I noticed this thread recently, and thought my settings might be helpful.
Since the beginning with VR (back to the 1080 Ti days), I’ve always focused on maintaining native resolution above any other visual quality settings, and then dropping most of the rest to improve performance. I’m running a 4090 with a 7950X3D, and with that hardware, I can run the crystal at full native resolution with appropriate distortion correction (maximum in the Pimax settings, 100% in MSFS and no resolution override) and TAA. That gives 4312x5102. FPS numbers typically run in the mid 40s to the high 50s, with most lower numbers from CPU bottlenecks (I like to fly the PMDG 737 which is a heavy CPU user). I keep TLOD low to avoid the frame rate totally tanking in busy environments.
While not the highest FPS, I find those to be adequate to enjoy full native resolution, which really is astounding (and why most of us bought this).
I run HAGS off, but that’s about the only slightly weird thing I do outside of the sim. DX11 of course. My MSFS settings are:
TAA
Render Scaling 100
AMD FidelityFX sharpening off
World scale 100
NVidia reflect low latency off
TLOD 100
Off screen terrain pre-caching Ultra
Terrain Vector data Ultra
Buildings High
Trees Medium
Grass and bushes off
OLOD 150
Volumetric clouds low
Texture resolution ultra
Anisotropic filtering 16x
Texture supersampling 4x4
texture sythesis high
Water waves low
Shadow maps 1536
Terrain shadows 512
Contact shadows off
Windshield effects high
Ambient occlusion off
Cubemap reflections 96
Raymarched reflections off
Light shafts off
Bloom off
Glass cockpit refresh rate high
Some of the real heavy hitters are clouds and ambient occlusions. The things that I have turned up are largely controlled by other factors like VRAM (which the 4090 has in abundance). While those things look nice, I’d ultimately rather have more resolution.
I get a mild bump using foveated rendering with the OpenXR toolkit. I run at 50% at 1/4 and 65% at 1/8. That gives perhaps a 10% bump. To really go further, we need quad views dynamic foveated rendering. Here’s the wishlist item to add it (it’s apparently pretty easy for Asobo to do it):