Quad Views Foveated Rendering for MSFS 2024

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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After playing MSFS 2024 day-one, I am disappointed to see that foveated rendering still isn’t implemented into the game, at least from what I could see. This was a long time requested feature for MSFS 2020.

It’s quite a bummer, because Quad Views foveated rendering can have huge performance benefits for headsets like the Pimax Crystal which I own. Games like DCS and Pavlov which do support Quad Views can see about 2X the framerate with no perceivable loss in image quality which is sorely needed in MSFS 2024.

I currently get about 15-30 FPS at 100% resolution scaling depending on the scenery. If I could double the framerate using Quad Views, I would be seeing framerates such as 30-60 which would be a MASSIVE improvement.

EDIT: Props to Asobo! They implemented this feature in Sim Update 2 Beta! While the performance improvement is not as drastic as DCS, it seems most people are able to get a 5-10 fps improvement. It seems that additional gains are limited by the CPU once Quad Views is turned on.

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I feel the same. MSFS 2024 looks terrible in my Varjo XR-4 headset. It would look amazing if quad views was finally implemented. I’ve fiddled with settings for the last several years in MSFS 2020 and now 2024 and no matter what combination I try between Pimax and now Varjo headsets, the image just looks blurry. Quad views would look BEAUTIFUL in MSFS 2024 and might help performance. So far the only way to get a clear image is to set my headset to high (default) or higher resolution, set OpenXR toolkit FOV to 50% and endure looking through a keyhole view. But at least it’s clear. I don’t know why Asobo can’t render the sim one to one into my headset’s native display resolution like other applications do. Instead it renders a stretched-out image to the headset and it looks very pixelated/low resolution. Changing render resolution in Varjo Base or in the sim does nothing helpful. But rendering one- to-one would look gorgeous in the headset, just like Varjo desktop does and would be a large FOV besides!

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I seriously want it. There is one who has never used Quad Views, but there is no one who has only used it once. I don’t think it would be possible to go back to flying without Quad Views.

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I expected it to be there because of the hints of fixed foveated rendering. Its a small step from that to DFR. Really wish they put the effort into suppprting this!

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This should be a must in any high quality VR application. Currently the sim works great in 2D but in VR it is heavily GPU limited. Quad Views would allow to have a great VR experience with amazing graphics.

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We’re probably lucky that VR is even included in this release. I recall back during development when news started circulating that they had moved most of the VR team on to non-VR tasks. Thus, VR in 2024 feels pretty much like it was just maintained enough to keep it working like a legacy feature, but not optimized or futurized in any meaningful way. DFR for a cutting edge product like this just seems like such a no-brainer considering that sims that support it (like DCS, ED, and hey, even products by tiny developers that are practically demos like Kayak VR and Aircar have it). I mean the differences can be stunning, so I really hope something is done about this. I really, really dislike the fact that I’m going to need to buy a $2000 5090 for 2024 just to (maybe) match the VR performance of my 4090 in 2020.

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This an absolute must have, let’s hope Asobo would add this. But sadly I don’t think it’s going to ever happen.

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Quad Views Foveated Rendering and Fixed Foveated Rendering (FFR) are features that the game should have by default, just like DCS World, especially when presenting the Pimax Crystal Light as the official headset for the game. The performance improvement would be significant. It’s curious that, despite this, when you go into the settings, at the bottom left it shows that FFR is disabled…

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Quadviews is fantastic in DCS. It nearly doubled my frame rate. It takes up a few CPU cycles, not many - and right now I am GPU limited by a large margin on my I9 13900K with RTX 4090 in MSFS 2024. And most importantly, with Quad views in DCS everthing is crystal clear, I can even run the area my eyes are looking at at even higher than native resolution of my Pimax Crystal!

And because of the eye tracking in my Pimax Crystal I can not see the degradation of the visuals outside of my field of view. Seemed like magic when I got it working in DCS. Crystal Light users who don´t have eye tracking will still benefit from Quad Views, but I guess they might want to be a little less aggressive with its settings in the out of focus areas than people with eye tracking headsets.

Please Asobo! :slight_smile:

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Hey, you realize that this is nothing “default” in DCS with quad views. The only reason quad views works in DCS is because of intense hacking I performed in 2023 and beyond.

Since beginning of 2023, quad views support on DCS has been a hack that Eagle Dynamics never made any efforts to improve.

The “base support” in DCS suffers from numerous bugs (incorrect lighting and camera position, double-vision cursor), does not support dynamic foveation at all, and in its default fixed foveated rendering provides near-zero performance gains. Many of these issues are worked around via various hacks in my implementation of the Quad-View-Foveated mod.

In 2024, Eagle Dynamics broke some of these workarounds with their 2.9 update, and only after the outrage of users on their forum, they finally fixed one of their bugs that had been long-standing for 18-months.

(I have explained many of the things below on the quad views MSFS2020 thread already, repeating for visibility)

Furthermore, there are no VR platforms beyond Varjo (aka less than 1% of the PCVR presence on the market) that actually offer quad views support in their OpenXR runtime out-of-the-box. All other platforms require modding such as my Quad-View-Foveated API layer, which would not work with MSFS2024 since my API layer doesn’t support DX12. The case of Pimax that you are making is just Pimax bundling my API layer with their software, with all the same limitations that would prevent it from working with MSFS2024.

If Asobo were to implement quad views in the OpenXR way tomorrow, it would only work on Varjo headsets (a vendor who has discontinued their general-population Aero headset and currently only sells $4000 headset). It wouldn’t work on Pimax (the official headset of the game as you pointed out). It wouldn’t work on Oculus Quest (the most widespread headsets on the market).

The recent announcements of OpenXR 1.1 including quad views in the specification are also completely misleading, as quad views remain an optional feature of OpenXR 1.1 (and frankly the only change from 1.0 to 1.1 is just a rename to remove Varjo from the feature name).

In addition to all these limitations, implementing quad views today in MSFS2024 would only reduce performance. This is because MSFS does not implement “stereo instanced rendering” and therefore quad views would double the CPU usage which is already quite high. You would go from GPU-limited to CPU-limited in the blink of an eye.

Folks on this thread are lobbying for the wrong things.

What you need to lobby for instead:

  1. Oculus (Meta) to support quad views in their OpenXR runtime. Without this, the technology will continue to be largely irrelevant. Unfortunately Meta had shown us in 2024 that they are completely abandoning the PCVR market and in fact sabotaging it with their software, such as the OVRPlugin fiasco.

  2. Asobo to implement stereo instanced rendering. This is a prerequisite to quad views.

  3. Given that 1) is never happening because of Meta, the only remaining option for Asobo is to implement a custom compositing solution in their engine (as described on my wiki). I have already discussed this approach with some engineers at Asobo in the past, they are aware of it.

  4. The catch with 2) and 3) is that the implementation is complex and will require 1 if not 2 engine developers dedicated to it. As far as I understand today, there are 0 engine developers at Asobo working on VR. Asobo needs to fund this effort and to fund VR engine development in general, something they have proven they are not doing since MSFS2020 SU10 back in mid-2022 :frowning:

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Thank you for clarifying several points that users with limited knowledge are often unaware of. That aside, I believe the marketing strategies of today’s companies are quite misleading. On Pimax’s side, we see technologies marketed as a panacea, which in the end are used at most by a couple of titles and in a very limited way. On Asobo’s side, we see a marketing campaign showcasing a highly polished and smooth VR product that is far from reality.

Not even an RTX 4090 can run this title smoothly without enabling those technologies, and I believe that even with a future RTX 5090, we won’t be able to play it under optimal conditions without lowering certain settings. It’s absurd to present an almost perfect product and yet not even be able to play it decently in VR with a $5,000 computer.

I’m not asking for 120Hz and 100 FPS, but I do expect a much more polished product. I don’t think this will measure up to MSFS 2020 for at least a couple of years.

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I won’t disagree with you on the bad marketing. That said, as much as I love Pimax (they’re the only vendor at this point in time focusing on PCVR gaming), they’re just another 1% of users and that’s not what we need to move the needle.

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While we’re on the foveated rendering topic… Understanding you no longer support it, I thought I’d ask anyway in case you have any ideas:

I’m using OpenXR toolkit in 2020/2024 with an Aero, I enable foveated rendering and can set the rings such that the entire screen is one region, and set that region to render 1/16x of the target resolution which makes it un-usably blurry, but I only get a 2fps boost from 38->40fps. Since I’m GPU limited (i9 13900k/4090) this is surprising but I think I’m misunderstanding which layer this is happening at / overestimating asobos ability to interface with the feature?

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In all likelihood the foveated rendering is only being applied on a late-stage rendering pass (eg: post-processing), which will effectively make everything low-res as you expect. However the earlier rendering passes, where the actual heavy part of the rendering is happening, are not being properly picked up. Hence no good gain in performance. This is what was happening after SU10 in MSFS2020 until the heuristic was “re-tuned” to property pick up the necessary rendering passes. A tool such as PIX would help validate that this is indeed the issue.

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thank you! is there anything I can do? (im not familiar with PIX nor did a quick google reveal it). if not, also totally fine and expected. I know it’s a little off topic. Just struggling trying to get something usable out of '24

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Tuning the heuristic is far from trivial. So even if you’d confirm with PIX that it is the issue, that wouldn’t make a huge difference.

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thats what I thought. Thanks.

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Hey Matt…thanks for the words of sense and wisdom (as always)
have you looked into the new Somnium VR1… ? doesnt that also support quad views in the OpenXR runtime? I could be wrong…

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It does though I haven’t tested it. It is yet-another-2000-dollar headset that will account for 1% of users, which won’t make any difference to the PCVR ecosystem.

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Hmmm… I’ll have to test my setup when I get home.

I turned on eye tracking and turned the FOV rings to my standard settings and it is obviously working in that its displaying those reduced renders, but I’m unsure now If I’m seeing a boost.

Will report back.