Congratulations for doing this, but please spell “Whisky” without an “e”. 
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Yeah, fair crack. I have no excuse, clearly it’s whisky.
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Simahangar recently released a vid that is regarding VR optimisation:
In it (from 4:56 to 7:41), he discusses HAGS and Game Mode. It seems HAGS and/or Game Mode have significant impact on VR for some reason.
I will say that I had left HAGS + GM on following my own tests, and when I came to eventually try VR some time later, I was wondering what the hell had happened, because it was so much worse than it used to be, but it was far enough away that I didn’t put 2 and 2 together.
I haven’t yet re-tested my VR performance after seeing this vid right now, but it’s fair to say that if you ever use VR, then you probably want both off.
I would imagine that the culprit would be HAGS, rather than game mode, but since in my own testing the consistent worst performer was HAGS off + GM on, it wouldn;t make sense to turn off HAGS but leave GM on - as I had since performing my tests.
Therefore, it seems both off is probably the way to go. I will try and get some time to play in VR tomorrow, and report my findings, but for now, I’ve disabled both and would probably suggest that others interesting in VR performance do the same.
I’ve annoyingly hardly had a chance to test this after posting the above youtube link. But I did get a chance to test briefly.
My initial reaction was “Wow, this has totally fixed VR” (by disabling the settings). I loaded into EGMC (London Southend) where I typically fly from, I do have the Orbx pack for this, and it was SO much smoother than it had been. Really, the difference was night and day, I was super happy.
But then as I was in the air, performance degraded. As I approached EGSG (again, I have the Orbx pack for that), it was super choppy. Probably dropped from 30-odd FPS to about 15.
So not sure if perhaps windows was downloading an update in the background or something, perhaps Game Mode would have helped. I’ll take the degradation with a pinch of salt, because EGMC, which is normally quite a strain on the system, was so buttery smooth that I must assume something else was going on to cause the later performance loss.
Has anyone else tried playing with these settings in VR?
Quest 2 user here. I have been playing with both game mode and HAGS settings several times but my conclusion is that HAGS off is better for stuttering. I am running on an RTX2080 Super.
Unless you’re Irish (IIRC) 
HAGS off seems better on my G2 + 3080
HAGS on seem to be giving some issues in VR. Definitely less stuttering for me but this is 2D
HAGS is causing CTD’s with some machines after the NVIDIA 511.23 driver release.
Would be interesting if you were able to re-run the test suite with the latest build and nvidia drivers. Thanks in advance.
I just got my first CTD and it was working well for the first few days .Not sure what it was.
Not noticed this since updating to that release.
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MS version
HAGS- on
Developer mode - off
Any changes from default? None
System specs - See profile
I ran another quick test today, since I hadn’t revisited this since last year, and my recent upgrade from a Win7 9900K/1080 to a Win11 11900K/3090.
With HAGS on, in my standard test of spawning at EGLL gate 225. I was getting ~43fps.
When I turned HAGs off, and rebooted, this had climbed to ~45fps.
The only thing I don’t remember is what my LOD settings were. I know I had everything else set to Ultra. If I had to guess I would say I was either running 400/200, or hacked 400/400.
I now run 300/200 as SU9 made flying 400/200 intolerable on the ground at most locations, and even caused stuttering when moving your view about in the air.
An aside regarding terrain/object caching since SU5
I’m still of a mind that since SU5 was released, the ability to cast your view about, and not suffer stuttering has been seriously affected.
When I look back to my earlier videos, with a more critical eye than I had then, I don’t see that stuttering that we see now.
If the scenery is being fully cached I don’t see why we should be seeing any stuttering at all when moving your view around. Yet we do, which makes me think that Ultra terrain caching is somewhat smoke, and mirrors, and its still dropping objects from memory when you aren’t looking at them.
It may not be as obvious as it was when SU5 was released, so they could somehow shoe-horn in MSFS into the Xbox, a veritable quart into a pint pot, but its still there.
Another incidental. When I spawned with HAGS off, I was instantly told my bandwidth was too low for PG. 
<pats MSFS on the head> There, there. It will all be better soon.
Problem I see with such tests is that it only gives you the FPS at a certain point in time.
IMHO FPS is not the main problem when it comes to performance. Smoothness is => reducing stutters. And that’s one thing that happens no matter if you have 20FPS or 80 FPS.
I could get that improved with totally different settings like VSync and getting the game GPU-limited instead of Main thread-limited.
I couldn’t discern any difference in smoothness with HAGS on or off by the way.
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I would agree its very synthetic, but overall it did feel like HAGS off was giving me a very slight improvement, but I think small enough that as long as it was above a certain threshold, I would only notice via a benchmarking tool. The difference between say 50-52 is relatively unimportant, but 28-30 isn’t, for me at least.
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I’ll add to this in saying W11 ‘Game Mode’ improves third party texture loading of sceneries. I really see a difference with sceneries like Fly Tampa’s KLAS.
Game Mode + HAGS ON!
Vsync 100% + Reflex (NOT Boost) On in game.
Use driver Nvidia 536.40
Please clarify what GPU you have.
Common wisdom is:
For RTX 4090 - HAGS on.
Other nVidia cards - HAGS off.
Don’t know about AMD or Intel GPU’s.
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