My rig is far from the recommended specs and delivers a festival of tearing and low res overexposed scenery… yet I am hooked on VR! This is my first VR headset, I bought it for MSFS and I am never going back to 2D. Ever!
I fly GA VFR and if I keep the options to low/medium I can hit 20-30 FPS if I avoid too many clouds. And it is smooth enough to be enjoyable and does not make me sick (although other VR experiences do so I’m not immune). It’s also true that you don’t need as much scenery details in VR for it to look good.
Probably a different story for IFR though as you need higher res for the panel.
I got my PPL 20 yrs ago but never really flew since then. This is my way of getting back into it. I have been waiting for years for technology to come this far and it is awesome!
I’m already on the path to upgrading my GPU (of course!) but you can definitely enjoy MSFS in VR without a crazy rig.
You are absolutely wrong by speculating others’ own experiences. I really enjoyed MSFS VR with 18FPS and never got the “horrible” feelings you were trying to claim for others.
I said 30Hz refresh and 30Hz app frame rate. That is definitely not a 30Hz refresh rate. I’m well aware that 30fps can look smooth, but only in limited conditions, especially if there’s no reprojection/motion smoothing/ASW to help it out.
And just to clarify, my comment was specifically in regards to a claim made here that anything higher than 30fps isn’t needed for smooth motion. I see this all the time online when people are talking about game framerates, and it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of a concept related to refresh rate, not frame rate. What they’re referring to is flicker fusion threshold, which is the threshold at which we don’t notice refresh flicker anymore – not the threshold at which motion looks smooth, which varies based on how fast the rendered motion is actually moving. And that threshold is not even 30Hz for most people, it’s upwards of 50Hz for most people. This is why in my reply I specifically pointed out app frame rate versus screen refresh rate.
Lastly, to your video capture there, try turning your head quickly or looking out the side at fast moving scenery at 30fps. Or better still, try flying aerobatics. If it really is just a 30fps app frame rate without any reprojection/motion smoothing/ASW, you will definitely see gapped frames. The reason high frame rates in VR matter is because of combined head motion as well as rendered app motion.
You didn’t read the rest of what I said, then. I was replying in regards to a person insisting that 30fps was all that was needed for smooth motion perception in our vision system, which is not really correct, and a misunderstanding of what that threshold really means. Smooth motion perception in VR requires a high refresh rate, and also a frame rate high enough to keep up with the rate of rendered motion. If things are moving slowly enough in your field of view, yes, 30fps can be acceptable, but not a 30Hz refresh rate. The flicker at 30Hz refresh would drive you crazy on an LCD screen.
Also, your 18fps is only ‘smooth’ because (1) your headset’s refresh rate is way higher than that and (2) there is some kind of reprojection or asynchronous spacewarp helping out, by interpolating the missing frames and injecting them. Pure 18fps without any assistance in VR would definitely not look smooth unless you were holding your head totally still and anything in view was barely moving. The end result of all this is even though the app frame rate is 18fps, the actual effective frame rate you are seeing is much higher than that, thanks to clever software tricks.
Anyway, my point wasn’t that modern VR systems can’t look smooth with low app framerates. They can. But it’s because the clever software tricks they utilize make it so that what you’re seeing isn’t actually 18fps in the display.
It could be as HT was ON at that time (I turn it OFF and ON depending benchmark I made). I will do the test again with it OFF,thanks for the idea.
Edit : so I turned HT OFF and yes, I’m near to saturate my processor, so it could be possibly the bottleneck when I lower all my graphical settings (see core #3 and #4 at 85% and 88%). The fun fact is I got more fps with HT OFF (112 vs 105).
So my I7 10700K stock clock (4,7Ghz on all core) is unable with MSFS to work enough to generate a correct VR view, as if I have only 112 fps on monitor (at all lower settings) it will be obviously unable to generate 2 x 3D views in VR (including VR management).
Interesting… and even more disappointing about the MSFS engine. It mean whatever GPU I have (I’m going to upgrade asap) I will not have my 90fps in my CV1 with MSFS, as the CPU will be in any case the bottleneck. That explain why people around with better GPU can’t reach native Hz of their headset.
Oh, that’s a given, for sure. None of the major flight sims can do that, except for AeroFly FS2 and IL2 Sturmovik. It’s disappointing, yes, but it’s something VR flight simmers have accepted for years now, and because of it they spend tons of time trying to find various settings combinations to give them something they feel is good enough. Even after X-Plane implemented Vulkan, you can still only hold 80 or 90fps in limited conditions for short periods of time, but it seems like they’re getting closer with each update. Still a long way yet to go, though, and I wouldn’t get your hopes up for MSFS to be able to do better than fps = 0.5*refresh with consistency any time soon.
OK, you are way more expert than me on this. I apologize for my misunderstanding.
I did not felt jittering or wobbling once I used higher graphic settings. I didn’t hold my head still either. I disabled ASW but I guess something was still happening there. One clue was that a quick head movement would make aircraft window frame or wing side start to show saw like patterns, but they quickly disappeared so I didn’t feel bothered. Another strange thing was that even quickest head movement seemed never shake ground scenery. Actually I felt they were super stable and almost still during my head shake. This was very different than I observed with lower graphic settings. Maybe the headset, the game, or my brain perfectly cheated me into “virtual reality” through some hidden logics?
This is one of the value proposition of DX12 (like Vulkan): instead of letting the driver doing the scheduling for you, and limiting the application to what resemble a single threaded queue of commands, the application gets the responsibility to do its own scheduling instead (and mem management, and more of course). In other words, instead of having a “one size fits all” driver which is inherently designed to work with the worst application implementation safely, you’re having a “my size fits me well” approach where you can deliver the video card commands from your own queues, under your scheduling, when and where it fits your application game loop. (this is just a short attempt to describing it all but it is way more complex than this of course).
i7 9700k here at 5Ghz on all cores, 32GB DDR4 RAM@3000MHz, 3080 GPU, CV1 HMD.
I use the Oculus debug tool to get 30 Hz (server:asw.clock30) with about 80% resolution in game and 100% scenery view distance (sorry can’t remember what all these things are called). 1.9 SS (190%)
I’m normally quite happy with the sim if I fly the TBM 930 at less than 150KTS at 2-3k FT.
One think I do notice is that the performance drops drastically if I increase speed to 200+ KIAS.
The Carrendo M40R is better as it’s slower and has a six pack.
No worries and no need to apologize. Sometimes I state things in a way that sounds unintentionally abrupt/harsh, so I understand when I don’t always come off as I meant to. The ‘saw-like’ patterns you saw – that is very characteristic of ASW being active. When it’s on and doing its magic, on straight-line edges and patterns (like the leading edge of a wing), that’s where you’ll sometimes see those graphical artifacts. So even though you thought ASW was disabled or the setting said it was, if you had fluid motion in the headset and saw saw-like distortions, it was still running, somehow How did you disable ASW, and also how did you force it to 18fps? The only ‘easy’ way to force 18fps is to set the Oculus runtime into forced-18fps mode with ASW active. If you did it via the Tray Tool, that 18fps option is a command sent to the runtime that is part of the ASW implementation.
Really? My 3 year old system is pretty similar - i7-7700k @ 4.25 GHz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080 with 8GB video ram. VR output is pretty good to my Rift. Sure the I7 is overclocked and water cooled, but most of it’s down to the video card.
This is a recording of my left eye channel through oculusMirror: https://youtu.be/qp7Su2V6GyI Gonna try ODB and see if I can get the audio as well. Same odd flashing lights as every one else, but I’m quite happy with it. Only visual pause is when it wants to play some new audio or throw up a pointless system menu. I’ve been slowly increasing my VR graphics settings and it still seems to be handling it…
I can still try the Tray Tool but last time I used it the performance seemed bad with stutters and the feel of colour distortion. In retrospect, maybe it’s because the Tray Tool truly disabled ASW?
I used Oculus Debug Tool instead: first opened it (normally in Admin mode) and changed the ASW to disabled. Then, left the window open and started Oculus client. Then I started MSFS, normally from desktop, selected departure, etc., clicked to fly, let it pause, switched to VR, then put on headset.
Maybe as you said, I didn’t actually disable ASW, However, the pixel density setting in ODT was certainly working as intended.
no need to guess since i see a massive difference between these 30/60/90 fps examples (especially in the “background”). just wondering why you wouldn’t. no offense.
How did you disable ASW, and also how did you force it to 18fps? The only ‘easy’ way to force 18fps is to set the Oculus runtime into forced-18fps mode with ASW active. If you did it via the Tray Tool, that 18fps option is a command sent to the runtime that is part of the ASW implementation.