My favorite thing after a long day of work was to put on a VR headset and fly over England or the coastline of California at dusk or dawn. Back then, I had to struggle with CTD that plagued all AMD users flying Reverb G2.
Then, SU5 came. It fixed the CTD, but the visual quality of VR has been degraded to a point where it’s no longer relaxing or enjoyable to fly. The sim used to be beautiful to say the least. I was looking forward to the sim pushing the evelope both on the visual and the performance side. Instead, Asobo/MS had a different plan. XBOX! Instead of branching the core sim optimized for each platform, they decided to merge them into one. In doing so, they reduced texture details, temporal aliasing quality to cut the memory footprint and meet the target fps of 60 on XBOX platform. The sim gained a few fps, but now is plagued with shimmer and lack of details on buildings, trees, and lights. And they called it “optimization”. In 2D, these visuaal degradation is not as noticeable as in VR. I listened to the Dev Q&A hoping that if they had any plans to bring the sim back to pre-SU5 visuals, but instead they used technical jargons to cover up what they have done to the sim to make it playable on both the PC and XBOX platform.
Devs, if you are reading this post, please consider removing this “optimization” at least on the PC platform and bring back the visual quality of pre-SU5. I hope I am not alone in this lament.
At least SU5 was playable for me and my Quest2, 3080 16GB and 5900HX.
Now, SU6 is a shimmering joke. Inside and outside of the cockpit regardless how I dumb down the LOD settings. My GPU isn’t even being used (less than 3Gb used on a 16GB card!)
Ridiculous! Pancake mode runs great but VR is such a huge disappointment.
As a VR flyer with less capable equipment (Quest 2, 2060 Super, 32gb and Ryzen 5 3600) I have not found that the dumbing down for Xbox has made any difference to the visuals in VR. SU5 caused many issues in the sim that impacted VR usability and pleasure most of which have been addressed now in SU6.
I would argue that, for the average VR user, whilst the experience is far from perfect, things have never been better for us.
I am sorry for the power users who are suffering degradation but I felt I needed to add this reply for some balance.
I am in the camp that has seen a real downgrade in quality overall. I believe if MS really wants this to be the cutting edge of FS then they should be very focused on the bugs in the sim and also solidifying the base program.
Compared to other sims VR is very much still in beta stage in MSFS.
I agree 100 percent,its funny people will tell you your crazy, the clarity is horrible at this point they have destroyed what was a great experience for me,I love vr flying and even I am hanging up the vr for now and using my 4k tv it’s a shame.
I don’t doubt that some of you have experienced diminished performance in VR since SU5. That is simply not the case for me. I am enjoying increased fps on my mid-range system, and since SU6, increased clarity as well.
For low to medium altitude flying, VFR and VOR in a variety of light aircraft and FlyingIrons Spitfire and P-38, I’ve had the best flight sim VR experience to date after the update.
Yes - each update needs a bit of time and work to re-optimise the settings and performance
No - it’s not perfect. There are some of the old issues still there and a few new ones too
but, in general, it’s blown my socks off.
Large passenger aircraft and high altitude - I think better than it was but still washed out colours and some other clunky stuff but slowly getting there.
But it does need lots of ooomph in terms of hardware, especially to drive my Reverb Gen 1
I was a big complainer about SU5 and looking back I still think those complaints were justified. However most of the issues have now been fixed and we have great improvements on night lighting and LOD, so overall I think the sim is now in the best state it has been. So much so that I’m quite jealous of those who are trying out vr for the first time with the current build
Of course I’m still hoping for things to be fixed:
-shimmering buildings since SU5
-brightness/over exposure in VR, sliders are needed
-excessive aliasing on thin objects since launch
-still feel there could be performance improvements in VR to bring in it closer to 2d performance… Could monoscopic rendering outside the cockpit, or lower render scale outside the cockpit be possible?
Same here.
I’m happy with the sim in VR after SU6. Could it be better? Of course! Shimmering is still an issue, but overall I totally enjoy my VR flights now…
I was using motion re-projection for a long time (G2 at 60hz, so locked fps at 20 and then re-projection up to 60)…but after SU6 I switched over to no re-projection at all and I am seeing fps of mid 30s and no artifacts or prop wobbliness with the re-projection turned off…and my GPU is now better utilized and balanced more with the CPU at higher graphics and LOD settings. So, try it on your system and its personal preference on wether you like motion reprojection or not, I don’t think there is a perfect answer and it depends on your hardware and what is important to you, the type of area you fly in, etc, etc. For now I am leaving if off but if I see FPS drop too low where I am noticing it then I will have to turn re-projection back on. It’s easy to toggle back and forth and see what works for you. At the end of the day, I still far prefer VR to 2D for the great immersion despite the slightly lower graphics settings due to the headsets and graphics cards not quite there yet as compared to where 2D is in the sim. I have thought about trying a wide screen monitor but I don’t want to give up the feeling of being inside the plane.
Thanks for your reply. I see people talking about getting great framerates in VR with SU6, but many of these people aren’t using ASW or motion smoothing, they have turned it OFF. This invalidates “smooth as butter” for me, because I absolutely need the ASW/Motion smoothing in order for the framerate to match up with the headset refresh rate. People are different ofcourse, but for me, if the framerate doesn’t match the refresh rate, I’m all out. Right now I’m struggling with my Quest 2 even at 36fps (72hz) on my RTX 3090 and i7 8700k.
Rift S 1.4 SS/ASW OFF
1080ti/8700k
32GB RAM
VR ran as smooth as butter in SU5 and now runs as smooth as silk in SU6.
SU6 has given me the best VR performance so far.
I’ll just chop it up to a right combination of hardware particularly the lower native resolution Rift S not being as demanding on GPU firepower as a Reverb G2 or Quest 2.
Either way I’m an extremely happy camper with my visuals inside of the HMD and my only complaint is MS/Asobo fixing the washed out daytime brightness and to hurry the hell up with touch controller implementation.
I’d never imagined the sim coming along and being optimized this well to run these settings butter smooth on my old 1080ti/8700k combo.
VR is as good as it’s ever been in MSFS. I had a good FPS jump after SU5, then WU6 smoothed things out even further. Didn’t see a performance improvement after SU6, but reflections were fixed.
I have a Valve Index, 9600K, 3080, and 32 gigs of ram - I run 100% render resolution in the sim, 120% resolution through SteamVR, have details mostly all on high with a couple things on Ultra, and am able to hold 40FPS most of the time. The only “degradation” I’ve really noticed is the clouds are a bit more pixelated but otherwise things look great to me. No shimmering that I’ve noticed. I have to wonder if some of you are having some other issues that aren’t directly related to MSFS.
