Please don’t get me wrong — I really love MSFS 2020. It’s almost perfect. In fact, it motivated me to buy a Meta Quest 3.
According to Steam, I’ve spent about 100 hours in the sim so far — although, to be honest, roughly half of that time went into troubleshooting. At first there was the DX12 loading manager issue, where the config file kept resetting to 0 and I had to check it every single time. Thankfully, that’s no longer a big deal.
However, running MSFS in VR has been nothing but painful to set up for me. I’m on a 5060, running close to 4 GHz, so the hardware shouldn’t be the main problem. For now, I’ll continue flying on PC for ATC and VATSIM.
Out of curiosity, I tried another sim (no need to name it here), and it worked almost out of the box. I only had to tweak the frame rate and lower a few graphics settings — and it was wonderful.
So why am I writing this? Simply put: if someone could help me get MSFS 2020 running properly in VR on my PC, I’d be extremely grateful.
Thanks in advance, and happy New Year to everyone!
Once I’m in the Meta environment (the white room with the grey grid), I start the sim from Steam on the PC. SteamVR then launches automatically on the Quest, but it just starts lagging and shaking. I get overlapping opacity layers from the sim and the Meta environment, constant loading with the hourglass, and it never really settles.
Only once did I actually manage to get into the air, but the frame rate was extremely low and everything was blurry. I run on lowest graphics settings. Eventually I have to restart everything.
I’ve tweaked with the Oculus Debug Tool and followed various YouTube guides, but nothing has helped. I’ve tried both a wired connection and hotspotting the PC, with no difference. In another sim, hotspotting actually works better than the cable. I’m getting about 250 Mbit/s in both cases.
Virtual Desktop (VD) is always a great option. I’ve used it for +6 years starting with a Quest 1. However, I can also get great results with both my QPro and Q3 using Link and Air Link. Both of these are a bit harder to setup properly than VD though. I’ll give you some basic setup settings I use with both my rtx4090 and rtx5090 PC’s.
Meta Link PC app I use 80Hz refresh with res slider full right.
Oculus Debug Tool (ODT), all defaults/zeros except distortion = Low, enable dynamic bitrates, input 750mbps Max dynamic bitrate. With msfs2020/2024 I also choose ASW mode = forced 45fps, asw = off. With a 80Hz refresh rate this gives me a nice smooth 40fps. You can also just select this manually on the fly by the keyboard command ctrl+num2 (numeric keyboard 2, not top row 2). Also, the beauty of using these settings is that they work for both Link and Air Link. With Link I use the official over-priced meta link cable connected to my motherboard usb3.2 gen2 type c port.
Nvidia control panel all defaults except power = prefer max performance and change texture quality default Quality to = High Performance. I also use nvidia profile inspector (google to find this) to set global dlss overrides. I don’t use the nvidia app. This is important if you want to use dlss, and I recommend you use this. I’m using the latest nvidia gaming driver 591.59 and I use DDU to properly uninstall previous drivers (google how to do this).
Win11 graphics settings, I disable hardware acceleration (HAGS) and turn Game Mode = off.
MSFS 2020/24 VR mainly high-end defaults and then fine tune a few later (like lower windscreen effects and light shafts). I set 2020 to use dx12 and use dlss/balanced.
Anyway, these are my basic settings and I hope you find some of these useful. Good luck mate and best cheers for 2026!
Thanks heaps for taking the time to write all that up…really appreciate it
Funny thing is, most of the stuff I tried actually did improve certain things…and then I went and tried some other tweaks and basically undid the good gains again VR tweaking in a nutshell.
That said, I’ll grab Virtual Desktop and give it another proper go and work through what you suggested more methodically this time. Your breakdown definitely helps a lot.
Thanks again mate, really appreciate the help, and wishing you a very happy New Year as well!
VR tweaking in a nutshell.