Asobo you definitely broke something.
With much trepidation, I returned home from vacation and installed the mandatory July 27 update, along with the two hot fixes. For context, I have no third-party content besides the Spitfire. (Which I also updated in content manager). My system is an 8th gen i7 (8700), a 1080ti, 32gb ram and 1tb ssd. Goggles are Oculus Q2.
The good news is that the app is stable and fluid for me in both pancake mode ultra and in VR (my old custom settings). I didn’t turn on developer mode yet, but there didn’t seem to be any loss in frame rate. If anything, the sim feels a touch smoother on my existing settings.
The bad news:
Firstly, I don’t detect much additional overhead to dial up my rendering resolution, at least in VR. I tried bumping it from 80 to a hundred percent, but no bueno. Even 90 percent introduced stuttering.
This is bad news, because at the same settings the sim definitely appears more—-cartoonish?? Especially in VR. The clouds are certainly less mesmerizing at both medium ans high settings. The terrain, even after the recent LOD hotfix, seems stripped of their texture unless they were custom-drawn in a high-detail area. Buildings seem to have more detail but are less photo-realistic. The reflections in the water are a mess. Even the lighting on the terrain is a mess. If I look directly at a terrain feature at sunset, it will appear to be in direct sunlight. As I shift it to my peripheral vision the directionality of the light shifts.
More subjectively, the sim definitely lost some
of its visual pop. The ability to cause me to suspend disbelief and feel as though I’m soaring up there for real.
I’m hesitant to go mucking around in the config file until the update at the end of this month rolls out. But I’m not optimistic that they’ll have a handle on this by then. They appear to be stretched thin covering two platforms, PC and VR.