Today I had the afternoon free and decided it was time to test the sim after the update.
For the first time since I’ve had it, the VR was just terrible - you can’t wish this kind of awful experience on anyone. I’d left my settings as after SU5 fix 18.50, when I abandoned it to wait for better updates and fixes. I used Quest 2 rather than my Index, and Air Link. fpsVR showed my GPU at 99% - well, have a look for yourself - the sim was literally jammed solid and unable to do much at all - though the guy was pushing me back, I couldn’t look around, I couldn’t activate anything in the cockpit (no switches working) etc etc:
It was the worst I have ever had in any sim - with or without VR.
Now, the mantra has always been “start with everything on the lowest, and work your way up”, but I have never had to do that in any sim before - I decided to do it now, and boy am I glad I did!
Yes, it took a few hours - but the result is now I can enjoy the sim in VR again, with very good settings for a nice experience, even though I currently still have many options on “low” or “off”. I’ll see what I can get away with enabling later, but for now, it’s better than it’s been since after SU4.
I haven’t bothered tweaking any config files as yet, either, I only worked with what is within the in-sim settings. I did check that the user options file wasn’t still read-only, after having tweaked it to improve the LOD pop-in we had - this must have been replaced in the update, because it wasn’t read only and the settings had been “zeroed” as I had set them in the sim.
I set everything to LOW or OFF - and I mean everything. This is what it looked like:
YUK!
Funnily enough - with everything off and low, the flight physics and controller response were excellent. I actually flew around for a while, with just a blurry mess around me! I really enjoyed that, but of course, it couldn’t stay like that. Headaches and nausea would surely follow. 
Anyway, as is the way, I changed just one thing at a time, just one step at a time, and took screenshots (which I renamed after each test flight to show what the settings had been) and scribbled down what I had changed and what the effect was in-sim. Took up half a notebook.
Anyway, you don’t need my life story - end result, it looks great again, and I can fly happy for the time being (until the next fine mess they get us into). The only thing I had to compromise on was the texture quality/size. In order to run at 150% render scale, with high object detail and TAA on, which is vital for vastly reducing the “sparklies” I had to reduce the texures to medium. On High, it was just a bit too much stutter, though it wasn’t that bad - I can imagine with something more complicated than the Cub I was testing in, it would only get worse.
So there ya go - reset and start from scratch. Make sure you have a couple of hours at least free, and try and enjoy it. Seriously, I rarely do this because I think it will be a chore - but it was actually quite fun, always flying a circuit at LGTL, Kasteli, to test the settings. Taking screenshots in the same place every time.
Another thing before I sign off - I noticed that the stutters/pausing that I have mentioned in other posts always happen at exactly the same locations in a flight. It isn’t “been flying for ‘n’ minutes = stutter/pause for a while”, it was “fly over x/y grid reference (maybe long/lat?) and it stutters/pauses”. If I avoided the place where the stutters had previously occurred, it didn’t happen. That I find very interesting.
This is my end result:
I don’t know the framerates, as fpsVR stopped displaying, but it was nice and smooth from start-up to landing.
