MSFS is my first VR experience, so when I started two months ago I thought I could never ever go back to pancake mode. My jaw was to the floor.
Now however, it’s starting to lose its luster. I am using a G2 with TAA100 / OXR100, so my VR picture quality is probably the best you can achieve at this time, and I get decent performance with a 3080 and 10700k.
That being said, 2D picture quality looks so dang good in comparison. I think it’s the post processing, which is severely lacking in VR. The colours in VR are dull and washed out, it takes away SO much from the experience. Yes, I know the colours in G2 is closer to reality compared to other HMDs, but it’s still very dull and boring.
Switched to 2D, and BOOM, vibrant colours, beautiful clouds, etc…
I’ll be mixing it up between VR and 2D for the time being. I guess depends on what I’m doing. I really hope though that MS/Asobo is able to implement better colours and post processing in VR, and better performance too. These will be game changers.
No exactly, its just the latest update has marred my VR experience… i know a lot of VR users are irritated that an “update” has caused so many issues with their experience of this sim…Oculus users are experiencing white flashes ( cause unknown) but heavy areas like London are unplayable after the update… they crammed WAY too much stuff in there and forgot about the VR users… i could fly everywhere in VR before the UK update… not now tho
To be honest 2D is over saturated and over sharpened compared to reality … but we have been conditioned by social media to like over saturated and over sharpened landscape photos so it is what it is.
More control over saturation and sharpening across the board would be a good thing.
I use the G2 also with a RTX 3080, It sure does look better on a monitor as well as preformance but flying on a monitor is boring to me
I way prefer sitting in the plane…Things will only get better for VR in the sim updates
I have a G1, ryzen 5800x and a rtx3080 and completely agree to your observations. I was intrigued at first, and i must say that the cockpit experience is super immersive, the graphics are detailed and crisp, but the outside world is overly bright, washed out and lack of details makes it hard to enjoy when you know how beautiful the sim is in 2D. I now only use VR for the occasional landing challenge, but for everything else i am back to 2D. Hope it will be better in the future and Microsoft will focus on improving VR.
Please note that the issue with Oculus Users is attributed to an update that occurred a few days ago to the beta version of the Oculus software. As most of us were suggested to use the beta version, we were all impacted by the update. The solution was to opt out of the beta software, which loads the current released version and this version fixes the issues that many of us had.
I get where you’re coming from, having enjoyed the Sim on Flatscreen for the few months prior to VR I got used to the Ultra Settings and Visual quality of the Sim. Since the VR Update however the overall immersion keeps me put in VR mode, it does get a bit frustrating to see a bleached out skyscape and then to raise my HMD to see it nice and colourful on the Monitor, but having a Reverb G1 it’s close enough to a Monitors Res for me to never go back to Pancake.
Perhaps if I had a better & Larger 4K Monitor it would be cool to switch between the two, but as is I simply cannot fly in Pancake mode any more with my current monitor, that aforementioned Immersion just wins me over every time.
Avid VR fan here and MSFS is just not doing it for me. When it works it’s amazing but between the reinstalling, tweaking, restarts etc I’m leaning on waiting for the next update and just getting on with more enjoyable things while the sim settles.
Forgetting for the moment all the technical issues and endless faffing about getting VR even working. I’ve always regarded VR as just another way to enjoy the sim. Its definitely something you appreciate more if you don’t do it all the time. I love flying using my monitor. The picture is far superior and I’ve always enjoyed flying outside the plane using the exterior view. Its such a great way to check out the scenery, graphics and appreciate the world.
VR is in its infancy in the sim and still clearly have a long way to go. On top of that VR headsets have a long way to go until they live up to peoples expectations of the medium. High res displays with rich colours and a wide angle of view are a few years off yet. Give it 5 years I reckon. Apple are probably going to change the game a bit with their headset.
For now, you simply can’t get the same image quality or fidelity inside a VR headset but for me the immersion trumps that. MSFS treads a finer line with that than other sims because at all ultra 4k it sometimes looks downright ridiculously good… but of course there’s nothing to say you have to do one or the other!
Do some VR to feel the immersion, do pancake mode to truly appreciate the visuals when sightseeing.
If they implement half of Cptlucky8’s various suggestions it will go a long way to improving the situation, but I do think it’s worth bearing in mind that we are currently at step 1 of the VR implementation… and ultimately if we are honest still relatively early days of this new wave of VR. I have every bit of faith it will improve significantly over the coming months/years both in terms of Asobo’s work on the sim and VR in general, GPU hardware and of course VR headsets themselves.
Fast forward a couple of years, hopefully we are sitting on a fully implemented DX12U with all the bells and whistles, another gen of GPUs and perhaps next gen 8k headsets with dynamic foveated rendering and ML based sparse infill for areas outside the foveal zone (which Michael Abrash suggested when combined could give as much as 20x speed up in rendering at one of his OC talks a while back!) and we’ll be wondering whether the monitors should just go in the bin!
well, its a theory, we dont know that for sure, in fact i have had white flashing problems prior to the Oculus update…theres no definitive proof. personally, i think its a mixture of things, bearing in mind that MSFS is the ONLY application that is giving me problems
i have your same opinion! i mean VR (using the HP Reverb G2) is pretty cool but somehow the graphics are way much better on 2D ( i am using a 4k monitor). For me is the pixels you see everywhere specially in the clouds ruins my experience a bit… but well that all what we have at the moment, i hope with the time we will see more optimizations!
i agree, but the level of immersion VR gives, greatly outweighs any visual fidelity i might loose compared to pancake mode… no going back to a monitor for me now, tried it last night… just not the same.
