I have been changing back and forth from Cable to virtual Desktop. I am not sure yet which is best for me. I have spent countless hours on fiddling around with the settings and in the end i totally lost my ability to judge the outcome. i need to let it go for a few days. i will give it a fresh start tomorrow and start with all my settings on “low” and write every setting i change down on a piece of paper and test it with the Performance-monitor from the developer tool. Yesterday i found a video from a Guy “FR Flight Sim Guy” that he released yesterday and he started by setting the Oculus Software to 90 Hz and 1.7. and 1.5 SS on a 1080ti He then limited the Tray tool to 20FPS and he was absolutely Happy with it and he had a smooth, crisp and sharp Image.
But Oculus Settings to 1.7 ?? I always thought one should keep this setting below 1.0 ? Am i mistaken here?
two things i found out are, when using the Cable i always have stuttering sound, even when there is no stutter on the screen. i use headphones directly connected to the PC as a workaround
Virtual Desktop worked well in the night when the family was asleep . Yesterday i had microstutters every 3 seconds. I looked at the Router and found out that 12 Devices were logged in to the 5MHZ network, Me, My Wife and 3 Kids, each with several devices… i dont think, that the total Bandwith is the Problem but maybe the 12 Devices slow down the internal communication on the 5 MHZ . Would it be possible to connect another seperate Router to my Modem via Cable and set Up another 5Mhz Lan only for my PC and the Quest 2 ?
There’s pros and cons to using the virtual desktop method and the link cable method. It depends on your set up and what you take as being ‘acceptable’ performance.
With the link cable you can use the Oculus tray tool to muck about with the super sampling and other settings. Doing that enables you, certainly enables me with my set up, to really crank up the in game settings so the landscape is beautifully detailed and crisp like you’re more used to seeing on your flat screen display. The downside to that is that the Oculus ASW, in order to smooth over the drops in frame rate gives everything in the cockpit a slight blur and shimmer. It also introduces artifacts if you move your head too fast.
For me going down the virtual desktop route gives me more efficient data transfer and thus wins me some frame rate increase. However to take advantage of that I need to drop settings down in the sim so the world and landscape isn’t as nice looking as I’d like. The upside, again with my set up, is that the cockpit is beautifully crisp and clear and there’s no artifacts or blur.
The annoyingly complex thing is that one method suits one type of flying and the other suits another type of flying. The link cable method suits zipping around the Alps in the MB-339 taking in all that wonderful scenery and where its not so important the cockpit is crystal clear. Where as the virtual desktop method suits flying an airliner where you want the cockpit crystal clear but aren’t so bothered about the outside world looking its best.
You can go back and forth between them of course but if you’ve got the Steam version, where playing with the link cable and Steam VR isn’t optimal, it means changing the registry each time time you want to swap over. Not ideal.
Its all just such an epic faff with the Quest 2. I really wish there was some way of getting the best of both worlds. Presumably some optimisation by Asobo will make a difference but I’d be surprised if there’s ever a night and day difference. The weakest link in the set up is always going to be that Oculus link cable only being USB and not HDMI.
It’s interesting how some people are experiencing improved framerates by using the VD. I’ve spent a few hours today trying again to optimise my system (10900K, 2060SUPER, Quest2) and although I can achieve 35-40fps with the link cable using either Oculus drivers or SteamVR, as soon as I switch to wireless via the VD my max framerate is barely 18fps, even with low graphics settings.
The main issue with VR for me is the readability of the controls inside the plane. I’m totally happy to have blurry landscapes, but I find anything less than 1.2 supersampling makes buttons too blurry to read in the CJ4. Is there any way to crank up the detail in the cockpit while keeping everything else fast and smooth? Using a 1.2 SS proves that the Quest2 is more than capable of achieving beautiful rendering, it’s just that my GPU isn’t quite capable of running everything with that detail. I just wish there was a ‘cockpit detail’ slider!
for this reason i use a Wifi6 router on 5GHZ to get the best performance. This is highly recommended.
With 2,4Ghz i have the same FPS rate as you and an unstable Steam VR application.
What about your Wifi connection ?
According to the VD profiler, my wifi latency is 13ms, so it’s not really contributing much to the frame drop. The limiting factor is the GPU or sometimes the render thread. Not really sure why VD would be so much slower than using the link cable on my system. What other settings do you use in VD for graphics quality, frame rate, bitrate and advanced options?
To be honest, the biggest improvement I’ve found is to set the FOV multiplier to 0.7 or 0.8 in the ODB and use the Oculus runtime and link. Then I can achieve a steady 30fps with 1.2x Supersamples and ASW on auto. But now the audio crackles wth!
Just to add up on the general confusion about VD vs LINK Performance…
I am using LINK with the Quest 2 and all the settings based on the youtube video from VR FlightSimGuy: Youtube Link
I am happy with it so far. I reach 30-40 FPS and although it sounds strange saying that but: it feels smooth as ASW is doing a good job. I will try to tweak a bit more to increase readability of the instruments but honestly I can identify everything. Of course I have to mention that I have been in the cockpits in 2D before
SUMUP:
Open XR from Oculus in regeditor
Oculus Settings to 90Hz and 1.7
MSFS rendering scale at 70-80%
Oculus Tray Tool: no SS, ASW 30Hz, Bitrate 300
Personal addon:
Capping fps in NVIDIA Driver to 40fps for MSFS to avoid glitches
My Hardware:
Ryzen 3600, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3060Ti FE, 1 TB M2-SSD
2.3 GBits 5m active USB connection (measured)
I might change my opinion when I found the time to try VD, but today I can’t confirm the issues with LINK.
for VD i choose Graphic High, VR Frame Rate 72FPS, VR Bitrate 150Mbs,
Steam VR: Rendering per eye 70%, Rendering for App 100%
MSFS: Rendering 100%, all other points High/Medium
With this settings i get 30FPS…but Steam VR is very instable on my system.
I´m still wait for my RTX3070, actually i use a 5700XT.
The connection via link seems to be the best way today, so i think we have to wait for updates.
If you want to try adding on a separate 1Gbps router like the D-Link DIR-882, the concept is to connect the new router hard-wired to the original router via a 1 Gbps wire from 1 of 4 ports to the other using 1 of 4 ports (not the cable modem input). On the original router, limit the DHCP range down from 255 to maybe 200. Set the new router with a static IP (same for first three fields ) higher than that limited range (e.g. 10.0.0.225) and disable DHCP. Make sure that the PC is connected with a 1 Gbps wire to the original router. Also on the new router, try to select a 5Ghz channel that your neighbors aren’t using (Android phone app called WiFi analyzer by Abdelrahman ) and an 80Mhz channel width - 802.11ac
just tried switching my runtime from oculus to steamvr and what a difference using virtual desktop. The image quality is much much better and I could read the pfd and cockpit so much better. Wow! Now I didn’t play with any settings much within the oculus app so I might have a look, but I would rather stay wireless. It’s worth a try for sure.
@ proxlamuz,
Since you nicely documented (and were the OP in this thread ), could you please document EVERY setting you can think of from the Desktop Streamer to the Virtual Desktop settings (quality and bitrate), SteamVR settings (resolution etc ), FS2020 settings… I just don’t get anything close to your results that you portrayed with a snapshot at the beginning of this thread. I get a lot of main thread overrun and only 20fps. I have an 8core 9700K at 5Ghz, an RTX2070 (nonSuper but oclocked to 2000Mhz GPU clock and 8000Mhz Memclock). I am running 457.30 Nvidia driver (what key settings are you using )and Win 10 20H2 (Build 19042.685). The more detail along with any performance displays like the Task Manager for CPU and ethernet rates during VR as well as Steam VR displays and VirtDesktop detail printout. Also, which aircraft and scenery location were you testing at? All of things are needed for some of us to get the almost twice performance that you get. Thanks so much!
I think the back and forth on what is better depends on several individual things…obviously network will matter for VD, but I am one that has much better success with Link. I’m a huge VD fan for most games but on this one, VD causes not only CPU to be limited, but also rendering skyrockets. I end up around 33 fps in the same area that Link gives me 45 fps. With Link, only CPU is limited. Rendering is MUCH lower. If someone knows why that there is such a difference, please let me know. I use a 6700k at 4.5 and a 3080. I have VD set to HEVC.
I see the bottleneck with the renderthread as well. I’m not sure exactly what the render thread latency refers to (as distinct from the GPU latency) but while using VD, my bottleneck is the rdrthread according to the MSFS FPS counter.
I think tbh the main different for me between VD SteamVR and Oculus link is that while using Oculus runtimes I can change the FOV Tangent setting to 0.7;0.7 and it increases fps by over 60%. No option to do that with SteamVR that I can see.
