I am tuning up a 3080 ti , i9-11900K, 32GB system for MSFS in VR with Oculus Quest 2 over Link.
I have been through a ton of excellent posts on tuning recommendations in this forum, but I would like to understand more from the perspective of how all the various components play together - that is, how are the settings are having an affect.
The understanding I am left with thus far is that:
The render resolution in the Oculus app sets the target resolution of the stream to be sent to the headset
MSFS reads this when it connects to the headset and renders the stream accordingly
In MSFS, the render scale then sets the balance between what is actually rendered directly and how much is done with super sampling - to achieve the required resolution
Super-sampling, being a render-cheat, is cheaper when it comes to GPU load
So at a basic level it is balance between full on rendering and super sampling…?
The various settings in MSFS are applied to what MSFS has to actually render, with the render scaling being applied last (i.e. the settings impact the actual rendering itself)
Is that the basic essence of it?
Playing around with the ODT suggestions, most seem to have no noticeable effect with the exception of FOV and ASW. Is it correct that the defaults for Link bitrate and Encoding width are now high enough to not need adjusting in ODT?
Finally - what actually causes micro stutters? Even when I drop things low enough for the GPU to be only at 60% load, you still see them when flying low.
Are the stutters basically dropped frames where the GPU cant reach the target FPS?
I dont see anything else maxing out - CPU wise, the thread load is around 20-30%. System memory and GPU memory are at worst 50% loaded.
I am running a Quest 2 over link on a system with an 2080 Super.
My experience is that you need to tune settings to an optimum max load to avoid stutters. I have been experimenting for over a half year with all kinds of settings but currently I am happy with the following:
After all my experiments I found that Steam VR is better than the native Oculus runtime. Added bonus of Steam VR is the fact that you can ajust world scale for cockpits that feel too small.
I use OTT to lock ASW to 18 HZ. However, you need to save the settings in OTT every time after you enable the link in the headset or it won’t work. When I enter VR and notice lagging I know the setting is not active. Just quit Steam VR, resave the OTT and enter VR again.
Lower the resolution by using the FOV reduction in OTT. I have mine on 70% both horizontal and vertical. As I wear glasses and have the glasses spacer installed I can live with the black borders in the corner of my eye. It is a good way to lower the amount of pixels being drawn.
About supersampling. SInce the beginning of VR for msfs I have used 100% renderscale in msfs. I used OTT supersampling but since SU5 I have found that I now can run the Oculus app on max resolution.
I think I will try SteamVR again - I was using that with my previous card - a 6700 XT - because Oculus Link wouldnt start with the Radeon software installed. When I got the Nvidia I simply switched over to Link as I found it easier to launch MSFS and drop in-and-out of VR using Link.
On max load I find that stutters start becoming much more noticeable above 80% GPU load - they are still ‘minor’ at this level but get worse as the load increases. But in some ways this does not suprise me as I would expect a processor’s ability to ‘cope’ to degrade once above 80% load - my day job involves CPU intensive systems such as realtime search, and this is what we typically see, and I would have thought the same would apply to a GPU as well.
FOV did have a big impact - but I could only go down to 0.9 before the side bars became intrusive.
I am still curious as to what actually causes the stutters though.