I get good, smooth VR performance in the air even with all resolutions at 100% and all high settings, but a slide show on the ground near terminals, even with much lower settings. Any advice?
Well, that might depend on what terminals…even in 2D there are places like Los Angeles (KLAX) that are terrible in the sim for 2D and of course for VR where you can literally see the performance hit an inflection point when you get within a short distance of KLAX, almost like you crossed an imaginary boundary. I have similar and good performance in VR and on the ground in most airports, even some busier ones like Chicago Midway (but for me KLAX is awful so I avoid it), but will say that if the ground traffic settings are higher with lots of vehicles that is a performance hit so try turning down the ground traffic settings to say 25% and not 100% and see if that helps you. Also, do you have multiplayer on and/or real time air traffic on? Those are hogs and impact 2D and VR for sure even on higher end systems.
Hi Kev,
Thanks for the info. I will try some of what you suggest though I uphold my previous comment.
It IS an absolute joke that MS and Asobo think it is acceptable to pedal a piece of software to so many which taxes modern home hardware so phenomenally, as you say.
The fact that it was running fine in VR previously and now does not, which has lead to an increase in complaints from users regarding VR performance drops, to me anyway, is quite indicative of the fact that they have not kept this aspect of the sim at the forefront of their efforts. Though it does not surprise me given that VR in MSFS was an after thought anyway.
I do appreciate your advice though man so thank you! 
Not sure comparing MSFS performance in VR to that of Roller Coaster is fair…
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Do you use SteamVR? I have compared SteamVR to WMR in the last few days and found out that SteamVR is a problem on my machine. It starts the Mixed Reality Portal automatically when I start MSFS. When I then start VR via STRG-TAB I often have a Slide-Show on ground at the terminal.
I do not have this behaviour with OpenXR and WMR.
You may ask why I tried to use SteamVR. Answer: I would like to use OpenVRTool (OVR) to get the windows of Pilot2ATC and Self-Loading-Cargo into the cockpit. This works but at the moment it is not stable. I tried everything but in 2 of 3 cases I get extreme slow FPS - this weird 10 FPS value that you also get when you stop VR by again typing STRG-TAB.
I gave up with SteamVR and OVR and came back to WMR only.
I’ll try reducing various traffic settings tonight, thanks for the advice!
Lol, you pretty much EXACTLY describe my own experience. I too tried SteamVR for the purpose of using OpenVRTool. As soon as I use SteamVR my fps goes to one every 10 seconds (no exaggeration!). I have never figured out why.
I also gave up on SteamVR and OVR and went back to WMR only. It is eerie how similar our experiences are…
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I want to thank you for your post sneaky74. I did after many attempts seemed to have found a set procedure to follow that allows it to actually work. Now that I have it working, it’s incredible and I’m loving it. To get to this point, hopefully this new procedure continues to work for me, was a torture of frustration beyond anything anybody should ever have to face or go through. I’m a rocket scientist.
Cheers and stay safe,
PACO572
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That’s lovely @Paco572 I’m glad you’ve found that balance in the sim which works for you. Plenty of work still to be done but there is also much enjoyment to be had. Take care! 
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LOL. I also tried Beta and Non-Beta Versions of ‘WMR for SteamVR’ and SteamVR - didn’t help.
I also tried to get rid of any traffic (AI, Multiplayer, Live) - didn’t make a difference as well. So I came to the conclusion that I have to stick with OXR/WMR.
Butter smooth VR for me lately. Outside of known problematic areas and aircraft of course
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The trouble with the current situation is you can have way higher h/w specs than someone else with a middle of the road PC and they can be getting higher fps than you, with less powerful gear. There seems to be so many other factors at play that can impact performance in this game alone (other games like Elite and Aerofly FS2 work flawlessly with no tinkering with settings at all). For example, if you have one or more onscreen display apps enabled, it tanks your framerate.
It really shouldn’t be ‘you need to follow all the steps to the letter’ to get reasonable performance, but this is where we are right now. I don’t think we really understand which settings are giving the most improvement either, which is why some of the guides say ‘you must follow this guide exactly, don’t skip any of the steps!’. It’s true though, miss a single step and nothing changes, follow all the steps exactly and you can get acceptable results.
Good! Because if you go through the whole list (which I strongly encourage, at least until you find the culprit), you will almost certainly find whatever ails you. I do try to be helpful here, maybe even more than I should when I could be flying, but I probably have a reputation for being something of a hard ■■■. But I’m only that way on people who constantly whine rather than taking real steps to solve their problems, or whine over things that are NBD, and one that really gets me going is expecting something, say an autopilot in a 172, to do something it’s straight up not designed to do, like an autolanding. In both IRL and the sim, the autopilots are not designed to do that, nor will they work! If you try to use an autopilot to do an autoland in a 172 IRL, the only thing preventing you from at least a crash and maybe death is dumb, blind luck.
And yet, for some people (like say, ME!), VR is working the same, or even better than it ever has been. The only time I have problems with VR is when I’m running an overclock (typically on my GPU, which I sometimes (like last night) do by accident), but the symptom is a CTD of the sim, not VR specific issues. I also have issues when I pause a flight for an extended period of time, say overnight while I catch my 
s, then it might crash when I turn it on or off. But I don’t blame that on MSFS, because it happens if I turn VR on or off regardless of if I’m using it for FS or not.
If doing the steps from above don’t help, try @CptLucky8’s recommendations for settings that you can find here. @CptLucky8, do those recommendations still stand, or have you changed them in any way?
It was not an afterthought. Perhaps the “when” of their release schedule was changed due to pressure from this forum, but they’ve been planning for VR for years. And they actually already had a dev team working on it for at least a year before the sim was released, assuming they’ve told the truth about that, and I haven’t known them to be untruthful. Yeah, some of their communications skills are poor, most notably their habit of marking bug reports as “solved” when they are in fact nowhere near being solved! I think that is something that needs to be fixed, we need visibility as to the actual status of bugs and when we can expect a real fix. Even if the answer is 2023, or “we have no idea”. I won’t necessarily like that, but I’d rather be told that than be lied to.
@Jummivana another request from me that I’d like a response to. I’d really appreciate answers, even if it’s “I don’t know” or “I’m not allowed to say”, or “maybe we’ll get to that in 2025”. The truth, no matter how bad you might think it sounds is what I want, and I do expect responses from you, which I’ve found have been sorely lacking. So do better, please.
You are very welcome. I actually enjoy helping people solve problems. I just get annoyed by the things I’ve already outlined, and especially annoyed when people just flat up ignore my advice, because I do know what I’m talking about!
@moadib2709, that is excellent advice!
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Can confirm much of what you were saying. I was having serious trouble with VR recently, seemed to get worse, but couldn’t put my finger on exactly when/why.
I had done some testing with HAGS and game mode on/off (out of VR), and found that both on was best when playing on a monitor, but that they (especially HAGS) had a significant downside when using VR. If you’re having trouble and don’t know why, turn that off. If you never use VR, consider turning it on.
But still having pretty bad stutters, both consistently (e.g. a slight judder every second or so when looking out the side at the ground), and also periods of crazy bad stuttering that would seem to reduce FPS to 15 or so for a few seconds. I did a little testing keeping an eye on the FPS counter.
Indeed, I was getting about 1 super slow frame every 1-2 seconds, averaging somewhere around 27 FPS. I thought I’d try clearing out my community folder to see if that helped. What a guess, suddenly I’m on 40+ FPS consistently, no stuttering/juddering. So either too many (I had around 70-80) addons installed, or one or two in particular causing an issue.
I’ve been slowly adding back in my community packages, and have established a ‘minimum viable’ set that I want to play with, that doesn’t overly affect the FPS/stuttering. Now averaging around 37 FPS with no stutters. I’m not massively happy about having to be selective with my 3rd party addons, but wow, the VR is 100% fixed, and that’s awesome.
So I very much second the recommendation of removing the community folder and testing.
I actually use MSFS Addons Linker (as you suggest), a great free tool, and it has easy to use presets. So now I have a few presets like “Standard” (which is pretty much everything installed which I’ll use for monitor play), “Minimal” which is just the bare necessities, “Minimal + VR” which is the same but with a couple of extras specific to VR. Just load up whichever one is appropriate before you run the sim, and/or turn on aircraft/airports as and when you know you’re about to use them, and see if that helps.
For reference, I’m running an OC 5900x, and an OC RTX 3090, 64GB of RAM, m.2 storage. So a pretty high end system. I’m not saying everyone should get 40 FPS in VR (mine is a reverb G2), but I have graphics basically on High across the board (1 or 2 medium, 1 or 2 ultra, render scale and LODs at 100). But I was suffering, and removing some addons has fixed it.
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@TheUKDave, perhaps you could share a list of the addons that aren’t causing you problems, so the rest of us can be aware of those “safe addons”, and use those when needed.
Also, if you intended your message to be for me, in the future please tag me by typing “@ KevyKevTPA”, but without the space. The same for anyone, really, except use their name instead of mine lol…
It was only pure luck that I even noticed your message, and didn’t realize you were talking to me until almost the very end. Assuming you were! You’ll see the results of tagging people when responding to them, because I tagged you in this message, and you got a specific alert to that fact.
But you’re right about addons sometimes being a problem. But identifying which ones are and which ones aren’t can be a painful ordeal. It’s not necessary to delete every addon, just some. But which ones? Nobody knows, except it sounds like you might have the beginnings of a list of exactly that information.
Now, please share with the class how in the hell you got your hands on a 3090. And please don’t tell me you paid a scalper.
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So I didn’t bother sharing a list of ones I do use, as I have no idea how common they are, and it might be more useful to list the ones that actually cause a problem. But I haven’t established that yet, but I do have 1 key suspect that I’ll try later - and will mention below.
But for anyone interested, the remaining 16 (down from 75) are:
VFR Map for VR (free)
Zinertek enhanced airport graphics (paid)
Flying iron’s spitfire (paid)
VGP powersolo (paid)
Just Flight’s Piper Arrow (paid)
Piper arrow checklists (free)
Piper arrow grey interior (free)
benjwri’s UK River elevation fixes (free)
Sofly Landing Challenge Pro (paid)
FS Academy Voyager bush trips (paid)
HDS aircraft carriers (paid)
Some (free) ground vehicle improvements, like swissport, gate gourmet, etc
Orbx channel islands core+vessels (free)
To be honest, I suspect the vast majority of add-ons are totally fine, perhaps each one gives some tiny overhead to the sim when in use, but negligibly so. For me, it wasn’t a matter of removing culprits, it was a matter of removing everything and then adding back in the ones I ‘need’ while retesting to make sure performance hadn’t tanked.
And didn’t want to call out a particular add-on without knowing for sure, but really I suspect that the culprit is the Bijan Habashi Seasons add-on. The reason I suspect this:
- I added it fairly recently, and probably around the time that I started getting VR issues.
- I believe that it modifies that draw distance of trees to make it more realistic (essentially forcibly increasing the LOD setting).
- it affects the whole world, not just one area like most scenery addons
But the above is conjecture, if I get the chance I may test again later adding back in everything except the Seasons, testing, and seeing if I can identify if it is that, or some other package … or that it’s just the weight of so many addons that causes the issue.
So for anyone experiencing issues in VR, I heartily recommend just testing the removal of community addons, if it works, then perhaps take the opposite approach that I did - add everything back in, and remove a couple at a time and test again.
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Oh, and @KevyKevTPA as for the 3090, I didn’t pay a scalper, no.
I literally got incredibly lucky, and paid MSRP for the MSI Suprim X 3090. I got an email alert on my phone as I checked my emails when I was literally just going to bed. Without even really thinking, I just clicked through and completed the checkout as fast as I could. It wasn’t even until afterwards that I realised I didn’t even recognise the website, or remember setting up an alert for it! I remember worrying that I might have been scammed, but … then it arrived in the post, so all good!
@TheUKDave Could you tell me how to do that, exactly? I probably wouldn’t get a 3090, as I’ve learned the hard way, buying the top of the line gets you 5% better performance (or other stuff) at a 50% price surcharge, but a 3080, perhaps. A 3080ti definitely, without hesitation, especially since I can probably sell my 2070 Super at a nice profit to help pay for it. I’m really kind of waiting for the 3080ti to be available at MSRP, but the truth is should a 3080 come along, I’d probably get that, too, but may wish I had just waited.
In fact, just to avoid making a decision I may regret, I may actually force myself not to search for it or buy it even if I can, and hope I listen to my own advice. But that’s between me and me. Thanks much, I’m gonna look at your list of mods later. I’ve got a mod (or maybe several mods) that are making my CRJ CTD, but oddly, only when it goes over very specific points on the map. But I have zero idea which mod or mods it might be! But I know a mod(s) at fault because it doesn’t CTD when I turn them all off.
That is going to be a difficult puzzle to solve.
@KevyKevTPA A lot of places allow you put your email address in to get alerts when stock (of an out of stock product) comes back into stock. I had done this on a few website, but the one that emailed, and therefore where I bought it, was CCL online.
I will say though for that site, while I paid MSRP for the Surprim X 3090 (around £1700), they later emailed me when another one came into stock, and this time they were asking £2400. So this site is certainly not beyond scalping their own customers, so be warned.
One slightly ‘crazy’ idea if you were desperate, many places have OEM GPUs that they can only sell as part of a system build. Scan would be one of those places, they will likely have at least one flavour of all the 30-series cards. What you could do … is buy a whole new PC with whatever card you want in it, then when it arrives pull that card out to put into your PC, and then put your 2070 Super in the new PC, and sell it straight on.
Lots of folks doing just that with Dell Alienware R11/R12 machines as I’ve seen many on eBay that are selling the whole thing minus the GPU that was pulled for the owners other PC. Crazy but it’s because Dell is not charging more than msrp for the GPU and their lead times aren’t terrible (about 4-5 weeks). You can get an entire PC with a 30xx series for not that much more than what scalpers want for just the GPU.
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