Bring charts / Youtube into the Virtual cockpit (using Oculus)
If you use an Oculus Rift S or Quest 2 with Link/Airlink, you can bring other windows in with you with a built in feature of the Oculus software.
Make sure your desktop is clear of extraneous running apps.
Start whatever windows you want to bring in to the sim (ie. open saved charts with Adobe Acrobat or use SkyVector in a browser, open YouTube in a browser, etc).
Once in your flight and in VR, click the Oculus menu button on the right Touch controller to bring up the Oculus menu.
From the toobar at the bottom, scroll all the way right until you see a plus button (it may be hidden under the edge), click that and you will be prompted for which window you want to bring in.
Use the right Touch controller grip button to grab it and the joystick to move / resize the window to get it where you want it.
Click the little pin icon on the bottom right of the window, then press the menu button again to get rid of the rest of the menu leaving just the window you wanted.
You can manipulate that window using the mouse if you Alt-Tab to it, then Alt-Tab back to use the mouse in the sim again. If this doesn’t work, you probably have other windows open on your desktop that you are unknowingly alt-tabbing to without knowing it. That’s why it’s best to close everything else first.
I use this with SkyVector all the time for charts in the cockpit. You can even open approach plates from the SkyVector site although there’s a bit of a trick to it. Either you open all the charts you want before you launch the sim and pin the window (easy but less flexible) or when you’ve alt-tabbed to make the browser the active window you can click on an airport which brings up a list of plates associated with that airport. Normally you could right-click on them and open them in a new tab but right click doesn’t work that way from within the sim (it just zooms the view). So what you can do is left click the PDF icon and drag it up to the browser tab section and drop it there and it should open as a new tab. Very handy when flying IFR and you aren’t sure what approach will be assigned.
One further remark to this: Only newer “App-Style” programs are listed here but under “All apps” you can find “Classic desktop application”. If the app you want does not show up there, just add a shortcut to it in the Start-Menu (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs).
The best thing I did for VR in MSFS was too buy OVR Toolkit; programs, Windows desktop etc all bound to key presses on my USB Numpad for easy execution. Couldn’t fly without it now!
Thanks a lot, 2 and 3 were completely new to me, and I’m also an “obsessive tweaker”! And 1,4 have steps that are new to me (NVIDIA profile inspector tweaks, MSI Util priority change) that may be important. The rest was already taken care of. I’m not not sure the new details will help, but they certainly can, and also every little bit helps in reducing stutters and improving performance, so they can have a cumulative effect.
Good stuff for sure. What video card are you using? I found that with the G2 and RTX 3090, I use OXR at 70 and Render MSFS at 100. I’ve tried the 200 and 50 but it actually stutters for me with no real gain in distance clarity.
Also. RTX 3090 doesn’t support/allow Resized BAR via Nvidia inspector from what I read in guru etc. I downloaded inspector myself but didn’t see a drop down for the 0x you mentioned.
Kill the cliffhouse is a super tip. Thanks
I disabled HPET for several test flights (Hawk T1 at Marham) and didn’t see/notice an fps difference.
Still messing with the other tips. Again, thanks so much, these are incredibly well thought out.
Don’t run OpenXR, just use the native WMR for your HP G2. I saw this recommendation in a thread on AVSIM and gave it a try. This change made a significant improvement in smoothness during VR flight. I was able to actually enjoy flying with increased LOD settings. There was still some stutter, but, much less.
Resizable bar (if your bios’s and driver support it) is enabled by the game profiles in the NVidia driver (all compatible cards). It’s a hidden setting though…i.e. NCP doesn’t have a setting for it. In profile inspector, there are many “unknown” settings. The three I mentioned are for enabling resizable bar.
To see all the unknown 0x00… settings, you have to click the little magnifying glass icon at the top of the profile inspector window. Then you can see and change all the “unknown” settings for each game profile (below all the known settings).
Disabling HPET for me seems to help with judders sometimes…not FPS.
What do you mean? We are always running OpenXR with G2 - either SteamVR version (bad) or WMR version (better). Do you mean not to run a Custom Render Scale in WMR OpenXR?
I tested your settings, implemented everything. It’s hard to see if there are any differences. I still have some irregular microstutters, that annoy me very much, there’s a glitch every few seconds, especially if I look to the side and watch the terrain go by. Not very noticeable when looking forward. Between the microstutters it’s very fluid. I use OXR70/TAA100 with MR. Settings mostly medium with high or ultra clouds, LOD 100. I did a CapFrameX capture in PA28 around LOWI Innsbruck, which is a relatively dense scenery. Are these results normal?
What’s weird is I cap the framerate to 32 in Nvidia Control Panel for Microsoft Flight SImulator program (that I had to add as it didn’t see it for some reason) but CapFrameX shows 99% of 32.2 and Max at 49.9, which is strange, as if it’s not capping the FPS.
FPS graph also shows framerates much higher than 32 very often. I think that when it goes below 22.5 FPS (MR threshold) is when I see microstutters… Also one idea that I just had from looking at this graph is that a lot of FPS are floating around 30, which is the second MR threshold. Maybe I need to load it more so it never reaches that and doesn’t switch back and forth on the 22.5/30FPS MR modes? Or cap the frames around the average 28FPS?
Is it possible that NCP does not cap the rates, or doesn’t recognize the MSFS so not applying the profile? This may be a big thing if it doesn’t. I assumed it worked. I will need to test with global settings set to the same. Any ideas?
I tried capping frame rates with NCP for the first time yesterday and it worked (496.49 driver), but I only set them in the global NCP profile. However, I figured I’ll have to exit and restart MSFS to make the NCP changes work.
The results when capping to 30 FPS were smoother than without, where I get roughly 30…45 FPS. But especially when looking out of the side windows / downwards it is by far not as smooth as with MR on.
On the other hand, when using MR and flying low, I’m seeing frequent stutters. Usually with MR I’m at 30FPS but during the stutters, FPS drop to 22.5 or switch between those two settings. Interestingly, these stutters coincide with Windows network usage going up, even if it is less than 10Mbit/s. At the same time, at least one of my CPU cores sees a small spike. The stutters pretty much cease when flying higher and what’s even more interesting, they are not apparent to me when using MR off either with or without NCP capping.
It kinds runs itself It doesn’t have to be open, it’s settings are always there. The only option to not use it in WMR is uninstall it. Or disable manual resolution settings and let it decide (which is supposedly sets it automatically depending on GPU memory size, and for my 3080 it should be 70% anyway). But its “Run OpenXR” checkbox and MR “Always ON” are handy.
Ah, so that’s what I’m thinking - I suspect Program-specific profile doesn’t pick MSFS up on my PC! This is bad because it means that Resize Bar tweak also won’t work as it’s specific to profile, and if profile doesn’t run automatically - it’s tweaks won’t work. This would also mean that all other NCP tweaks I set (power to max performance, etc.) also do not apply. I will try setting a global profile. Not ideal as it affects everything else too. I wish there was a way to force a profile to run, or run it manually…
Exactly! Same here. One possibility is that stutters happen when MR switches from 22.5FPS mode to 30FPS mode or back. 30FPS or higher is 30%+ of my frames, so it is plausible. It mostly hovers around 30FPS, so it means it switches MR modes quite often. Maybe that’s the stutters I see when it happens? Maybe it would be a good idea to limit to 28FPS or so, instead. So it won’t ever have to switch to 30FPS MR because it can’t maintain in anyway on any current hardware. I’ll test it for my PC.
Unfortunately OXR doesn’t allow manually specifying or limiting the MR framerate, so the only option I see under these circumstances would be to enable MR and in addition use NCP to cap the framerate to 22.5 or at least less than 30 FPS (thereby forcing OXR MR to revert to 22.5) and see if that prevents the annoying MR switching stutters. Unless you constantly achieve >22.5 FPS … dreaming …
If you try it, please report back if this worked out for you!
That’s my understanding as well: once set, the OpenXR app does not need to be fired up to use the WMR.
Myself, I have the OpenXR custom render scale set to 150, VR render scale in game at 100, no “recent runtime” and MR disabled in OpenXR. This combination works best for me (so far) with an RTX 3070, i7-10700 and 32 gb of ram at 3600.
Yes, I’m also not using the latest preview (1.08) because it gives me somewhat lower frame rates and - what’s more annoying - MSFS will freeze when trying to switch back and forth between VR and 2D more than once.
On 3070 and G2? OXR 150/TAA100? How is that possible? Most I can do on 3080 is 80/100 (MR) and folks on 3090 are struggling with 100/100. 150/100 seems impossible… If you are getting 150/100 you know something we all don’t, so please share your settings and tweaks
Ah, that calls for a TIP OF THE DAY:
use prop mods from flightstim.to, or better yet, make your own texture replacement for your favored planes. I actually created a texture for PA28 with solid and almost transparent disk. You can’t see the prop in real life anyway in flight, visible prop blades are only there on videos, but IRL there’s just a vague suggestion of a disk. And with that mode there is absolutely no motion artifacts on the prop. Looks realistic too. Artifacts can still happen on wing edges etc. but those are are not as annoying and frequent as the default props, which are horrible. But the solid prop texture solves it perfectly. The texture usually has some “fast” and “back” or “b” in the filename, and it only affects a prop at full speed, so startup, static prop and slowly spinning prop is not affected and still looks the same.
Your observations mirror mine exactly. I’ve got an RTX3080 running with a slightly lesser CPU (5600X) but I get pretty much identical performance averaging around 28FPS. OXR at 70% TAA with 100% sim render scale, medium settings elsewhere. I sometimes put clouds up to high or even ultra if I think I can get away with it but they’re one of the biggest FPS hitters as far as I can see.
I don’t get how some people are claiming to run the sim in VR with the G2 with sittings on high and ultra and are claiming to get around 40FPS with a 3080. I understand how 3090 owners can scape a few more FPS together with their GPU. All that extra VRAM helps. There’s so many wildly different experiences with VR.
Does this win back a few more FPS then? The Quest 2 has similar thing which you can disable and it means loading into VR was a bit faster and easier ( I always found it a messy business with the Quest which is one of the reasons I got rid of it) but I don’t think it actually improved performance once you were in the cockpit.
It doesn’t have to be open, it’s settings are always there. The only option to not use it in WMR is uninstall it. Or disable manual resolution settings and let it decide (which is supposedly sets it automatically depending on GPU memory size, and for my 3080 it should be 70% anyway). But its “Run OpenXR” checkbox and MR “Always ON” are handy.