EXPERIMENTAL: Virtual Reality

use your mouse if you have space to set it next to you to manually move your head position if you've got it locked to horizon(its not really as i can look down and up still)- i've had to use mine to properly line my head position straight up with the steering wheel as the VR recenter only gets it close at times.

now if there was a fix for turning off snap turning while in walking/snowman mode in VR (and the possibility of using my rift 2/quest 2 controllers instead of my mouse).. i have the box unchecked and have smooth movement enabled but i can rarely move the direction i want to go without the camera flipping 180 degrees any time i move the mouse to change my direction.
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question for BeamNG's dream team of devs- is there anyway to manually set the render distance in a text file or something or something along those lines for when playing in VR/Vulkan?(i was using LOD bias: 4.75[i use 5 on assetto with all graphical settings at their max value] via the app listed below, but it's a chore to do every time)

i've had luck using the 'extreme grahpics' UI app here on the forums/repo(cant see the ui for it in VR but can on the monitor) but i have to manually delete it and it's config file and add it back to the mods folder, then enable it once i have VR enabled ingame.. EVERY TIME i play multiplayer.. figured there has to be a core file where i can hard set the render distance without my graphical presets changing it as i have to run low on some servers but on a 5 player vanilla server i can crank my settings back up..

*to be fair to the dev's seeing as VR is currently 'experimental' the game runs pretty darn stable at an unchanging 60fps no matter the graphical presets-for some reason it's locked there when VR is enabled with no fps limiters set and ASW turned off.. with the rift s and quest 2 on a 7900xtx which is amd's consumer level flagship gpu- I had waited so long for vr support to come back and it has not disappointed! Beam has now ruined other simulators for me now as well because it's just too good. It's got every type of motorsport available in it down to casual driving in traffic following road rules and police to stop you if you don't.. you can't beat it because it's got it all.

 

good to know about the snap turning, i swore i unticked all the boxes concerning it but i may not have.. and thats a shame on the render distance- I figured ingame settings would just be stored in some type of file that could be opened with notepad and manually set it. i guess i'll have to keep struggling with the extreme graphics UI app from the forums til something in the ingame options is implemented.

And thank god its the runtime that has the fps capped and I didnt accidentally change something and have to do yet another clean install, im not looking for maximum fps but was curious since i know my PC's hardware is fairly capable considering its AMD's top end consumer grade products.

 

im capped at 36fps, gpu usage at 50-60% and vram is 6.5/8gb, why is this happening and is this working as intended? unmanaged fps sits around 90-100. thank you

Specs:
r9 3900x
32gb ram
gtx 1080 8gb
edit:
using quest 2 using oculus link. set to 72hz which i guess is why its capping at 36

 

thanks for the reply. so basically i need to buy a new gpu to achieve a higher framerate?

 

I can confirm!
I can replicate crashes within 5 minutes of gameplay as long as the lighting setting is not set to the lowest (anything else can be ultra, the game won't crash).
I load up the Garage to garage West Coast USA scenario, enable VR, and within 5 minutes the game will freeze, and in the Windows Event Viewer there's 3 events about a display driver crash (one even says "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.") with the timestamp matching exactly the time of the crash. Even though the display driver crashes, none of my displays flickers or freezes including the Valve Index which stays on SteamVR, but BeamNG stops responding and won't even issue a crash report.
Btw, the game works fine with Vulkan in non-VR mode, even if I play through the SteamVR theater, so it's really when VR is enabled that this bug happens.
My setup (if that changes anything):
- i9 13900KF
- RTX 4090 (and RTX 3070, both on the latest driver)
- SteamVR
- Valve Index
- Logitech G27 (though I think it really doesn't matter)
- Windows 11 (latest update)

 

I'm not using steamVR, and I typically have 1.5-2GB of VRAM free when playing using VR :/

 

Hi,

When I disconnect my monitor from my GPU fully I get fantastic frame times in VR even with high settings, reflections & shadows on Italy as a benchmark, however without doing that I have tried many other things including just turning off my monitor, clean installs of SteamVR & beamNG, fresh driver installs, Nvidia control panel settings, all beam graphics + display settings, hardware accelerated GPU scheduling in windows and my recent upgrade to windows 11, the result of all these tests was unplayable stuttering and frame times (on both windows 10 and 11) the only other thing that did impact performance notably however was the size of the beamNG window on my desktop, even if it had no UI apps and was set to not render anything from VR, the bigger the window the bigger the frame times and stuttering, for comparison if I disconnect my monitor while running various other VR games such as Pavlov the difference in performance is negligible even though it is rendering my VR view onto desktop.

Regards
An avid beam vr enthusiast

Edit:
Specs
Gigabyte B450 AORUS Elite
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
Nvidia RTX 3070 TI (I do not get the VRAM warning even with the stutters)
16GB 3600MHz
970 EVO Plus 500GB
Acer XF240YU

 

Thank you for the BeamNG VR support! It is like a dream and I am very impressed, but there is one problem. The game suddenly freezes after multiple trees appear in the air. By the way, if the map has no trees, the game does not end abruptly. The graphics board on my PC is an RTX3060 model with 12GB of VRAM, and the FPS during gameplay is sufficient, so I think this is a different problem than a processing crash. I look forward to every update of BeamNG!
And obviously the tree display is wrong.

 

I discovered from a YouTuber by the name of Krazee that you can open any level, hit "F11" to go the level editor, type in "thelevelinfo", adjust the clipping distance, save the level, and if you re-open the level the clipping is taken into effect in VR.

I'm not sure if there was a huge improvement in FPS, but it does seem to take off some of the overhead.

 

Steam recently announced SteamVR Link, which allows you to directly stream SteamVR to the Quest, without going through the Oculus software.
I don't see it yet in the OpenXR runtimes diagram, so it might be out of date. Or is this now also considered to be a part of the SteamVR headsets?

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/3823053915991825336

 

first and foremost your setup is alright- i'd highly suggest scooping up a second hand 5800x3d for the time being(or a dirt cheap 5600x for +15% performance along with your money back from selling the 3600x) and another 16gb of ram(playing beamng in vr uses all my 32gb of ram and most of my 24gb of Vram leaving me with 700mb give or take which is WILD). *given i do have discord open and stream most gameplay*


I don't want to come off as a 'naysayer', but alot of people have been having issues with win11 gaming and VR in particular in the AMD and Intel communities- most of us have stuck to win10 pro and have seen higher performance than win11 byfar- even higher performance with VR on linux using AMD flagship GPU's(given this isnt beamNG testing).

TL;DR: windows 11 at the time is hit and miss for VR/gaming currently compared to everything still being stable on win10 pro.


**Also note to dev's- mod UI apps do not appear in VR only on the main monitor and we need more graphical preset controls so that we can tone down some things without sacrificing render distance and visual quality of what you currently see.. because using a flagship graphics card 4090/7900xtx only will get you a decent experience at low settings online, mid to high offline with light traffic in my case due to reflections causing terrible stutter, the game will easily eat 22.7gb of Vram out of the 24 my gpu has..... (not sure if this is VR specific)- career mode- "vehicle garage" just deletes/doesnt show your cars except for the one you've got out given it doesnt despawn it which was a real kick in the groin after streaming 6 of grinding to buy a battlehawk and a few other cars to only have them disappear into nothing along with my money lol. *(basically would like the beamNG devs to add the 'extreme graphics' mod from the repo to the graphics options ingame as if it were normal as we need more control over what renders)*

***Also curious if the hand tracking openXR plugin will be added for headsets that support it like the quest 2(along with some more optimization) in the next update concerning VR, seems AMD has added more vulkan extensions in their last driver update aswell so i hope performance gets better.

Final note: thank you to the devs for adding VR back in and i hope there is at least a singular or a few members of the dev team that focus on VR's fixes to keep them on the forefront with upcoming updates.-if i had proper experience i'd love to work specifically in that department to further beamNG as i can see this growing exponentially like Assetto still is via the modding community.--- or at the very least if i could do detailed logging for you fine folks of my VR gameplay to send to you after each session so you may be able to look over what causes what for issues on a machine that is very capable of handling high res VR sim racing.

 

I tried to make it clear in my initial post that the issues were the same on Windows 10, I only upgraded to win11 recently after and re-tested with very similar results (I'm aware of the win11 situation but haven't had any issues with it myself yet), I'm not going to spend money I don't have on hardware to fix something that I've seen working smoothly on my setup albeit at the moment inconvenient to do so until future updates.

I don't know why but I haven't experienced much issue with running out of ram/vram barring unreasonable game settings

*It's also worth mentioning that when the VR update initially released it was playable in VR for me without having to physically disconnect hardware, the issue started happening after a STEAM update (not SteamVR)

**Thought it might be a good idea to check now as it's been a while since last test and behold (without unplugging anything):

Drove around for a while and it's gloriously smooth (win11)

 

I've yet to encounter this issue and the biggest difference with my hardware and software is that my PC has an Intel i7-9700F, whereas this issue is happening on an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X. I have an inferior GPU as well, being the non-Ti version of the RTX 3070.

 

Hello Guys after the new update its working so much better. Before the update the game crashes after 1 min in vr mode. Now i can play for hours on high settings and reflections on.
Thanks to the beamng team.

Specs:

RTX 4090
i7-13700KF
32 GB DDR4 RAM
Pico Neo 3 Link

 

Bro, I have the same components, tell me at what resolution you play vr and how many FPS you have on high settings, like in Italy. Is it more FPS or just more stable game in "0.31"?

 

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i would say its more stable. the fps is on lowest the same then on high. There are some areas where i have no fps drops.. yes but i know.. sometimes there are drops. but iam around 90 fps or more. its just the drops. but there is no freeze anymore and thats for me a good update.

i also drive with 10 AI Cars and 5 parked (without the ai cars its simpy the same experience)

 

I get it, VR can be played comfortably now ?), then I'll buy VR)