I’m on leg seven of the Alaska Bush Trip. I’ve done the whole thing so far in VR using an Oculus Quest 1 and the Oculus Link method, and I’ll take it all the way in VR to the end. Now I have the settings right it is as smooth as silk. The scenery is incredible, utterly amazing realism. I love the way you can lean right over and see your wheels and the ground far below. I’m surprised that, with my mouse and Xbox 360 controller, I can handle all the levers and buttons easily in VR, I’ve been doing a lot of VR flying since it was launched fro MSFS, mainly around London, but this bush trip has been the thing that has really brought the gobsmacked out in me. It’s huge fun! It’s been hard getting the VR to work right, but now it does I’m thrilled with it. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time - like 40 years of flight simming 
. Alienware M17 R3 Laptop, Geforce RTX 2070 Super, 4K screen, overclocked GPU and CPU using Alienware tools.
Good sir, since you are in VR, I highly recommend getting something like Logitech G Pro Yoke System and Rudder Pedals. I am also very impressed from the realism in VR in FS2020 and highly highly recommend to do your realism a small favor and add to it, by flying your planes controlling them with a real Yoke. Your hands and feet need to ‘feel’ the plane. I can’t recommend it enough to upgrade your experience to a full immersion level. Well, the full immersion will be reached, after they add our VR bodies into cockpit. Not seeing your hands on the yoke in the plane, is quite an immersion breaker, but until then, we gotta go full immersion.
Thank you, BoxDominator
I have been trying to get a better control system, but it seems the whole world wants similar kit at the moment (because of the massive MSFS launch) and I can’t get it! But thanks for your tip, I will look into it.
Mark
What settings do you use for your Quest? I have spent hours meanwhile on getting the most out of it, but with Link I always end up with framerates going up and down between 24 and 36fps. Then I switched to Virtual Desktop and now it’s a bit more stable, but still between 27 and 36, but mostly around 30fps.
First I worked on the 2D settings. I have a 4K laptop and, to my surprise, it’s best with MSFS set to that res for 2D and VR. In fact, it really improves VR quality. 2D continued: Vsync off, Render scaling 80 (frame rate gets worse if lowered!), Anti-aliasing TAA (important for quality of 2D and VR), Terrain L.O.D 70-100, Cockpit refresh Med or low. I also make sure no other windows apps are running, and I use an Alienware app called Gamefast that includes a feature to shut down unneeded services while playing. I also use Dell Alienware’s Control Centre to set up overclocking and full speed cooling. That is the start. It gets me 44fps sitting on the runway in 2D at EGLC with the Orbyx London Landmarks and Orbyx EGLC sceneries on. No doubt you have your own frame rate test setup conditions.
Now, for VR, the main ones that work for me are Render scaling 80, Anti-aliasing TAA, Terrain LOD 60. I have a file with all the detail but I think these are the key ones.
I don’t know what VR frame rate I get. I can measure the 2D frame rate, and used it in the above, but not 3D. Actually, I don’t care much for frame rates. I’ve seen posts where people are really angry that they are stuck with 24fps in VR, furious, talking about refunds, saying it’s “unplayable”, “unflyable”. I suspect I’m getting about that but what matters to me is the experience. I’ve flown many hours of every type of trip, plane, scenery density in VR and had immense pleasure. It’s just excellent. I’ve flown the Pitts Special around the London Landmarks scenery doing all sorts of wild acrobatics - brilliant, all in VR. It’s as smooth as butter except every now and then Windows lets something grab machine resources temporarily and I suffer. In the end, what matters is the quality of the experience, the flight, and the view. Frame rates are seen by some as not just a proxy for this Quality of Experience, fps becomes the desired end in itself for them. They talk obsessively about framerates, being envious one minute and next bragging, in equal measure, as if this is what it’s all about. They hardly ever talk of the experience. This, to me, is folly. Frame rates help the tuning process, like a piano tuner uses tuning forks. But in the end, the piano tuner will play the piano and smile if it’s good.
Sorry for ranting a bit, it’s a bit of a pet topic of mine
I fully agree. Framerate is hard number, but how one experiences it is very subjective. Some people find the Quest 1 a bad headset as it’s only 72 Hz, but many others have no issue at all with that. (me included) Of course the more fps the smoother the experience, but when I turn off the fps counter I have no idea how many fps it produces, I can only confirm that it’s smooth. My most important requirement is that it’s as sharp as possible (I want at least be able to read the numbers on the G1000 from a normal seating position) and the best graphical fidelity with regards to clouds and reflections as they contribute to the immersion. So my render scaling is 100 and clouds and reflections are on High. Now I only have some microstutters, but I think that’s inevitable and even people with the most high end HMD and PC have it. Sometimes I spent hours on changing settings in order to get a couple of extra fps out of it, but mostly I end up with what I started with and I’m happy with it. But for me it’s more to find out what component in the chain is the bottleneck. Is it my CPU, GPU, Link or Virtual Desktop or my Quest 1? I only hope that future improvements by Asobo will give some massive gains in performance. Like DX12 support, because now my CPU and GPU are heavily underutilized when I’m in VR. But I must say that FS2020 in VR is the best thing ever! It’s by far the most immersive VR experience I have ever had and VR adds so much more to flight sims. It’s really addicitive and since I have it I haven’t nearly played any other VR game. By the way ‘real’ MSFS fans know that high framerates are not needed to have a good time. Look at the first editions, where it was not about frames per second, but more like seconds per frame. 
You analogy with the piano nails it.
Same here: 4 decades of flight simming, always trying to achieve full immersion. I even built my own simulator: hanskrohn.com
But nothing comes even close to the experience of FS2020 in VR!
I hope I’ll live another 40 years to see how VR and haptic FB controllers will evolve…
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.