DiRT Rally 2.0 DR2.0 VR performance tuning and visual upgrade mods

DR2 kinda runs like a pig in VR. There's also weirdness with gamma/brightness and things being blurry. Turns out these are largely solved. Between optimizing settings, a mod for brightness and another for sharpness it can look really good in VR and the mods have no noticeable performance hits.

First a guide for gfx settings to get the most out your system. There's guidelines for visuals or performance and explanations of what's being changed. Still relevant despite ui changes since it was made. Not mine but the best I know of.


Eye Accommodation Fix
This addresses the weird gamma/brightness thing that make day/sunset stages in Sweden a white-out despite brightness settings. This works by picking a different target in the fov to base brightness scaling from making it drivable under all lighting conditions like people playing on a monitor get to enjoy.

https://www.kegetys.fi/dirt-rally-2-vr-eye-accomodation-fix-v2-0/

There are separate settings for day/night, fog adjustment parameters and new vegetation shaders that get rid of the dot/grid dithering artifacts. Love the evening gloom and actual lighting variance this mod provides... having to actually turn my headlights on to see better as dusk rules.

I've found the stock settings in the accommodation mod make headlights too dim and canopy covered areas at dusk too dark, but it can be adjusted in the .cfg:

eye accommodation mod tweak:
luminanceMaxRange=1050
luminanceMinRange=600



Contrast Adaptive Sharpening/reshade

This CAS sharpening tool has only recently became compatible with VR. I would have never believed it possible, but it's like putting on glasses you didn't know you needed or running settings on ultra -instruments readable without leaning in, can read signs in the car's mirrors, the mesh windows of crosskarts or chain link fence sharp and realistic instead of a floating blur etc.

The Sharper Eye (CAS sharpening mod)

racedepartment keeps breaking my link so if the one above doesn't work repair this one by removing the spaces in necksismods because for some reason the naughty world filter keeps replacing it with ** https://www.ne xusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/46999?tab=files&file_id=191435

Technically a Skyrim mod but made to be compatible with most games and works great in Dirt Rally 2.0. It comes with presets for Skyrim so a few values need to be changed to make dr2 colors/brightness look right.

CAS sharpener tweaks:
Brightness=1.000000
Contrast=1.000000
Saturation-0.850000

@obo
made an additional .dll to accompany reshade. He discovered a load order issue with the eye accommodation mod and his dll shim makes them work together, detailed in this post along with a link to his mod https://www.racedepartment.com/thre...-and-visual-upgrade-mods.200905/#post-3372288

If anyone knows of any other really good tweaks or guides I'm interested. Also, if anyone knows of or stumbles on to some particularly good settings for the mods above, or other mods that make the game run or look better please post them here.
 
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Managed to get to my rig and test this. Indeed , openxr, tookit and kegetys eye accomodation fix is working. With quality and wide FFR settings managed to get massive boost in game performance. Bumped resolution from 70% --> 90%, with same 4x msaa, and difference in visual quality is huge. Tested openvr 70% (what i used before) and openxr without ffr, and same resolution and noticed also better visual quality with openxr. Shader cache seems to have helped me also with the stuttering, so everything now feels great with dirt rally 2.0

3080
5800X3D
32g ram
HP G2

EDIT: @mechsicko do you still recommend your eye accomodation settings ( post #43) nowday?
 
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Managed to get to my rig and test this. Indeed , openxr, tookit and kegetys eye accomodation fix is working. With quality and wide FFR settings managed to get massive boost in game performance. Bumped resolution from 70% --> 90%, with same 4x msaa, and difference in visual quality is huge. Tested openvr 70% (what i used before) and openxr without ffr, and same resolution and noticed also better visual quality with openxr. Shader cache seems to have helped me also with the stuttering, so everything now feels great with dirt rally 2.0

3080
5800X3D
32g ram
HP G2

EDIT: @mechsicko do you still recommend your eye accomodation settings ( post #43) nowday?

Yep, double checked and I haven't changed my .cfg since it was posted here. In case you missed the explanation there are double headers for day/night sections, with one of each '//' commented out. Reason is sometimes the mod gets confused and swaps day with night values, so if a stage loads with crushing darkness or cartoonish brightness this is why.

Settings take effect in real time, so when they're swapped you can tab out, use SteamVR desktop access and can easily swap the headers without taking off the hmd by switching which ones are // commented out. I Was typing out Day and Night at first but this is more streamlined.
 
I've got OpenComposite (OpenXR) running in parallel with the updated dr2vrfix-openxr, so thanks to those of you that made that possibility happen. I'm still not entirely sure what the best sequence of opening all of this, and which ones I actually need to open. I have all of this installed which I think is relevant/needed:

  • Mixed Reality Portal
  • OpenComposite
  • OpenXR Tools for Windows Mixed Reality
  • OpenXR Toolkit Companion App
  • Steam

I am launching the game from Steam still, and selecting Launch DiRT Rally 2.0 in Steam VR Mode. I can't really figured out why sometimes SteamVR still opens, and other times, the game runs without it, and just with OpenXR. Is there a better way? What should I have open first? I feel like I've tried every combination, and it's just inconsistent with what it starts with.

I'm also a bit confused about the Rendering Settings and Custom render scale in OpenXR Tools for Windows Mixed Reality. I get the feeling that 100% here is not the same as 100% in SteamVR, for my Reverb G1. It just looks way sharper at 100% than SteamVR did at 100%, but the other thing is when I use the OpenXR Toolkit, and go Override resolution > Yes, the Display resolution (per eye) that is initially displayed is about 500 pixels higher than my actual headset. EDIT: And I know the G2 was different in Steam where something like 50% was actually the native resolution, but for the G1, 100% was 1:1.

Beyond that, I still have my stutter. Having Foveated Rendering is nice, but the stutter is just something else..... probably something beyond the reach of this realm :)

EDIT/Update: Okay, if it really is as simple as it seems, because there's a resolution listed in the OpenXR Runtime tab, 100% in OpenXR is giving me a resolution of 3160x3092, whereas my native resolution is 2160x2160. 45% seems to be the closest match to my native resolution. Therefore, I could lower this a LOT, and get more headroom, maybe for 4x MSAA, or maybe even for stutter elimination....... haha, probably not. More testing to come.
 
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Don't know exactly how, but I've now had this game running smoothly for ~3 consecutive days. Lost track of how many things I've changed, so hard to say exactly what made the difference. Sure, still could be related to Shader Cache, but also now running OpenXR with Foveated Rendering. Eliminating SteamVR feels very clean; now when I run the game, I have WMR and Dirt Rally 2.0 running, and nothing else. Well, Steam is running in the background, but only to launch the game. Curious if it might even be possible to eliminate that with a command line option in a shortcut for the .exe? Also did a lot with my graphics card, including a voltage increase. Last thing I can think of, again, some of this might be entirely unrelated, but I uninstalled vjoy, which I had installed to get irffb work with iRacing; I guess I can't play iRacing any more, but Dirt Rally 2.0 is life, so no problem :)

If I don't have smooth game play now, it's entirely because I'm pushing the graphics settings too hard (aka because I don't have a 4090 :)). Any frame drops from that is very different from the stutter I was having before.

EDIT: There's also been some SteamVR and WMR for SteamVR updates in the last couple of weeks, so could be that.
 
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Super interesting topic,

can someone explain to a newbue like me the steps to benefit from this package ;)

Seems like you have done a lot of testing, may be some setup is now stable ? :)

Thanks
phil
 
Super interesting topic,

can someone explain to a newbue like me the steps to benefit from this package ;)

Seems like you have done a lot of testing, may be some setup is now stable ? :)

Thanks
phil
There are a few different things going on here with the same goal -making DR2 look as good as possible while running as good as possible. First up are a few mods, Eye Accommodation (corrects awful gamma/brightness to make Sweden and other combos driveable in VR) and ReShade/CAS (to increase sharpness without a performance penalty)

More recent stuff are musings and experiements to combat the eternal scourge of stuttering in SteamVR and also WMR. Another thing rolled into this is using OpenXR to bypass SteamVR for people using WMR headsets like Reverb.

Depending on what platform you use some or all of this might be relevant. Are you wmr or SteamVR? I am on SteamVR using Eye Accom/CAS and used the vid in the op to tune my gfx settings. Recently took Moogleslam's advice of bumping Nvidia shader cache to 100gb and that seemed to solve my stuttering and was able to crank other settings in gfx now it looks great and runs smooth and others report good effect with it as well.
 
I am using reverb g2

And dirt 2.0 is all i play ;)

I have a 4090 coming next week but I’d love to get the best of it

I usually play on my Samsung g2 but I’d love to do VR if I can get better quality image

So far it is pretty washed out

The stereo effect is awesome but man vr is just such a hit and miss

Never working as expected .. I kind of gave up ….

May be with some new mods it could come back to life ! ;)

I’d love to !
 
ok so I did it ... now running Dirt2 bypassing steamvr.


My steps to get started
- Dirt2 previously installed via steam
- install openXR : https://mbucchia.github.io/OpenXR-Toolkit/
- install opencomposite: https://gitlab.com/znixian/OpenOVR
- Restart PC...
- run open composite, select 'run all via openxr'
- run open XR
- go to steam and launch dirt2.0 inVR
... Steam runs but OpenXR takes over... only way for me to make sure, is using the CTRL+F1 shortcut which popup the openxr menu... if not everything is the same.

I have not tried yet the 'eye accomadation' patch here

I am calling it a day by I can say that the game run much smoother now. It is not a 100% perfect thing but still good. and much smoother overall.

I can run the game at ultra setting and get 90fps IF I remove a few of the useless artifact such as the crowd or god rays and the like.

But I still cannot run 16x MSAA and 8x anti alising.

I am running RTX4090 FE and intel i7-10700k and reverb g2.

For some reason with steam I sometime had perfectly smooth run and other time it was horribly laggy. Right now it seems I can have stable smooth high definition

PS: silly me, at first I only saw an FPS overlay and all black screen... I thought it was buggy but looking behind me with the vr headset, the game ws just playing in my back ;)
 
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On my system if I start steamvr it disables openxr, so I make sure to never start steamvr but instead launch from steam with the steamvr option.

And I highly recommend the eye accomodation fix, as well as fixing haze and exposure problems it also improves performance by turning off the tree dithering.
 
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ok so I did it ... now running Dirt2 bypassing steamvr.


My steps to get started
- Dirt2 previously installed via steam
- install openXR : https://mbucchia.github.io/OpenXR-Toolkit/
- install opencomposite: https://gitlab.com/znixian/OpenOVR
- Restart PC...
- run open composite, select 'run all via openxr'
- run open XR
- go to steamVR and launch dirt2.0 as usual
... Steam runs but OpenXR takes over... only way for me to make sure, is using the CTRL+F1 shortcut which popup the openxr menu... if not everything is the same.

I have not tried yet the 'eye accomadation' patch here

I am calling it a day by I can say that the game run much smoother now. It is not a 100% perfect thing but still good. and much smoother overall.

I can run the game at ultra setting and get 90fps IF I remove a few of the useless artifact such as the crowd or god rays and the like.

But I still cannot run 16x MSAA and 8x anti alising.

I am running RTX4090 FE and intel i7-10700k and reverb g2.

For some reason with steam I sometime had perfectly smooth run and other time it was horribly laggy. Right now it seems I can have stable smooth high definition

PS: silly me, at first I only saw an FPS overlay and all black screen... I thought it was buggy but looking behind me with the vr headset, the game ws just playing in my back ;)
Disable Anisotropic Filtering in the game gfx and enable it in Nvidia Control Panel instead, uses less resources. While you're in there bump your shader cache up to 100gb (it's a global setting, msaa is game specific though). Eye Accommodation mod is stuff the game should have shipped with and corrects some things that make certain stage/weather combos un-drivable
 
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I just upgraded to 4090 and with the opencomposite workaround upgrade at the same time, this is bringing VR back to life for me!

Before that with my 3090 and SteamVR, Dirt 2.0 in VR was really underwhelming compared to the monitor playing.

I am looking forward to stepping back into VR.

There is still room for improvement so the next generation graphic card (rtx5090) may actually allow us to use 16xMSAA ;)

@mechsicko thanks for the tips, I've recently read the older post because the eye accomodation patch had transformed my trees into 'real time fireworks', they were flickering in and out as I was driving by. But I found in the earlier thread that my setting of 2xMSAA was buggy, increasing to 4xMSAA had fixed it.

I didnt' know about the MSAA setting optimization, I'll try it ;)

@ltnordb you are right I updated but bullet point, I do need to start in steam and select play in VR, if I do start with the steam dash the opencomposite doens't work. thanks for pointing that out.
 
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Disable MSAA in the game gfx and enable it in Nvidia Control Panel instead, uses less resources. While you're in there bump your shader cache up to 100gb (it's a global setting, msaa is game specific though). Eye Accommodation mod is stuff the game should have shipped with and corrects some things that make certain stage/weather combos un-drivable
MSAA also in NVCP? Or do you mean AF? Currently running msaa in game 4xx and AF 16x in NVCP
 
Hello, I been using DR2 for quite some time now. Just wanted to share an update of the current fixes that have worked for me in the hope that it may help guide someone out there. Most of this has been suggested in this same thread, I'm just summarizing. I'm using the Oculus Rift S with a 3080 laptop.

*Open composite. This alone brought me around 10% of performance overhead AND fixed the low quality dithering at low light. The only problem I have is that whenever the headset goes to sleep, DR2 will crash. I "fixed" that by covering the headset sensor with tape.

*Eye accommodation fix there is an Open composite compatible version. Obviously a must for usability and improved tree quality.

*FOV tangent multiplier 0.8/0.8 in the Oculus debug tool. This alone gave me around 20% performance overhead and can be used with all Oculus games without any visible penalty.

*Game settings optimization, there are many guides out there; however, you should try all settings by hand to measure actual improvements in different tracks conditions. MSAA4x did seem to be the sweet spot with SS at 1 (disabled) any more and performance suffers without notable quay improvements. Other picky setting is ground cover, in some sections can really tax my system, medium is a good starting place but I did ended customizing it.

*Nvidia shader cache setting in the Nvidia control panel. This actually seemed to help reducing stuttering!

*Starting Steam in light mode. This actually seemed to free my CPU a bit and improved stuttering In general.

Some things that have NOT worked or brought little/any improvements:

*CAS sharpening filter. Not compatible with Oculus.

*VRPREFKIT sharpening and FOV rendering tool, didn't work for me either with Open composite or the Oculus SDK at the same time as the Eye accommodation fix.

*OpenXR toolbox. Will run but didn't get any major performance improvement either with rescaling or FOVeated rendering, and did affect quality so I decided to disable it.

So that's it, took a lot of time from my life trying to get the most of this sim, and surely will in the future! But I really love rally simulation in VR, so it's worth it. All this feels like amateur rally racers tuning up their ride, so it's in the sport's spirit I guess... Jajaja
 
Hello, I been using DR2 for quite some time now. Just wanted to share an update of the current fixes that have worked for me in the hope that it may help guide someone out there. Most of this has been suggested in this same thread, I'm just summarizing. I'm using the Oculus Rift S with a 3080 laptop.

*Open composite. This alone brought me around 10% of performance overhead AND fixed the low quality dithering at low light. The only problem I have is that whenever the headset goes to sleep, DR2 will crash. I "fixed" that by covering the headset sensor with tape.

*Eye accommodation fix there is an Open composite compatible version. Obviously a must for usability and improved tree quality.

*FOV tangent multiplier 0.8/0.8 in the Oculus debug tool. This alone gave me around 20% performance overhead and can be used with all Oculus games without any visible penalty.

*Game settings optimization, there are many guides out there; however, you should try all settings by hand to measure actual improvements in different tracks conditions. MSAA4x did seem to be the sweet spot with SS at 1 (disabled) any more and performance suffers without notable quay improvements. Other picky setting is ground cover, in some sections can really tax my system, medium is a good starting place but I did ended customizing it.

*Nvidia shader cache setting in the Nvidia control panel. This actually seemed to help reducing stuttering!

*Starting Steam in light mode. This actually seemed to free my CPU a bit and improved stuttering In general.

Some things that have NOT worked or brought little/any improvements:

*CAS sharpening filter. Not compatible with Oculus.

*VRPREFKIT sharpening and FOV rendering tool, didn't work for me either with Open composite or the Oculus SDK at the same time as the Eye accommodation fix.

*OpenXR toolbox. Will run but didn't get any major performance improvement either with rescaling or FOVeated rendering, and did affect quality so I decided to disable it.

So that's it, took a lot of time from my life trying to get the most of this sim, and surely will in the future! But I really love rally simulation in VR, so it's worth it. All this feels like amateur rally racers tuning up their ride, so it's in the sport's spirit I guess... Jajaja
I can't access the site for the eye accommodation fix. Is there any way I can get it?
 
I can't access the site for the eye accommodation fix. Is there any way I can get it?
Yeah Kegetey's site's been down for a while, luckily the updated version of it (compatible with openxr) was recently posted to github and works the same with steamvr

 
Yeah Kegetey's site's been down for a while, luckily the updated version of it (compatible with openxr) was recently posted to github and works the same with steamvr

so do i just drop this folder into my dirt rally directory or how do i install it
 
so do i just drop this folder into my dirt rally directory or how do i install it
I was able to pull up kegety's site on the wayback machine, and amazingly the link for the zip file is still active. In that version there is a readme that explains how to install and use the mod but essentially yes you just put it in your DR2 directory folder and all changes/tweaks to it are done through the dr2fix.cfg file. For that I recommend making a copy of mine that I've posted a few times in this thread, the stock settings are a little wonky and I spent a while getting it dialed.

 
Can anyone give me a step by step guide on how to get Dirt Rally 2 running via SimCommander 4.5, I've got a G2 and trying to play the Steam VR game via WMR and open up with one click in SimCommander.

I saw a video detailing how to do this in version 4 of sim commander but it doesn't seem to work for 4.5

It has found the game but it says waiting for game to start, when I put on the headset it just says "put on headset"
 
Maybe not what you want but have you tried starting the game in VR like normal and then activating the profile afterwards? Should be fine that way, but there was an update for VR devices a while ago that makes them easier to boot straight into the headset from the profile. I've stopped using VR since returning to Simcommander so I haven't tried this out myself.
 

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