benjaprud

Yes, I've noticed that supersampling has a large effect on cloud performance. I'm on a Rift CV1 which is the lowest resolution headset on the market (1080x1200/eye). I doubt anyone coming here with an Index (1440x1600/eye), Pimax 4k (1920x2160/eye) or Reverb G2 (2160x2160/eye) will manage to achieve anything with volumetric clouds in their current state, although to be fair I'm not sure how Reverb G2 users manage to run X-Plane in the first place. It's a bit of an unrealistic target, at least at native resolution. We'll let you work your magic, but honestly I had a few flights where I was pretty blown away with the visuals. You certainly did amazing stuff with that ! But I can't help thinking that there's some room for a visual downgrade in VR if you ever need to go that way. Also in VR we don't tend to focus on the details in the distance since the display clarity doesn't really allow to fully appreciate these.

Thanks, I've toned down my settings a bit to some point where overall performance is less of an issue but still very much on the edge. It seems like from time to time I'll hit an edge case scenario that makes the performance go to trash, yet I can't point my finger to what's happening exactly. I've also found a way to capture my flights with the frametime info overlayed so hopefully I can catch some of these and send them to you for more constructive feedback.

You guys may want to remove this for now, it's a bit misleading.

Good catch, I'm trying to manually reproduce the conditions that will tank the performance without success for now. I haven't been able to reproduce this wind effect. Maybe that's me not using the X-Plane weather setup interface properly though. If possible, I'd be curious to have a screenshot of your weather setup page.

Let's be realistic, I doubt the kind of performance improvements we'd need to consider volumetric clouds VR worthy will happen overnight. We might still get there hopefully.

I also had a one time crash when reenabling the volumetric clouds, although it's not a systematic thing.

I think the performance hits were there from the start. In my case I've noticed my first serious hits with 5.0.1 after several hours of flight. The fact that some people are noticing it after 5.0.4 is probably because of the short lifespan of previous builds since it takes particular sets of conditions to trigger worst performance scenarios.

I'm not sure if dedicating 80% of the GPU frametime to just clouds and 20% to all the rest is a sound expectation to have. It leads to huge variablility in performance and basically asking users to compromise on all the rest just to make some room for the clouds.

@Cameron You may want to be aware that SMP5 will be looked upon by a big chunk of the VR simmers crowd. The main reason why I use SMP/RWC is that currently it's the only VR compatible solution that allows us to get rid of instant changes in weather, and I bet that's true for a lot of us. The improved graphics while welcome is not necessarily what I'm looking for. The last bit that was an issue with v4 was the rotating effect with the billboard clouds, which can feel nauseating to some, and highly distracting to all of us. V5 is viewed as a potential solution to that last issue, meaning we may finally fly low VFR around the weather without any sort of distracting or immersion breaking behavior. While we need more experience and testing with v5 to see if it is the ideal weather solution for VR users, my experience with it so far is that the performance is hardly workable. It'll still take me lots more tuning attempts to see if I can make it work for me though. In my opinion it highlights the fact that the expectations from flatscreen and VR users may diverge quite a bit, and there's no "one size fits all" answer to it. While the former will value a high fidelity graphics depiction, the latter strives for believable weather that doesn't hurt performance too much. I'd understand that catering for the VR flightsimmers crowd may hardly be valuable as it represents a niche inside a niche. From where I stand, the SMP team is the closest to crack the issues we're having with weather in X-Plane, thus why we're looking at it with hope and passion.

For me so far I had the worst performance hit in some low overcast conditions, I'm still not sure which set of conditions lead to that much performance impact yet. One was low overcast (4000 ft) with two broken layers underneath, another one was two successive layers of low overcast with low visibility.

I use the X-visibility FlyWithLua plugin to mitigate the whiteout issue. I'm not sure if that would improve on OP's issue though.

The clouds looks have started to grow on me, they're really cool. As far as VR is concerned there's probably some room for a visual downgrade. I'll be testing the 5.0.4 fix shortly which is supposed to resolve the terrain blending issues. However during my last flight with v5.0.1 I had more concerning issues in regards to VR performance in some overcast situations. My last flight started at 90 fps (clear skies over water and/or easy scenery), then was 45 most of the way (various cloud coverage above water along the way) but ended at 16 fps (low overcast at night with two broken layers underneath, easy scenery). My setup is an Oculus CV1 with a 1080ti. I usually keep supersampling at 1.3 and can lock 45 fps most of the time with my current settings (HDR, textures max, no AA, anisotropic 8x, world objects high, reflections low). I'll try lowering some of that but I'm not sure if that'll be workable at the moment. I may be able to approach 30 fps by ditching supersampling and going from HDR to medium, which is about how low I'd be willing to compromise the rest. Pic 1 looking down (GPU time is 15 ms without the capture software), pic 2 looking up (GPU time is 60 ms without capture software), two successive layers of overcast cumulus and low visibility, moderately dense overlay and mesh. This is with the latest v5.0.4.

Wow, that was quick, can't wait to try that fix.

I guess you could just switch back to the v4 style clouds in the various "configure texture" menus.

I've never experienced issues with fog myself, which may or may not be because I'm using ASXP alonside RWC/SMP or have different graphics settings. I'd be happy to try to reproduce the issue for you and see if v5 makes a difference there, but I'm not entirely sure of what I should look for. The only times I felt crosseyed is when I'm flying close to a cloud's edge and it rotates so close from my position that it will enter the cockpit, and obstruct each of my eye's viewpoint in a different manner.

While I don't have much experience with SMP v5's performance yet, my first hint is that different types of clouds will impact performance differently (ex : overcast vs scattered cumulus). Also I think it has been said that clouds are rendered differently if they're drawn from X-Plane's weather data or RealWorldConnector's data and also depending on which source of weather data is fed to RWC. Performance may also vary depending on the time of the day because of lighting effects, and clouds detail may also vary depending on their distance from the aircraft, aircraft altitude or the coverage extent that you've set in SMP's control panel. I've had the odd case where I fly under scattered clouds and the performance is fairly consistent, but sometimes there's that one particular cloud of them all that will tank my performance (GPU frametime going from 20ms to 35 ms) if I look directly at it, and I'm not sure exactly why yet.

Yes, for me the main reason to have the whole ASXP/RWC/SMP package is that it gets you rid of the instant changes in weather. Currently it's the only VR friendly way to fly VFR and be able to make flying decisions to get around the weather, since weather won't instantly catch up with you anymore. While I don't care too much for the clouds looks, I still wish for something that's believable and doesn't break immersion, and while we're getting close we're still not there yet. While the rotating clouds are disturbing, I've gotten used to them. They were another good reason to stay far away from the clouds. I'd understand that it can feel nauseating to some though, which can be a dealbreaker. Thankfully if that was your issue this is a thing from the past now. Hopefully someone will crack the X-Plane weather issue someday, and I sure wish the SMP team good success with that. MSFS in VR does have spot-on wind and weather depiction and amazing graphics and lighting, but the aircrafts that come with it all feel soulless and shallow for now. X-Plane is still where the fun is to be had in my opinion.

Well... As a VR user, I can assure you that the rotating clouds/crosseyed effect problem is thankfully fixed, which is all it would take to make me a happy panda but !... Volumetric clouds in SMP v5 do come with their own set of issues at the moment, which are to my eyes more disturbing than the "rotating clouds" effect I've gotten used to with v4 over time. See here and there if you want to get a rough idea and make an informed decision. Also the "clouds to the horizon" is not really a thing in VR yet. I have to keep my distance slider to the default 10000 I used before to keep similar performance, your mileage may vary depending on your GPU (I have a 1080Ti). To be fair, setting the slider to max does not impact performance nearly as much as it did before, but it does so enough that it's not suitable for me yet. Shadows do look awkward in VR. They "move" with head movements, which feels kinda similar to the rotating effect of v4 clouds so you'd want to have these disabled as well, as recommended by SMP's manual itself. Currently you'd be trading rolling clouds for the occasional sea of milk or sharp-edged mountaintop showing through, until things hopefully get improved in the future, although it was hinted that a fix may come with a performance hit. Clouds do look and perform fine when they don't break though. They don't look great, but they're believable enough and have defined shapes and edges which is all I'd wish for. For now I'll test it a bit more to see what can be done to tune the performance and allow for longer viewing distances and maybe help the team with testing and feedback, but I may be rolling back to billboard clouds soon.

Yes I've had this as well (see picture attached), although what I was describing looks like a different issue (cloud looking like a sheet of paper). You may be right that it's a much worse looking variant of the same problem though, especially the "blanking out all scenery" part.

Hi SMP team, I've been trying that latest version of SMP (using it alongside ASXP and RWC) and it's quite promising (as in "it needs a bit of work"). However I've just had this happen on my latest flight : something appeared that looked like a white opaque layer below me (pics 1 and 2). After taking a left turn along the valley (pic 3), the white sheet would cover all the terrain in the distance, including occulting mountains that were higher than the layer itself. Basically it was all white except for the close mountains on the sides (couldn't capture that). The layer then faded out a few seconds later to reveal the terrain in the distance, leaving only the end of the white sheet below me (pic 4). I checked the weather and I was supposed to be at an altitude inside a "few clouds" layer.