Score one for Team Red

[Post 1 of 3 for R.E.A.L. VR release 20.1.0]

What's this? Where's Death Stranding? What's Luke been up to?

Okay. Let's start from the ending. I am going to publish a series of three different posts. The final one will be the release post for the game you saw in Brandon's teaser: Death Stranding Director's Cut.

But before that, you will get two surprise games that were not announced, which are going to be the subject of the next post I'm going to write.

So what is the current post for? What about Team Red?

As many of you know, I started my VR modding efforts a few years ago, and back then I was supporting NVIDIA and AMD video cards with more or less identical features.

However, as time went by and the number of modded titles grew, I was forced to leave AMD somewhat behind. The reasons for this were threefold: AMD cards stopped being competitive with NVIDIA, especially in VR where you need lots of raw power; the market share reflected that, with only 9% of my Patrons playing on AMD cards; and most importantly, the hardware and software capabilities exposed by AMD GPUs did not allow me to port my AER v2 and DL(S)SS implementations over, without undertaking a huge effort and time investment that would benefit few users and lead to mediocre results anyway.

Today, the situation has changed somewhat. NVIDIA is still king in terms of sheer performance, but a series of factors are making it a less and less attractive choice. Some of those, like the exponentially rising prices, scarce availability, huge power consumption/heat generation and so on, could still be tolerated within the boundaries of an enthusiast market. However, the increasing marketing/technology push toward the so-called "fake frames" trend (temporal upsampling that multiplies the perceived frame rate on a display monitor but is worthless in VR, due to restrictive implementation policies that make it unusable) is leading to a progressively worse price/performance ratio.

In the meantime, AMD's implementation (FidelityFX™ Super Resolution, or FSR for short) has gotten more and more competitive, to the point where even the guys at Digital Foundry are starting to be quite favorably impressed.

So these past few weeks I experimented with the Red side of the world (AMD, not China ^_^) and I am happy to announce that we now have a viable solution to get rid of the shimmering without the need for an NVIDIA card!

The solution is based on a third-party mod which is nothing short of amazing: OptiScaler by cdozdil. Thanks to that mod, in almost every game that supports DLSS upscaling, you can substitute AMD's FSR implementation and have it run effortlessly on AMD hardware. But from the game's point of view, the video buffers will still be produced in DLSS format, and that means that my R.E.A.L. VR mod can intercept them and fix the disocclusions by translating the calls to work in stereoscopic mode, thus getting rid of the shimmering around nearby objects and NPCs.

Unfortunately, these days companies move way slower than modders, so for AER v2 instead, where I need ROCm and HIP, I'm stuck waiting for AMD to extend support for their tech to Windows. Their current unofficial roadmap mentions Q3 2025 as a possible release window, but AMD has been known to delay their software stack implementations quite often. We'll see.

Nevertheless, even without AER v2, the improvements made possible by OptiScaler (enabling my DL(S)SS implementation) are quite dramatic. If you have an AMD card, try it in CP2077 when I publish the new release: the difference is night and day. (While you wait for the release, you can get a sneak peek by watching Brandon's video for the tech here: []-)

Instructions and caveats

To use DL(S)SS with your AMD GPU, first of all you will need to download Release 20.1.0 or later of the R.E.A.L. VR mod, which you'll find attached at the end of this post series. Remember that in order to update an existing installation of the mod, you need to run RealConfig again after extracting the archive and overwriting the old files. If you don't run RealConfig, the update won't work.

Launch the game in VR once, just to make sure that everything works correctly before complicating things with another mod installation.

Then, download the latest OptiScaler version from https://github.com/optiscaler/OptiScaler/releases and extract all the files in the exact same directory where you installed my mod, again overwriting older files in case of duplicates.

Be very careful with this next step: now you need to run "OptiScaler Setup.bat", and when it prompts you to choose a filename for OptiScaler, you'll want to select choice 8, "OptiScaler.asi". If you choose any other name, or just press Enter which will default to "dxgi.dll", my mod won't be able to find OptiScaler and patch it to enable VR support. Actually, if you choose the default option you will also get a file conflict because both mods will want to use dxgi.dll as the name of the injected library. So remember, at the first prompt you need to select OptiScaler.asi which is currently choice number 8.

For the remaining two prompts, namely GPU type and DLSS inputs, just select the default options instead (meaning that you'll use an AMD GPU, and that you will want DLSS inputs enabled).

NOTE: this whole procedure is only meant for AMD video card users. If your system is NVIDIA based, DL(S)SS is already supported natively by my mod and you don't need OptiScaler (installing it will probably only mess up your game configuration, unless you know what you're doing and have a specific purpose for it).

The next step is to run the game again and select DLSS as the upsampling technique. Most games will allow you to use DLSS without issues once OptiScaler is installed, although some of them may need additional tinkering. The current compatibility list can be found in the OptiScaler wiki. Do NOT activate frame generation of any kind, as it never works in VR and it will lead to crashes or freezes.

As I was saying above, AMD cards do not support my AER v2 technology yet, so make sure that the Render mode in the main page of the R.E.A.L. VR mod overlay is set to Legacy AER. Many games in my list implement the Camera rotation compensation, which means that turning the camera with the right controller stick will give you a smooth and fluid panning motion even with Legacy AER. Lateral movement (strafing for instance, or NPCs walking sideways in front of you) will still lead to some ghosting, visible as a left-right duplication of object edges. To get rid of that you'll need AER v2, which you can access today on NVIDIA systems, or hopefully in a few months from now if AMD keeps working on extending HIP/ROCm support to Windows and to their new cards.

Finally, an additional recommendation. On my system, if I use the NVIDIA GPU I get much better performance and fluidity by turning on HAGS (Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling) in the Graphics section of the Windows settings app. However, I was quite surprised to find out that the opposite holds for the AMD card: as soon as the GPU load increases toward 100%, my Quest 3 tracking gets all jittery if HAGS is turned on, while it remains perfectly stable when HAGS is off.

Do not take this as a general rule: it could very well be system-dependent. The important takeaway is that you might want to experiment turning HAGS on or off on your own system, and the results may vary if you swap in new hardware.

See you soon for the game posts!