I’m going to go ahead and eat some crow and say I’ve changed my mind about reprojection. I think it’s easy to get tunnel vision when you’ve loaded up the same Kennedy Int’l flight about 700 times for testing purposes.
Last night I realized I didn’t have the latest world update installed. I installed it and saw the new Alaska bush flight. Fired that up with my G2 and Honeycomb gear. Even running TAA 70 / OpenXR 70 with all high settings, there was something really bothering me about 30 minutes into what was supposed to be this beautiful sightseeing trip. It was annoying to look in the cockpit, it was annoying to look outside. It was generally nice, but nothing to write home about.
I decided to turn off reprojection and crank all my MSFS settings up to ultra. The Alaska bush trip turned into a religious experience. If you don’t whip your head around side to side, or put your eyes up to the stick and strafe left and right, the motion experience is nearly identical. The visual experience was much different. I was able to run at TAA 80 / OpenXR 100, all MSFS settings maxed at 35+ FPS. I think the Terrain LOD setting to 200 made a big difference in how interesting the ground looks from bush flight altitude.
One thing that I don’t think I weighed properly with my first tests was the artifacts introduced by reprojection. I was focusing mostly on propeller distortion and wing+runway distortion. These are really not that bad if you have the right drivers and you’re able to keep enough resource headroom for OpenXR reprojection. However, there’s what I would call a shimmering and a blurring that happens with reprojection that just exhausted my mind and eyes after spending more than a few minutes in the air. It’s hard to describe. Like you’re wearing glasses with vaseline smeared onto the lenses.
I still think reprojection is the way to go for some circumstances. Or maybe it’s the only way to go for some people. But I think I’ll be flying with it off most of the time.