SteamVR, Discord and Voicemeeter when i play. Also, i got multiple screens, i disable all except the main screen in order to save performance for the game.

Imagineer_NL · Feb 10, 2022

Is the guide still valid?
I get a "503 Service Unavailable, No server is available to handle this request" when i click on the link

Knut Mattheisen · Feb 10, 2022

anonhost1433 said:
Hi,

I have been polishing ACC for VR, made a guide to help others out.
This guide is mostly for Valve Index, Vive and other SteamVR headsets, not tested with Oculus. However, if you find good results with any Oculus headset, let me know so we can update the guide.

Guide on Web

In this guide i will explain in detail how to get the most out of Assetto Corsa Competizione in terms of VR Performance.
In the end, you will find a downloadable pack with all the configs and readme's.

Last Update: 2021-12-20

Changes:
[2021-12-20]
- Updated SteamVR resolution baseline
- Updated ingame graphics settings and uploaded a new config
- Updated the json graphics config preset

[2021-12-07]
- Corrected some links

[2021-12-06]
- Updated the sections

[2021-12-05]
- Changed Engine.ini to optional as it does not seem to be requiered for good performance
- Fixed some typos

Sections:

Introduction

Before You Get Started

Check Your Hardware

Expectations

SteamVR Settings

Nvidia Control Panel Settings (Same should apply to AMD's control panel)

Stop the game from double-rendering the game

Engine.ini

OpenVR_FSR V2.0

Ingame Graphics Settings

Video of improved performance

Summary

Imagineer_NL said:
Is the guide still valid?
I get a "503 Service Unavailable, No server is available to handle this request" when i click on the link

few minutes ago it was still online ;-) I have worked with it successfully

Mekonrider · Feb 10, 2022

I'm getting the 503 as well.

Mekonrider · Feb 11, 2022

Working now, thanks.

LynxSec · Feb 14, 2022

Imagineer_NL said:
Is the guide still valid?
I get a "503 Service Unavailable, No server is available to handle this request" when i click on the link

Knut Mattheisen said:
few minutes ago it was still online ;-) I have worked with it successfully

Mekonrider said:
I'm getting the 503 as well.

Hi, sorry!

The server was offiline due to an error in the datacenter.

I have posted the guide here on Racedepartment now, inacase it happens again.

https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/acc-vr-the-definitive-vr-performance-guide.48679/

=SHB=phenrys · Feb 15, 2022

Hi everyone.

I got a final solution with the editet ini files and tweaks from here for me that only works with high resolution headsets:

Specs: i9 9900 / 64 GB 3200 RAM/ 3090 / HP Reverb G2

I use full resolution in Steam VR / G2 Headset settings and in ACC as well.
All Seetings INGAME on low / med (distance view HIGH / texture HIGH) .

DISSABLE ANTI ALAISING !! That makes a hugh performance hit.

In 2160 resolution you dont need it. Sharpening 120 % / DLSS OFF .

On public server up to 20 driver = stable 90 fps - since a crash happens More than 20 oppenents increased the frames. at 27 ~ 29 player the frames reached 65.

Maybe that works for you guys as well...

Knut Mattheisen · Feb 15, 2022

=SHB=phenrys said:
Hi everyone.

I got a final solution with the editet ini files and tweaks from here for me that only works with high resolution headsets:

Specs: i9 9900 / 64 GB 3200 RAM/ 3090 / HP Reverb G2

I use full resolution in Steam VR / G2 Headset settings and in ACC as well.
All Seetings INGAME on low / med (distance view HIGH / texture HIGH) .

DISSABLE ANTI ALAISING !! That makes a hugh performance hit.

In 2160 resolution you dont need it. Sharpening 120 % / DLSS OFF .

On public server up to 20 driver = stable 90 fps - since a crash happens More than 20 oppenents increased the frames. at 27 ~ 29 player the frames reached 65.

Maybe that works for you guys as well...

Nice to know mate - will try it.
What do mean with "full resolution" in SteamVR? You mean the native Resolution of the G2? (2160x2160)
And where did you set the resolution in SteamVR? On the global side (general), or did you set it on the per application tab?
As far as I know it makes a difference how you get your final resolution. Either only on the global side, or in combination with per app.
The final SteamVR SS Percentage 100% can be achieved with different combinations.
I'm confused.

I'm trying to do the same with Automobilista 2 right now....

=SHB=phenrys · Feb 15, 2022

Hi Knut.

I set every resolution i can change to 100% , in Steam (global) so in MixedRealty Setup so i play in the native resolution of the g2.

you can set resolutions diffently, i know, but that makes the picture blurred.