Hi all, I wanted to share some good news for those of us getting into the world of VR flight sim. My journey has all been with a Quest 3 headset which is reasonably modest price point. So this post is about that journey for anyone who might find it helpful.
The main problem I have with VR is that I am CPU bound even though I have a 9950X3D with 64G of 6000Mhz RAM. So there are really only a couple of ways out this problem. Reduce the LOD and other settings in the sim to allow the main thread and render threads some headroom or use foveated rendering.
Let me step back one chapter.
I bought Virtual Desktop for my Quest and found that I could get reasonable results with DLSS 4 using Godlike mode over VXDR with H264+ as the compression codec. AV1 10bit just has too many quality issues to be a serious contender for me. I didn’t use any FOV Tangential alterations in VD or in the Sim settings and left these at 100% along with the render resolution and no additional sharpening.
In the desktop mode I run all the sliders maxed in TAA mode and the results are understandably excellent, but clearly with nearly 19m pixels per frame in Godlike mode in VR to render the main thread of the sim is just going to drown under that sort of weight. Therefore, I run the sim in the “medium preset” for VR mode and then tweak up the TLOD to 200 and the OLOD 160 and this actually has served me very well. I tend to fly the FA18 over “New York” or Tokyo to stress test my settings. If it slightly stutters over Tokyo it will be fine over NY and everywhere else is then no problem including London. Inside the headset I run ASSW and then constrain the SIM to a target 35FPS in Dynamic Settings.
However . . . there is something much better I have found and here is what it is. (caveat, it is still a compromise not perfection) Foveated streaming. I hate the idea of foveated anything to be honest and if it wasn’t so good I would not be writing this up.
SteamVR beta now allows foveated streaming to the headset with a standard maximum foveated resolution of 1344 pixels. You can edit a config file to set is to 1536 but this could excessively stress the headset hardware and well, it’s expensive so I decided against that option for now. So with this setting in use in the steamVR codebase we have about 380MB/s of data bandwidth available to stream to the headset (the max the headset can handle), but the majority of that stream can be taken up with just the foveated section of the image with the remaining portion providing only the much lower quality peripheral vision. Due to this configuration the quality of this central section can be entirely maxed out and the result is seriously good. Way better than anything I can get in Virtual Desktop.
I can run the SteamVR resolution super sampling at 500% fixed at 72 Hz refresh rate (or higher refresh rate but that just stresses steam VR with extra interpolated frames to make up). It does mean SteamVR is interpolating roughly 2 or three frames in somewhere like Tokyo for every rendered frame but the experience in the headset is seamless and silky smooth even in a FA18 at 400KT. This has enabled me to switch to TAA mode which is ultimate for clarity (both VFR and IFR) and to entirely remove any “Dynamic Settings” constraints. The final part of the picture is to match the foveated rendering in the sim with the 1344 pixels foveated streaming which I can tell you for free is exactly 37%. It doesn’t sound allot but everywhere you are looking at is every bit as crisp and clear as it is in native desktop mode, something I never hoped to achieve in VR with this headset at this price point. It is the foveated rendering in the SIM which keeps the base frame rate at about 40fps which in turn means steamVR is interpolating just a single extra frame.
So there you have it I never thought I would be happy looking at a sim through a cardboard tube but the quality is so high where my face is pointing and provided I accept that I need to move my head (since there is no eye tracking in this headset) I get pin sharp, silky smooth VR loveliness and it is simply a delight and a joy that I hope you can now have too. Because of the freedom VR brings and the immersion this compensates enormously for the tubular vision compromise.
Oh, I almost forgot, getting the correct steamVR apk onto the Quest3 headset is a journey. There are lots of bloatware methods on the internet which allow sideloading but they are entire ecosystems in and of themselves which I frankly have no interest in engaging with whatsoever. I used the native adb.exe from android platform tools toolkit for Windows to overwrite the steamVR apk with the beta one which requires the headset be in developer mode - there is no other way to get to this feature unfortunately. Then you have to switch on the beta version inside the settings in the steamVR app in the headset. Then steam downloads a different version of the desktop streamer code and then it all comes together as per above. To get the headset in developer mode this can be done from the phone APP. Again the Meta Quest software is just buggy bloatware in my view so I uninstalled it from my PC. Once the headset is in developer mode, you have to attach it to the PC via a USB3 cable. Run the following as an admin from terminal and then launch cmd.exe and run the commands below in that window.
adb stop-server
then
adb start-server
then authorise the connection inside the headset and then use
adb install path-to-apk file
and it will just overwite the store steamVR apk and complete with success message. Where is the APK? Steam supply it on your machine in “Steamapps\common\SteamVR\drivers\vrlink\resources\android-steamlinkvr-release.apk”
There are some other commands you can find and run like seeing if the adb.exe can see your headset is connected. Find these with adb.exe /?
To get the steam beta requires signing up with steam - have a google that is well documented on the internet, the above has only been out since late Dec 2025 IIRC.
Cheers all.