Hi - I created an account just to come answer this in case anyone else lands at your post searching for solutions like I did.
First, my specs: i7-10700k, 64GB ddr4-3600, RTX 3090. Oculus Quest 2 using link cable. I was also getting horrible performance no matter what settings I was using for flight sim in VR, probably 5 or 10fps - seriously awful and unplayable. I followed the suggested route of updating the registry to point to the Oculus version of OpenXR using the beta channel in the Oculus app (v24). I even bumped resolution scaling down to 50%, set everything on low, etc. Nada.
This was highly frustrating as I’ve been seeing plenty of reports from people with much less powerful hardware getting entirely playable results.
The solution for me was to use SteamVR’s implementation of OpenXR instead of the Oculus apps. I set the registry back to point to Steam’s OpenXR json file (default location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SteamVR\steamxr_win64.json) and enabled the SteamVR beta. Then launched the game in VR as usual. After doing this, I was able to set resolution scaling up to 100%, kept the defaults except for turning textures up to Ultra and Glass Cockpit Refresh up to High. My SS in SteamVR is set at 150%. I have render resolution for the Quest 2 set at 1.2x in the app. I now get entirely playable performance and the thing looks beautiful!
My assumption is that the Oculus apps implementation of OpenXR is just buggy and not very performant right now. The SteamVR implementation works much much better, even for Oculus headsets (I bet this applies to Rift S as well).
Btw, I am using the game through Xbox Game Pass and did not purchase on Steam so this approach should work ok for all store versions and headsets I assume.
I’m running a base oculus rift with a 1080 video card and it’s quite playable.
I don’t see enough people mentioning to turn off VSYNC in graphics settings. After that here’s what works for me:
Render Scaling: 100
Anti Aliasing: TAA
Terrain level of detail: 200
Terrain Vector Data: Ultra
Buildings: Ultra
Trees: High
Grass and Bushes: High
Objects level of detail: 100
Voumetric Clouds: High
Texture Resolution: High
Antistropic Filtering: 16X
Texture Supersampling: 8x8
Texture Symthesis: High
Water Waves: High
Shadow Maps: 1024
Terrain Shadows: 512
Contact Shadows: Medium
Windshield Effects: Medium
Ambient Occlusion: Medium
Reflections: Low
Light Shafts: Low
Bloom: On
Glass Cockpit Refresh Rate: Low
I tried this solution, and while it definitely removes a lot of the frame spiking issues, it also introduces different issues.
Mainly getting very strange distortion/artifacting when moving my head, as well as an overall “fisheye” perspective.
The main issue seems to be that the Oculus OpenXR implementation has a bug in it when using it with a link cable on the Quest which makes everything a jittering mess that constantly fluctuates between 20 and 40 fps.
Unfortunately this may be something that needs to be fixed by the team responsible for OpenXR, and Asobo may not be able to fix it themselves.
Just FYI this is wrong, you are thinking of panel resolution when in fact at 100% steam slider resolution you are at 2016x2440 per eye for a total of 4032x2440 on the index, so you would expect slightly less than the frame rate you can achieve on a 4k panel.
There is also the overhead of rendering two different viewpoints which makes comparison to a single 4k image less easy.
So you are using SteamVR OpenXR runtime with Quest 2? How does this work? Do I need to do anything specific to run the game on SteamVR? I have a Q2. I agree with you Oculus implementation, specially when using Link, is bugged. The frame times are out of sync and this is causing extreme stutter and jittery head movements…very frustrating. I will try what you suggested.
Tried it and it definitely introduced other issues. Distortion was annoying and scale was off. Scale looks pretty accurate using oculus openxr runtime, but with steamVr and quest 2 planes are tiny. I still find turning Vsync ON (fast mode) to be the best solution for the Oculus Link issue. Not ideal, but make it playable. I believe the game needs a lot of work to be properly optimized to run in VR. The way it works right now is not good enough. To be honest, they should removed it until it is running properly. When VR is this bad, it can cause health issues, eye strain, headaches, etc… This is a liability. Potential is pretty clear, it will be amazing when it is working, but we are far from it. I will play 2D for now.
You are confusing the panel resolution with the render resolution. VR headsets ideally render at a higher resolution than the panels (about 1.4x the linear resolution values) as they have to apply barrel distortion correction to the image before sending it to the headset. Your index at 100% in steam is rendering at 2016x2440 per eye as I stated.
Feel free to check it yourself in steam, it’s right there for you to see if you go to custom resolution slider and set 100%. Alternatively just do a small bit of research on how VR headsets work and barrel distortion correction.
Both the cockpit and environment are modelled in 3D space. So this won’t improve rendering time but reverse engineering what you just said and theoretically you can get a smoother cockpit experience if the simulation runs independantly of the rendering engine therefore allowing the cockpit to refresh without the need to know where the plane exists as this is computed relative to the player. Very Interesting, I would hope MSFS does something similar.
Why would they not render native? No wonder nothing looks crisp. Non native res is bad on every panel ever made.
Sounds like a failure of a design.
Anyway if you’re correct, I can not check as I am a thousand kilometres from my PC, that means Index requires a little more pixels per second than my 4K monitor.
But i when I use smoothing I only need 45fps which is half, which is heaps less. Yet I still only get about 30fps.
Where as I get 50-60 on the monitor.
Still a huge fail.
They have botched the implementation.
Aerofly FS2 I get 90fps in ultra in VR.
Thank you Vulkan and a game built for VR from ground up.
Not a case of if, I am correct. If you are away from your PC then perhaps a cursory google of valve index steam render resolution would find the proof you desire.
It’s not a failure of design, and it isn’t why nothing looks crisp to you. Running at the higher render resolution would actually makes things more sharp as it reduces aliasing (look up super sampling).
Again, it is mostly to correct for barrel distortion. The game will render at the higher resolution to a buffer, distortion correction will be applied which warps the image so that once you view it through the lens of a VR headset everything will look correct… due to the nature of warping the image you need more pixels to start with otherwise the area that gets stretched in the middle will end up appearing low resolution. That higher resolution pre-distorted image is then sampled and sent to the headset at native resolution, and once it has passed through the lens looks geometrically correct to your eye.
And to add once again, you are comparing the rendering of one viewpoint at 4k to two viewpoints at slightly over 2k each. There is more overhead involved in rendering two scenes and is why there are things such as SPS that exist to try to address this overhead (but come with their own problems).
Is there room for further optimisation in MSFS, absolutely. Hopefully a lot. DX12 especially should help both flat and VR graphics performance with things such as VRS, Sampler feedback etc. However your argument of a perceived lack of VR specific performance by way of comparison to your 4k performance is flawed due to a lack of understanding about how the systems actually work.
There’s nothing flawed about my claim it runs like ■■■■ in VR.
I get 30 fps in VR low to medium settings.
I get 60 fps most the time in 4K Ultra.
Tell me how that’s acceptable?
It should require far less GPU processing power especially when I set the index to 80% resolution scale and 80hz and smoothing.
Yet can’t do it.
I don’t want 90fps, I am happy with 40 or 45 so smoothing can do its job. But I barely get that.
3080 Suprim X OC 2150mhz core.
Ryzen 5600x
32gb DDR4 3600mhz
I’m not saying the performance is acceptable, I’m saying your comparison and expectations relative to your 4k performance was flawed in a couple of key ways and have explained those at length already.
However I would suggest you have some opportunity to improve things because I can run at a solid 30fps with mostly medium/low on a 3070 at 70% resolution on a G2 which is significantly higher resolution than the index (at 100% it is trying to do over 3k x 3k per eye!) take a look at this thread for some settings optimisation advice which will also help with your 3080 (you’ll just have more headroom to turn things up higher or to shoot for 45fps).
There is a link to “My VR Settings - Index” above, and I’m preparing the article for “My VR Settings - G2” soon. In the meantime, I’ve tried capturing what I do get with the G2 which you might find interesting:
I still find turning Vsync ON (fast mode) to be the best solution for the Oculus Link issue. Not ideal, but make it playable. I believe the game needs a lot of work to be properly optimized to run in VR. The way it works right now is not good enough. To be honest, they should removed it until it is running properly. When VR is this bad, it can cause health issues, eye strain, headaches, etc… This is a liability. Potential is pretty clear, it will be amazing when it is working, but we are far from it. I will play 2D for now.