Yes! We are probably going to do a recalibrate of the settings and remove a few “over the top” settings that just kill perf without a lot of benefit.

Have you considered removing or hiding the “Maximum (uncompressed)” texture quality setting?

Currently it does nothing but confuse and frustrate people; they choose it thinking it will offer increased quality over “Maximum”, but all they get from it is stuttering due to texture paging.

@Maurice Cohen.
It is my understanding now that the Index software takes care of the algorithm that corrects the image for canted displays just as the Pimax does for its.
The issue is these are not efficient so I was hoping that Xplane could hard code in the required adjustments for canted displqys which would be much more efficient.
For example the algorithm Pimax use costs around 20% in Xplane performance by all accounts but this can be tested by turning off support for parallel projection and noting any difference.
I’m not sure why Valve have not incorporated into steam VR instead but my thought was that if Xplane coded for canted displays it would not be necessary but apprarently that is incorrect.

I am successfully using the Valve Index with SteamVR running at 45fps and cannot see any negative effect as a result of the lack of overt support for canted lenses. Given the close relationship of Steam and Valve, I would assume that SteamVR automatically takes care of it.

Ah right, thanks.
I was under the mistaken impression they had Steam support for the Index release.
Well at least we will get better performance purely on the back of Vulkan efficiency.

Last I checked, SteamVR didn’t have API support for canted displays, so even if we had canted support, we couldn’t use it. Right now we don’t have canted support though, so we’re blocked on us and SteamVR.

Hi Philipp, so grateful for Laminar’s VR support and I’m hopeful there can be greater gains via optimisations using Vulkan down the line.
However one thing that is quite resource intensive is parallel projection required for canted HMD’s which now seem to be the cutting edge (Index, Pimax 8K+)
Can anything be done to hard code for these displays so that parallel projection is not required?

I watched the X-Plane 11 presentation on Saturday from the live stream and heard what you said about Vulkan and Metal.

I tried to get him to go over to the X-Plane 11 booth when he was streaming the floor on Sunday because I thought you would be running the Vulkan build but did not happen.

I am so happy that we are this close to a beta and can’t wait to be able test and especially want to see if there are any improvements on VR for Linux.

I have a 1080Ti here so looking forward to putting it to work.

Thanks Bill

All Sunday long, we were running VR (using the WMR headset Samsung Odyssey+) with Vulkan. So, everyone who test flew VR on our machine at the booth on Sunday flew with Vulkan.

It was stable enough to keep people flying on Sunday, but it is still quite rough. We had Orbx True Earth Great Britain installed on the machine, and that is quite a demanding scenery when it comes to VRAM usage. Currently, the Vulkan version will just crash if you go over VRAM – and we only had 8GB available on our GTX1070. So we occasionally ran out of VRAM when we loaded a different plane or airport and had to restart X-Plane. If we had had 16GB of VRAM, it would probably have worked without the need to restart, ever.

However, we can’t require 16GB VRAM for everybody! That’s why it is important that VRAM management works correctly without crashing! That’s the major remaining to-do item before we can give you a beta.

Our goal is to ship Vulkan _with_ VR working – we sent a Vulkan VR build to the show so tomorrow I’ll find out if it worked or blew up. Generally better overall/desktop perf means a better VR experience.