I did some test flights in VR yesterday. i7 12700F, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3080 and M2 SSD. When VD reported 65-72 fps, the fps counter in msfs consistently reported around 36 fps, with peaks of 40, and LimitedByMainthread was for the most part in the red. This was in the wilderness in Peru. No big cities, no big airports, nothing. VRAM looked like it was fairly stable around 4 GB. With one of my ORBX airports, AI traffic off, multiplayer off, I get really choppy performance at terrain LOD 100 and object LOD 150. Yesterday I pulled the pin on getting an i9 14900KF. Will that improve things or just move the bottleneck to the 3080? Hesitant to pull the tab off the new CPU if I might just see no or very little improvement. Would trading the 3080 for a 4080 Super when that comes out be a better upgrade? Or are the benefits of the 4080 lost when running VD which has no displayport?
Iād say it doesnāt improve things so much. The difference between i7 and i9 is the number of cores and frequency. The former will not affect the āmain threadā limitation, but the latter might, although a couple of hundred MHz more will not make any noticeable difference.
In my opinion the upgrade to RTX 4xxx might make more sense because they support frame generation that will almost double your current framerate, but I would also not recommend that for the following reasons:
- Asobo might implement support for AMDās FSR 3 which enables frame generation on all GPUs including the 3080
- The 5xxx generation GPUs could come by the end of the year
- MSFS 2024 promises some improvements in multi-core usage and therefore reduce the reliance on a single thread
- Your current is near ideal for running MSFS at 1440p resolution or 1080p VR
Hope this helps 
Except FG does not work for VR (unless Iām very much mistaken but I donāt think I am).
I have had awful problems with VR Performance too but finally made somewhat of a breakthrough by following these settings in Nvidia Profile Inspector:
And a bit of these in game settings:
Also make sure you set the PC Graphics down to LOW preset and turn off the things that leaves on (light shafts and something elseās lower down after youāve set it to low. Canāt remember what now).
What headset are you using? Are you also using OpenXR Toolkit with VD? Turning on Turbo mode there seems to help. This might shed some light but itās a bit of a mixānāmatch of settings from all over the place!
I finally got to a point where 72Hz with SSW is acceptable, but itās not perfect still if Iām in a systems heavy plane in lots of cloud / weather and at a large airport near photogrammetry. Thatās kind of throwing everything at it!! More testing for me over the weekend but I think Iām close to having it smooth everywhere.
EDIT: also set your Texture Resolution on the PC side to the same as you have in VR side after you pick the low PC preset. That will save the GPU loading in different texture sets when you switch to/from VR
Thereās probably not much difference between either 12700k and 12900k, or 14700k and 14900k.
However, the question appears to be regarding 12700k to 14900k, in which case there should be a noticeable improvement in CPU related performance. Whether itās significant enough to remove the main thread bottleneck will depend on settings and circumstances.
Thatās right. I am leaning towards keeping the i9, mainly because now I can afford it. If I get a better GPU later (if I can afford that) and it necessitates a better GPU I might have blown the money on something else equally essential to some extra frames per second in msfs.
@Baracus250 I am on a Quest 2, which is good enough for me (when it is good), and I use OpenXR. Havenāt tried turbo mode. Did install Oculus Tray Tool and it did help a little.
This is what annoys me with the sim. You canāt just ābuyā a smooth experience, even if you happen to have the money. I realize that if someone wants to get a Pimax Crystal and to run everything on Ultra you just have to buy the most expensive gear on the market and hope itās enough. But running a Quest 2 (a three year old headset) on settings that are as good as it can handle should have been possible, at least after throwing some money at it, without fiddling with 273,000 settings and third party apps.
Indeed. Itās extremely annoying. And even when you think you got it good, it can degrade in the same flight, or the next flight, or the next day ā having made no changes.
Iām new to VR (4 weeks) and in that time all Iāve been doing is fiddling. Not really been able to sit back and enjoy a flight. One day maybe. Or do we have to wait for MSFS 2024?!
Same here for me for the last 2 weeks with my new Quest 3. After a LOT of fiddling Iām realizing that MSFS with VR is probably not going to be better than on my Samsung 55" Qled in 4k HDR10. Iāve ordered some corrective lenses for the Q3 that should be arriving within the next week or so that should help so Iām plodding on.
Iāll most likely never change to 2D for this. I have tried and it just breaks the immersion to a level where I canāt even land an approach that would have been easy as pie in VR. Itās like Iām looking at a plane flying instead of flying one. So Iāll take choppy laggy and less crisp VR over a monitor any day.
I am a simmer/gamer who is more than happy with last yearās game titles on last yearās hardware. That is why I was hoping I could at least get the Quest 2 / Pico 4 āmaxed outā. And that shouldnāt take the best CPU and a 4090. That last step up is freakishly expensive.
It probably just comes down to the fact that VR is not a priority for Asobo. And for the life of me I canāt understand that. Maybe for airliners flying IFR, because that is a bit like watching a plane fly. Lots of autopilot at very high altitudes with not much to see out the windows. But if Asobo took the time to optimize for the Quest series, at least that mainstream headset would work without issues making VFR flying a joy and the enthusiasts could fiddle with the pimaxes, varjos and so on.
I tried my Pico 4 with the same setup I have now before the CPU swap and it was consistently more laggy than the Quest 2. I must be running something (maybe Oculus Tray Tool) that is not helping the Pico.
What is annoying is I am sure it can do itā¦ just finding that sweet spot of settings is a massive web of interrelated combinations it makes it so time consuming to tune. Everything exponentially increases the ways you can set it up.
But a friend of mine has OLDER hardware and can run smoothly with a Q3. And I have seen mine perform well too, but then it changes (or maybe I try and squeeze a bit more out of it once I think I have it good but it makes it worse, then I canāt remember or find what I had before).
All these things, that multiply the combinations is driving me crazyā¦ you can try all the settings again with every one of these main things changed and youāre into hours of testing again for each:
- DX11 ā DX12
- AV1 ā HVEC etc
- VD alone ā + OXRTK (or just Oculus App / SteamVR)
- VD settings (both the Desktop app, and Streaming settings)
- OXRTK settings + various resolutions.
- Tray Tools (not even sure if it has an effect if using VD)
- BIOS changes (Multithreading on / off, ReBar, PBO etc)
- BIOS version (!!! - I think this is my next step to try updating to latest but I had big problems last time I tried a few months ago)
- HAGS on ā HAGS off
- Game Mode on ā or off
- MSFS Settings (in itself this would be enough combos!)
- DLLS ā TAA (and all the options within those)
- Nvidia Driver version(s). I might try the latest but am on 546.31 as I heard it was best for MSFS, newer ones only adding bloat and stuff for new games?)
- Nvidia Profile Inspector (or just the 3D Application) settings
- THEN on TOP of all that, testing various scenarios in sim. I mean, flying in group flights with lots of other aircraft close by can suddenly lose it especially with a lot of unoptimised aircraft around like the H160 and Wildcat. PG areas (some are worse than others). Heavy AI traffic + airports etc etc.
Itās frankly ridiculous. I am missing some stuff Iām sure BUT it should just work, at least better than it does out of the box.
Same for cockpit builders with multiple monitors. Both are minorities.
FG already kind of works using this trick: Get frame generation on all RTX cards MSFS 2020 (youtube.com)
But again. I do not think that is relevant to those who primarily fly in VR?
Agreed. The i7 should be close enough to the i9 (although mineās a 14700K, where the equaled the number of performance cores, but I digress) to not be a factor.
I think that upgrading the RTX isnāt a bad idea. I just traded my 3080 for a 4070 Ti super two days ago, and Iām always limited by mainthread, always, but I donāt care because itās smooth, it doesnāt stutter, and it has the detail I want.
Also, itās 4K Ultra with 300 TLOD, 200 OLOD. In other words, at some point youāre going to be really happy with what you see, and not care about limited by MainThread. I think the sim is always going to be ālimitedā by something.
I might be a bit late to the party, but a 12700k to a 14900k will certainly be an upgrade but likely more limited than you may think.
FWIW, I found pushing to DDR5 8000 was by far the best thing to improve the 1% lows with MSFS, but this is a bit more enthusiast overclocking.
Nope 
Decrease LOD mate.
Many good observations here. I did install the i9. As far as I can tell using the built-in fps counter I still get flashes of red for limited mainthread, as many have said I would, but I also believe my fps increased from about 36 to about 40 at the airport I was testing with VR active. So that is at least something. I also went back to my Pico 4 to test as that was consistently more laggy with rapid head movement than my Quest 2, and, although it might be a placebo effect, or some change Iāve made that I canāt remember, it seems to be smooth now even though on a flight I get lower fps, about 45 in the OpenXR overlay, than with the Quest 2, 60-72 in OpenXR.
I am considering the 4080 Super when that drops, if the price is lower than the 4080 as announced. I can use my 3080 to upgrade another PC along with the i7. Iād rather spend the money and be content that any stutters or lag is not because of my hardware, than to be left wondering if I could have fixed it through an upgrade.
This is now my only hobby, and as with other hobbies I have gone through I want to do it properly and not half-baked if I can afford it. I am comparing it to people who restore cars or motorcycles (or even just rides a motorcycle unless it is your only form of transportation) play golf, go skydiving, rock climbing, play ice hockey or any other pastime that is more or less heavily dependent on the gear you use. I donāt think youād get through very many months of any of those for the price of an i9 and a 4080 super. Donāt prove me wrong, I need this
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Then you definitely want to look into this:
Dream sim pit
Iāve been drooling over this since I saw it lol 
Very interested in the performance of the 4070 til super. If thatāll do for my purposes then I will consider it over the 4080 super to save some money.