Dear VR friends,
After making quite a lot of posts complaining and explaining my disappointment at the problems of SU5 (mainly severe scenery pop-in on head move), I wanted to share a couple of suggestions I have of ways to get the best out of the VR experience specifically in its current form:
Setup
If you have a Quest 2, a decent graphics card, and a good router+network, you should consider trying Virtual Desktop instead of Oculus Link for the following two reasons:
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Being able to adjust the gamma to 70% is more helpful than ever given the brightness / “washed out” appearance of the sim. It makes a much larger difference to the look of the sim than you might imagine.
EDIT - It has now been announced that there will be some kind of brightness slider added inside MSFS in a future update (not the upcoming hotfix). So if you had been considering buying Virtual Desktop just for the gamma adjustment, you may want to consider waiting for the fix instead. -
If you have a good graphics card, the “Ultra” setting within Virtual Desktop is, for me, much sharper than the max resolution available in oculus link. I don’t know why this is, because the Link max resolution is around 5400x2700 whereas the VD max resolution is only slightly higher at around 5500x2800. But it looks a lot sharper in the cockpit. Note this is with a 100 render scale in game.
Also note if you have a Nvidia 3000 series card, set the preferred codec in virtual desktop streamer to “HEVC” as the developer states this provides better image quality for the same bitrate.
Flight time of day
This is a simple one - If you can’t use virtual desktop to adjust the gamma, then adjust your flights to be at sunset or sunrise! Note it is possible to use Live Weather, whilst having a non-live Time. I don’t think this was always possible.
Flight type 1 - Between buildings
Whilst previously I loved to fly proper VFR with circuits and visual navigation at a few thousand feet, I find the visual pop in (of distant buildings, or of nearby trees increasing their size and detail) a second after I glance out the window to be really painful with sim update 5. However - whilst not my cup of tea - what is undoubtedly improved, is the ability to fly dangerously low around buildings in places like New York and London. This is of course due to the increased frame rate and the fact that you are so low that you don’t see more distant objects popping in.
Flight type 2 - Fast and low
Another strategy is flying fast and low enough that you don’t have time to be looking side to side and generating the pop in! Flying Iron simulations has yesterday updated their Spitfire to make use of smoke and panel vibration effects, and they now allow you to disable engine damage if you want to tear around at 350mph - It is great fun blasting through the scottish highlands.
Flight type 3 - IFR
This is kind of the antithesis of how MSFS has been used in VR up til now… But the suggestion is essentially to stick some bad weather on and “stay in the cockpit”. The glass panel FPS/performance improvements hopefully open VR airliners up to more people. The FBW A320 gets better and better, and the PMDG DC6 has enough going on with engine management etc that you can have a very immersive experience whilst being focussed on the cockpit and instruments rather than the scenery and the pop in problems. The weather simulation remains fantastic, and getting glimpses of terrain etc through heavy cloud usually isn’t enough for pop in to be noticeable.
Finally
Please vote in the below threads to bump the fixes up the dev priority list! Thank you