Finally got time to try out VR.
TLDR: I’ve put what may be useful tips or info as bullet points so you don’t have to read the while thing. Some of the tips will be repeated in threads already so sorry if you’ve heard these things before! My opinions at least may be useful to some people.
Starting Point:
FS Premium Deluxe installed and tested at with a flight from London City airport, with Orbx Lonodn Landmarks and Orbx London City airport addons. I thought I’d start in a built up city and just see how bad the performance would be. My Titan is a Maxwell series so now quite old and equivalent to a 1070 or maybe a 1070ti, CPU is a 5820K and 32GB of reasonably fast RAM.
Switching to VR mode immediately brings up the main menu in VR and each time it starts, it asks you to recentre your view, and won’t let you do anything else until you do and you can’t rencentre unless you’ve bound a key to the command.
So…
- Before you start, while in monitor mode go to Option>Controls and under Camera you’ll find ‘VR – Camera Reset’, assign a keyboard or controller button to it.
If you start the sim, then start the Oculus app/ out on the headset, the ‘Enter/Exit VR Mode option may be missing from the main menu. If so, just go into General Options and enter VR from there.
I had the black overlay issue described elsewhere (right-side periphery blocked and a masking circle to the centre, top-right.
Resetting position was incorrect, to move nearer the panel, you’d expect to have to move backwards, rest camera, then return to your position, but this was reversed, you had to move forwards, reset, then return.
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Open Oculus Debug Tool and turned ‘Use FOV Stencil’ to off. This fixed the circle but right-side peripheral vision was will blocked.
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Installed latest beta version of the Oculus app and the peripheral vision was fixed. This may have also been a fix for the circle as the debug tool resets stencil to Auto after every PC restart, but I’ve not had to set it back to Off.
The beta also fixed the position reset issue.
Performance:
There are separate graphics setting in FS for monitor and VR so you set each independently. FS had defaulted my settings to low and Render Scaling to 80% (I think).
Took off in London for a short flight around the city.
If you’re used to DCS and some other sims, you’re probably going to be disappointed with FS unless you have a 2080 upwards for the Rift-S headset. It’s a monster.
Having said that I was expecting it to be unplayable on my machine after previously playing FSX and P3D in VR. I was relieved that FS2020 for me, on my old machine was playable.
I was getting around 20-22 FPS in the city and 25-27 further out. With ASW this is an ok experience imo. There are lots of stutters though and the aircraft is jittery when you move your head. Outside scenery, (between stutters) was smooth.
- Using Oculus Tray Tool, set ASW to 30 Hz reduce the stutters for me by quite a lot. Unfortunately you can’t create a game profile in OTT for the Microsoft Store version of FS as it has protection that prevents access but the Steam version apparently should allow this. So for the MS Store version, just leave OTT open without a profile selected and ASW set to 30.
Jittery cockpit is the remaining issue which you may or may not find a big deal.
Other issue is world-scale which seems too small to me… by maybe 25-35%.
- In the VR graphics options, all of the settings seem to me to make only small differences in frame rate but adjusting the Render Scaling makes a huge difference. At 50% for the Rift-S on my PC, everything is smooth and almost no stutters. Instruments are just about readable with some needing you to lean in but the outside scenery isn’t great at this setting. Moving it back towards 80% is probably as far as I’d go before it becomes really unpleasant.
This gives me hope though that a GPU upgrade will make a big difference for me. I think you really want scaling to be around the 150% mark or about for nice clarity in the Rift-S.
Overall, I’m relieved that this looks like it’s going to be ok once the remaining issues are sorted out and frame rates are likely to be good once I upgrade to maybe a 3070 or above and probably more up to date CPU.