Hi All,
I bought an MQ3 a couple weeks ago after my Reverb G2 just died (turns out it may just be a board so I’m getting it fixed anyway). After unpackage, configuring and setup, I encountered the same as the topic subject line and started to research the problem by vetted this through the PMDG forum. With little success and no solution, several crashes in a row trying slight variations in setup, I tried a hunch. The hunch was that when the freeze occurs, I’m not necessarily doing anything in particular and then BAM! A couple times I noticed that it froze when I was looking at the direction of the tablet. So, I disabled the tablet. The problem went away, immediately! The (VR) graphics were glitchy but I flew at least 6 legs in the last two days no problem. For grins I turned the tablet back on again and sure enough, BAM! MSFS crashed on the climbout to transition altitude.
I reported my findings on the PMDG forum here: https://forum.pmdg.com/forum/main-forum/pmdg-737-for-msfs/general-discussion-no-support/275471-meta-quest-3-freeze-after-15-minutes-of-ngx-flight
I then submitted a ticket to PMDG of which they replied promptly. Their response was that they don’t have any MQ3/2 hardware in-house, that one of their team members has a 4K setup with no reported issues (whatever that is) and that he’d pass it along. Bottom line, don’t expect a response from them. My suspicion is that this is a problem between MQ3->Virtual Desktop->Steam VR and MSFS. The PMDG tablet with the Navigraph API (of which Navigraph may or may not have an affect) just happens to be the catalyst that exposes the bug somewhere in that value chain. I should note that I read somewhere (the Meta forum on the same topic) that updating the Nvidia driver would remediate the problem, it didn’t. I’m lucky enough that I can still take my MQ3 back, of which I plan to.
My recommendation: Disable the tablet under the settings on the FMC and report back to this thread. If you can fly without problems then this theory is confirmed and Microsoft/Asobo should take a look at this. The downside is that it only appears to affect MQ owners as they have to use an unorthodox method to interface to MSFS. Even the original Rift series (though proprietary) was more seamless than this paradigm.
For details on the discussion, visit the link to the PMDG thread above.
Good luck and please report your findings to this thread.
Howard