Using the following hardware:
- i7-6700K @4ghz (no overclocking)
- RTX 3800 (no overclocking)
- 32 GB RAM
- SSD
- Oculus Quest 2
Starting up VR was a breeze, I didn’t have to do anything besides linking my Quest 2 via PC link and enabling VR mode in MSFS.
My first impression was horrible, the game was one big stutter fest, with a lot of warping. The scene looked like the ground was lava and the air above it was shimmering from the heat. There also was an ugly black thing floating in the air. I was partially expecting this because I normally run everything at ultra in 4k, so I already knew I had to lower my settings.
Entering the settings screen was a shock though, everything was already at low. That also explained why a lot of things didn’t look that pretty anymore. I started reading the forum, updating my drivers, tweaking resolutions and enabling the Oculus beta. The last step luckily fixed the black floating thing, but I didn’t get any performance gains no matter how low I set my resolution and settings.
I then tried to just raise my settings, I set the resolution to 100, my Oculus link to 90hz at the recommended resolution, a lot of settings to high (including windshield effects and light shafts) and well, the view was quite amazing. Graphically it was actually beyond what I was expecting except for the horrible wobbling of the screen. Performance wise not much had changed from ultra low to high settings though.
It took some time, but eventually I tried to just disable Asynchronous Spacewarp using the Oculus Debug Tool (there is probably a setting for this somewhere in the Oculus settings menus also). This made a huge difference for me, the wobbling and shimmering disappeared completely and the screen was razor sharp, WOW! Looking around felt quite smooth, but I do get a lot of stuttering when turning my airplane on the tarmac (strange, because looking another way doesn’t cause any stuttering). Once in the air things got a lot better, things were almost completely smooth after a while, except when looking at the instrument panel.
The details and the overal feeling really amazed me, things actually looked real and it performed quite well, I could easily read most instruments without leaning in. Didn’t expect it to be this good. Then I started to play around, set the time to dusk, WOW, all those lights everywhere. Decided to add some road traffic as the highways were deserted, really cool. Then I chose the rain preset, no rain on the windshield, bummer. Raising the windshield effects to high solved that though, I also set the light shafts to high to be able to see my landing light in the clouds.
Flying through the clouds in the rain while it was dark, it was really amazing. This has to be my number one VR experience in a sim, it just felt real. The lights distorted by the drops of rain on the windshield, seeing those runway lights all warped up while landing, flying through a thick cloud during final with my landing light peering through, hearing the rain on the aircraft hull… The future is here!
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