I've tried everything, I can't stop the flickering

[Flightismylife]

So as the title suggests, I've played with just about every Nvidia, FI, and FSX setting I can find to try and get this to work fluidly, but I have had no success. There's no way it's a hardware problem in that, even on the lowest resolutions and settings, and with hardware like mine (Two GTX 980's in SLI, Intel i5-4690K overclocked, 16GB ram), I cannot escape flickering and jumping frames withing the VR environment. When I take off my headset while it is on and glance at the windowed FSX, I notice that there is 0 latency and it looks perfect no mater what type of movement I try, hovering at 90fps. But once I look within my headset, I find that looking left to right repeatedly causes intense flickering and locked frames. I see the amazing potential this has, and I really do want it to work, I only wonder what it is that might be wrong. I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks,
Flightismylife

[Robert]

It's the SLI. Or most likely the SLI.

FSX, FlyInside, and SLI just don't work. SLI actually makes VR worse in most every VR application. Nvidia promoted VR-SLI a couple of years ago but never implemented it at the driver level. Applications have to be coded specifically for it and even then, according to Nvidia, you still only get a pretty minor increase in performance. Supposedly the 10 series cards are better but applications have to be coded specifically to use SLI. Still. Turn off SLI, use the second card for PhysX (don't think that helps in FSX though). Some have reported they had problems until they actually removed the second card physically. I didn't have to when I was trying SLI. I just turned it off in the driver settings but that was quite a while ago.

Turn SLI off and try again. Bet it works much better.

[Flightismylife]

I disabled SLI, and viola!, no more latency! I never would have thought that might be the problem. However, there is still an issue... While there is no longer any latency, now I find that the screen has black flickers, which I again can't seem to disable. I would think this has something to do with the refresh rate or something along those lines, but playing with various settings did not fix that. At any rate, at least the VR is now usable, thank you again. Any advice on fixing the black flickering?

Thanks,
Flightismylife

[Tony]

Known issue with the vive mate. Dan is working hard to fix it

Tony

[Robert]

Have you tried turning off reprojection in the SteamVR Settings menu? Or turning it on if it is off?

Also, try turning off or down various MSAA settings, autogen, special effects and the like in the FSX graphics settings menu. It is also affected a lot by more complex aircraft with surface reflections and things like that. And if you are running with lots of other add-ons you can run the load up and cause flickering.

Since FSX is generally bound up by CPU performance, if you have good cooling, try a bit of overclock. Also, on your GPU, if you can, set the fans to run up to full speed at anything a bit above room temperature so that your system can catch GPU heating and prevent the GPU clock from being throttled.

[Flightismylife]

Glad to hear the future looks bright for this software! I did try turning re-projection off and playing with a slew of other settings, but in the end it doesn't fix the problem. I'm just happy that it is now usable, to be honest I think the VR is so incredible I don't mind the occasional black flashes; of course I'd love to see it patched out though.

Flightismylife

[calistah]

I actually did the opposite and enabled always-on reprojection. Started SteamVR, went into Settings, scrolled down to Direct Mode and checked the box for "Enable Always-on Reprojection". Close SteamVR, start FlyInside.

That cleared up all of my black screen flicker issues. Running max resolution in FlyInside.

Windows 10
P3D
GTX 970
Core-i7 6700

[northg]

After weeks of experimenting I was just about to give up on the flickering issue when I noticed this post. I turned on the "Enable Always-on Reprojection" and it has fixed the problem for me as well. I can now run in max resolution with most sliders turned up without any flickering. There is still some slight stuttering at the most cpu intensive airports (ORBX Southampton) but that is far less annoying than the flickering.

WIndows 10
i5 4960K
GTX 1080

[snojj]

Wow!! Also checked "Enable Always-on Reprojection" in the Developer tab, and the flickering stopped for me as well! Max resolution.

Tested with pmdg 737 at fsdreamteam klax - it runs better than it does on my monitor! (AI traffic enabled too) - Off to test some full flights!


Win 10
P3D
GTX 970
i5 6600k

[littleDave]

Can confirm that this trick removed all flickering for me, too. Had tried everything and nothing worked for me. I tired to get used to it, but sometimes it was just no fun anymore.

I just tested the PMDG 737 in Taxi2Gate EDDM during a thunderstorm and the A2A Cessna 182 in FlyTampa Dubai. Max resolution, 2xAA, medium settings, P3D v3.2: no problem.

I did not check the SteamVR SDK yet, if this option can be set automatically by an application, but at least a mod should create a sticky post with this possible solution.

Another thing I noticed: when I opened the frame timing stat window of SteamVR, there were no more misses frames.