I’m running the xbox / ms store version of MSFS on PC. I have a HP Reverb G1, NVIDIA 2080ti, and 16gb ram (I know that’s on the low side).
Recently I started having issues with my headset going black, and msfs hanging and / or crashing. Would happen a lot (8+ times in about 30 mins - duration from a few seconds to a few minutes). On these hangs, the sound would glitch for a second, and then continue, but the screen would be frozen, and the vr goggles black.
I messed around a lot with various USB configurations as some folks reported usb power issues to be the cause with G2’s. Despite what I think were a couple of false negatives, this didn’t seem to help.
While testing other games in Steam (all of which run fine), I accidentally clicked ‘make steamvr openxr implementation’ or some such. Now the crashes and hangs are gone!
So my questions are, is SteamVR better, or is something causing openxr to behave so poorly? What should be my next steps to continue to fault find this? And any other thoughts?
It’s 2 different implementations of the OpenXR standard so if one works better for you than the other… stick with it. Regarding which is better, for this sim from my experience I get better performance using Micorsoft’s OpenXR. I think Asobo has optimized the game using Microsoft’s technology. But both work so if you have better results using Steam’s OpenXR then stick with it.
Did further testing by switching back to OpenXR, but not using the preview runtime, and it runs smooth as butter. It just seems to be the preview runtime that is hurting me.
Steamvr seems to be a bottleneck when it comes to VR. I’ve modded IL2, DC2 and ACC to bypass steamvr and they run so much better. Anytime I’ve tried msfs with steamvr it’s far worse than openxr. The only advantage steamvr has is better motion reprojection (smoothing) but you’ll need 45 fps to enable it.
I was making comparison sake between OpenXR and Virtual Desktop + SteamVR. In theory OpenXR should be better but it’s not so simple.
However, SteamVR doesn’t seem to work well for the G2 as the default runtime. I see around a 50%+ decrease in performance.
I have my doubts on the future of OpenXR. It feels like a prototype that will be abandoned at some point. I’m probably wrong though! It’s just my worry.
I realized that was contradictory when I wrote it, lol.
I’m coming from a Quest 2 with Virtual Desktop background. For the most part, things were just smoother, more stable and polished for the overall experience. But that is just all subjective on my part.
If not for your work, I’d be running back to VD/SteamVR.
