State of VR

any information supporting the HP G1 ? I am using this one ( with XPlane), and the technical difference between G1 and G2 is marginal.

The release of VR for MSFS, in October, should offer support for all WMR headsets and not just the G2, as has been widely and incorrectly reported by the IT press after the initial announcement.

Your headset should therefore be supported, when the October patch is made live.

As the owner of a now rather dated CV1, I’m also hopeful that the month-long delay, from the original mid-September release date, might have allowed the devs the time to also add support for the other non-WMR headsets.

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thanks for the quick reply, hope my RTX2080 can handle this.

only time will tell :slight_smile:

Since VR performance is CPU-limited and even on a monitor no CPU today can probably get a steady 60fps. I don’t know how the 90fps needed by VR headsets can be achieved. It’s not a matter of pixels or having a stronger graphics card. It’s that 3D needs to draw the same image 2x in VR. That’s done by your CPU and unless someone incredible magic happens for this game VR is going to be DOA. Apparently the DX12 upgrade won’t necessarily bring performance improvement, only features like ray tracing.

I don’t think you need 90 fps per se. On my Rift S, anything over 40 fps looks smooth, so that’s all you need in that case. Maybe it;s different for other headsets.

My guess is you won’t even get 40fps. And that’s only achieved by constantly running reprojection or frame doubling. Hey if it can work, great but I hate to see this go on and on in other flight sims which are never going to be able to perform in VR. Better to do it right or not at all.

Do you have a VR headset sharpexb?

I don’t own one personally, I use them at work though actually. My guess at performance is based on MSFS being the new Crysis. I don’t see how it will be possible to run this in VR

Disclaimer, I’m a 3D graphics dev, but do not have experience in VR. But these claims don’t make sense to me, so I was hoping you could clarify.

It’s my understanding that you can get away with a far lower FPS in a VR flight sim, per reports of those using it on existing sims and how flight sims work compared to other games. Do we really need 90 fps?

Why is “drawing the scene twice” a CPU limited function? There’s a little bit of overhead as the sim switches up between frames, but that’s miniscule compared to drawing the scene itself which is literally the entire job of the GPU.

I’ve suggested this already elsewhere, but I don’t even think VR needs to actually draw the whole scene twice. A big optimization they could use would be to only draw the cockpit twice, and just recycle the world scene. There’s no significant depth information beyond the nose of the plane in most situations.

VR renders in stereo 3D so it draws two frames, one for each eye. Frames are drawn by the CPU and rendered on the GPU. Flight sims in particular already draw a great many more objects than typical games due to the view distance. And obviously MSFS is on the high demand end of this spectrum. Most players on monitors are already CPU limited in 2D.
VR needs high frame rates of 80-90 FPS to avoid sickness. 30fps or the occasional stutter isn’t a big deal on a monitor but in VR it’s sickness inducing. All HMDs have some sort of frame doubling in order to smooth out any low rates but they induce artifacts into the image. They’re meant to be an intermittent safety net, not to be run continually. If frame doubling was a good way to get high frame rates, nobody would need a RTX3080. The early adopters and VR enthusiasts in other flight sims just seem to put up with this and get all enthused about a continual 30fps being great. But it can’t be a good experience and it’s not what VR is meant to deliver. All of these flight sims were never meant to be VR games, including MSFS. I think their response was “we didn’t think it was a thing”. So yes I’m sure this game will offer “support” meaning you will be able to plug a headset in. But it won’t perform well at all. I can’t see how that will be possible. I can’t even imagine a boost from DX12 being enough.

The CPU doesn’t “draw a frame”. The CPU does the calculations needed to update objects in a scene such as their positions and states, and then it tells the GPU to “draw the frame”. It only needs to do this update once when it draws both frames for each eye, and many of the objects in the scene do not need to be updated by the CPU. Simply adding lots of scenery objects or extending the viewing distance doesn’t necessarily put more load on the CPU, but it does add load to the GPU.

It’s stuff like live traffic, AI, the flight model and avionics that puts the load on the CPU in flight simulators. If performance is really a problem in VR, some of that can be disabled or reduced to up the frame count. For example, you might sacrifice AI air and ground traffic.

Low framerate induced sickness is definitely a thing, and may be a problem in Flight Simulator, but I’ve heard that this issue is highly dependent on the type of scene and motion you’re doing in VR. Flight simulators get cut some slack here. Moving through a small room where there’s a lot of stereoscopic depth information, for sure you want a high frame rate. But just sitting in a cockpit, where the world around you has no stereoscopic depth information, and you’re not moving around in your cockpit much beyond turning your head once in awhile, you should be able to get away with a far lower frame rate.

I’m really curious to see how this turns out. I’m optimistic, however. Asobo has experience with both VR games, and “simulator” type games. Plus this VR feature has been in development for a long time now ( a year?) and they’ve pretty much confirmed it’s coming this Fall. I doubt this feature would have gotten that far if it didn’t perform decently.

Still, given the roughness of other parts of the sim, I’m going to wait before I jump on a G2 Reverb and a 3000 series Geforce. I think they can pull it off, but I just don’t want to be an early adopter for another rush job.

Ok “draws objects” or “creates frames” whatever. Bottom line is flight simulators draw way way more objects than typical games or VR specific games. And yes it’s two distinct viewpoints. This is all well known in other flight sims that try to use VR. None of them perform well at all. There’s a big difference between “flying games” like Star Wars Squadrons or Eve Valkyrie specifically made for VR and this sim.

Hey let’s wait and see but yeah I’d wait on jumping into the purchase of an expensive HMD for this game. If it follows the pattern of every other flight sim attempting to do VR. None of them perform very well.

I agree that since this isn’t a combat game with fast moving action, the sickness factor is certain going to be less. Also the artifacts from reprojection. I’m rather ok with 30fps here whereas in a combat sims I would want 60 for certain.

So I use vr in dcs world. I started with the original vive. It was great. I never felt sick, or dizzy or eyes hurting. Actually I did get that feeling in my stomach like on a roller coaster , only because my eyes tricked my brain into feeling like I was on a roller coaster. When dog fighting and pulling high g maneuvers as well as yanking and banking it felt real. Now on my monitor I’m getting 30fps with dcs world. I have since upgraded to the rift s and visuals are much better. I can actually read the numbers on the instruments and the whole cockpit is clear.

How many fps am I getting using vr? I have no idea. But it feels real and great immersion. I have a better sense of depth of field.

So from my experience I dont think fps on a monitor is the same as fps in vr. I dont think you can say if im getting only 30 fps in 2d, then its going to be worse in vr. Im looking forward to vr support in msfs. Of course looking out into the world using vr the visuals are not as great compared to a 2d monitor. I plan on upgrading to hp reverb 2 next year depending how the reviews go, which should improve the outside world visuals.

As time goes on things will get better. Look at where the pc was at in the 90s vs today? I think msfs will be like windows ten. I dont think there will be a new version of msfs in the future. It will be updated and patched to take advantage of new technologies as time passes. I hope that is the case and not get abandoned.

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If you’re only getting 30 FPS on a monitor then you’re getting substantially less in VR. Some people it seems are just not sensitive to this or are willing to endure the effects of stuttering or reprojection.
Hey if VR can be made to run decently just imagine the performance boost anyone running in 2D will get! There will have to be some great improvement made by adopting DX12 or something.

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When using vr i dont gwt a sense of low fps. Fps on a simulator is not as important compared to a first person shooter. Hopefully soon the developers will support dx12 and see how that improves the performance and visuals.

Closed as VR has been introduced into the simulator.