My Quest 2 setup: Steady 36 FPS, 27ms frame times, no ASW

After buying a Quest 2, I spent the last week banging my head against the wall trying to get what I considered acceptable performance in VR out of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Today I had somewhat of a breakthrough- I’ve got a clear picture, and a non juddery framerate.

I thought I’d post my setup here in case it is helpful for others. I’ve read literally hundreds of posts on here - thanks to all those who have contributed.

My setup:

  • i7-7700k overclocked to 5.0 ghz
  • AORUS 3070. Not overclocked- Microsoft Flight Simulator does not seem to like any overclock on the graphic card- Crashes To Desktop at first whiff of an overclock.
  • 16 meg of 3200 DDR4 CL16 memory
  • nVME SSD drive

My Goals

  • No ASW. I like barnstorming round cities at low altitude, and ASW introduces too many immersion breaking artefacts for me on buildings. Even at altitude I cannot stand the “crawling” that ASW adds.
  • A steady frame rate of at least 36 FPS (so 27ms frame times- see note on timing below), in my chosen test aircraft (Robin Cap 10) in my chosen test area (Wellington harbour, NZ). I’ve found that any lower that 36 leads to choppiness. “Steady” means that if you bring up the tray tool performance overlay in headset, the frame rate stays pretty much constant at 36- performance graph shows a straight line.
  • A crisp picture. I want to be able to read dials, and I don’t want buildings to look blurry.
  • Ideally, at least medium settings for both volumetric clouds and reflections- these are both very expensive but give that “wow” factor.

With the settings below, I get the above working perfectly- 27ms frame times, 36 FPS almost flatline, crispy instruments, decent scenery. Note however if I take the same setup to say Chicago, or fly an Airliner, I need to drop the game settings until I get 27ms again.

My Settings

Note some of these are strictly voodoo- ie I haven’t tested on or off. There are so many combinations, and I just want to spend some time paying the game :slight_smile:

Windows Config

  • Game mode: Off
  • Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling: On (not tested with off)
  • Both Microsoft Flight Simulator and OVRServer set to “High Performance” in windows Graphics Performance Preferences (under the HAGS setting)

Nvida:

Driver: 466.27 (latest)
Nvidia Control Panel Settings: (I don’t know if I need all of these or not- will test one by one when I get time.)

  • Power management -max performance
  • Texture filtering quality- high performance
  • Vertical Sync- fast
  • Virtual Reality pre rendered frames: use application setting

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Oculus Application Settings

  • Opted in for beta (haven’t tested non beta)
  • 72 hz
  • Max resolution!! This gives 1:1 picture on the quest. I’m somewhat surprised this doesn’t tank my performance, but the clarity it gives is fantastic, and means I don’t supersample.
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Tray tool
Whenever I connect the Quest to the PC, I need to reset the AWS and Supersampling settings below. This means I change them to something else, then, back to the settings below. The tray tool should do this for me but I can’t work out how to add the Xbox store version of Microsoft Flight Simulator as an executable.

  • ASW Off
  • Super Sampling 0. I think this means 1.0 but I’m not sure. I know it works for me.
  • FOV Multiplier: whatever you can handle- lower values introduce black box around your vision. I need to do further testing to convince myself this actually does anything performance wise.
  • OVR Server Priority: Above Normal
  • Bitrate 500 bitrate
  • Encode resolution 3648
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In game
Main settings to play with, depending on your context. I find if my timings are out, I can drop one or all of the first three settings below and still have a decent picture.

  • Render scaling: 80%
  • TLOD: 90
  • OLOD: 90
  • Clouds: medium
  • Reflections: medium

These are the main contributors to frame timing. My other settings are as follows:

  • Antialiasing: TAA
  • Terrain Vector Data: High
  • Buildings: Medium
  • Trees: Medium
  • Grass: Off
  • Texture resolution: High
  • Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
  • Texture Super Sampling: 2x2
  • Texture Synthesis: Medium
  • Water Waves: Medium
  • Shadow Maps: 1536
  • Terrain Shadows: 256
  • Contact Shadows: Low
  • Windshield Effects: High
  • Ambient Occlusion: Off
  • Light Shafts: Off
  • Bloom: Off
  • Cockpit Glass Refresh Rate: Low

A note on startup order.

I don’t know if this is magic or not but this works for me:

First start:

  • Boot your PC.
  • Start Microsoft Flight Simulator
  • Start Oculus
  • Start Tray tool.
  • Connect Quest from within headset
  • Apply ASW and supersampling settings in tray tool, and turn on performance over if you want it
  • Choose flight plan
  • Switch to VR

When changing settings in sim:

  • Just change them and measure. Only exception is texture quality which requires sim restart

When changing supersampling in tray tool:

  • Don’t :slight_smile: But if you do, toggle into and out of VR to apply

When changing headset frequency or resolution:

  • Toggle out of VR
  • Apply in oculus tool
  • Restart headset
  • Connect Quest from within headset
  • Apply ASW and supersampling settings in tray tool, and turn on performance over if you want it
  • Switch to VR

If instability occurs (low frames when you know it was solid, unstable picture etc), restart PC

A note on timings.

I don’t know if this is fully correct, but one thing I found helpful was to consider the frame timings as the main thing to focus on when tweaking. FPS is somewhat variable, as the Quest will jump around depending on the frame timing and the refresh rate. It looks like the Quest jumps to a multiplier of the refresh rate depending on the frame time- either the base refresh rate, one half, one third, one quarter, or one fifth.

You can inspect the CPU and GPU frame times in Microsoft Flight Simulator debug view, and see if you should consider moving the refresh rate in the oculus tool up or down.

The frame rates available to us can be expressed as follows:

FPS Base Refresh Rate Multiplier Frame Time (ms)
90 90 1 11.11
80 80 1 12.50
72 72 1 13.89
45 90 0.5 22.22
40 80 0.5 25.00
36 72 0.5 27.78
30 90 0.33 33.33
26.67 80 0.33 37.50
24 72 0.33 41.67
22.5 90 0.25 44.44
20 80 0.25 50.00
18 90 0.2 55.56
18 72 0.25 55.56
16 80 0.2 62.50
14.4 72 0.2 69.44

The quest seems to “snap” to the next available stable FPS based on the frame time. So for instance if it is taking you 35ms to render a frame and you are running at 90 hz, the quest will run at 22.5 FPS. If you drop that frame time to 33ms you’ll start getting 30 FPS.

So if we are getting 35ms frame time, and can’t do anything to reduce that, we’re best running the quest at 80hz. The quest will the snap to 27 FPS, which is better than the 24 FPS we’d get at 90hz.

In my case I wanted at least 36 FPS, so I aim for a 27ms frame time.

Random notes:

Check that Microsoft Flight Simulator and it’s cache are on a fast drive. I have two SSDs, a fast and a slow, and I saw significant disk queueing (sustained > 20) in windows perfmon on the slow drive. Moving the game to a faster drive fixed this. I used Crystal Disk Mark to measure actual drive speed.

I use the openxr runtime rather than steam as detailed on the zendesk site under “How to install OpenXR”. Seems more stable, and I don’t have to have steam running using up resources. Downside is I can’t run FPSVR to measure frame rate, and have to rely on the oculus tool;

The latest afterburner beta seems to include a c++ runtime that kills my Microsoft Flight Simulator install. If this is happening remove c++ installs as detailed on the zendesk site under “CTD Issues”

Make sure your page file is of a decent size

Make sure your USB port has enough power. I had frustrations at first with the quest or oculus software crashing, until I plugged the quest into a powered usb port on a powered usb hub (you need both of these things!).

Hope this helps someone.

10 Likes

This is very Helpful, thanks!

Thank you, it’s always helpful to have alternate settings to try. I can get it to run smooth but with completely different settings. FS2020 is so weird that way.

At the 72Hz setting in the Oculus setup app, what do you mean by max resolution? 1.3X? Just confirming. It seems way larger than the Quest 2 can deliver, so I am trying to understand how to interpret the various resolution settings. Quest 2 resolution per eye is 1832 x 1920 per eye. If I recall, you double the vertical, so with two lenses that comes out to 3664 x 1920, but I could be wrong. Anyway, 72Hz at max resolution is 5408 x 2736 – seems like overkill.

Have you tried it? It is certainly not overkill, I’ve been running 72hz and max render scale in oculus for a month now, will never look back. The clarity for cockpit screens is so much better, I’ll take every super-sample I can get!

Of course, some people’s rigs won’t handle it but luckily mine does (5800x, 3070, 32GB 3200mhz, 500gb NVME)

@PRD925 it’s 1.3x on the slider. It is larger than the quest native resolution, however due to barrel distortion it is the magic number that gives a 1:1 app to display pixel ratio in the middle of the display- ie no super sampling.

Source: Volga Aksoy, who codes this stuff for oculus.

On my rig, I’m not going to hit 72 FPS even at potato quality (I’ve tried- turning down all setting to a blurry mess still gives 36 FPS max), so cranking this slider all the way up hasn’t really cost me anything.

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Got it. I think that’s what I’m using from earlier tweaking, but I’ll go back and check. I was just curious how to rationalize the various resolution between Oculus hardware, software, and MSFS software. Curiosity mostly. I’m happy with my performance but always looking for the magic tweak!

I have been playing with settings for months and months like the rest of you to get to something that works well enough. Soo much playing around in OTT oculus app, nvidia settings, windows you name it, if someone said it may work I have tried it…

What appears to be working for me is:

Oculus PC - 72hz 1.3 5408x2736
If you go straight into msfs and check graphic settings in VR it should show this number as well.

Then go to OTT
Reduce the FOV to .72 , .75
ASW, you will change between the following:
30hz - heavy city areas
Off - medium density but you can tell your card can give you more frames i.e 30 - 31 frames
45hz asw disabled - high altitude or low density scenery - this will give you 36 fps

If you check your VR resolution in settings with the above fov adjustments it should end in x2048
( So you are getting the crisp x2736 but only drawing up to x2048)

In nvidia settings, all the usual suspects that people mention but I have put my pre rendered frames to 3 and textures to quality not high performance.

From this point:
Start a flight in a heavy area you like flying. Start flying… then pause. Turn all your msfs VR settings down to there lowest.

Find your absolute best frame rate. I.e 36fps with a 72hz setting. (Ensure your asw is set to off)

Start slowly bumping up each setting looking for a frame drop. If you get a frame drop knock it back to the previous and move on to the next setting. You may see some settings like grass as low priority… just leave it to low and use the left over frames for another setting. Once you have gone to the bottom and have managed to get all your settings bumped up without too many frame drops then go back through the list and bump the features that are important to you… I.e clouds medium to clouds high. If you have managed to keep your your Fps above 30-31 then your in the zone for your hardware setup ( in that particular area your flying)

(Note: when doing the settings changes ensure that your asw is sett to off)

I have a 10700k stock, with a rtx3070 stock, 32gb of ram.

Of all the many different approaches, the OP is the best for me. I’ve tried many and even with my RTX2070, I have been able to get 36fps (mostly) stable - I am using the 0.75;0.75 FOV adjustment recommended by Mewsik. The “buzzing” when looking sideways and down is at a minimum - much better than ASW at 18-20fps. Many have said to stop using OTT in favor of ODT, but with the OP recommending start/stop VR, OTT has more features. Also, using the performance HUD is actually superior to the MSFS Debug FPS display.

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Thanks for this post, your hardware is very close to mine, so I write down all my current settings and then try these and see what happens… Worst case I go back to what I currently have set up.

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