Microsoft Flight Simulator VR is... Terrible? 

This game has some pretty strange performance situations. I have noticed that almost everyone with a 3090 experiences worst performance that those with lower end hardware. I expect this is a driver thing which will hopefully update. other things that I have noticed is random windows settings make large differences in this game as well as occulus headsets not performing well with the wrong settings. This game is capable of performing at 60 fps on my vega 64 and ryzen 2600 with 16 gb of ram. A lot of people have managed to get the game running well, however this has been known to have been extremely finicky. I mean some people are having to go into registry files while others are able to do things as simple as disabling game mode in the windows settings. Not to mention the TXAA in this game i kid you not will drop you 15-20 fps from FXAA with a very small drop in quality.

It's about time that we get a good DLSS implementation in VR sims.

I have no performance issues (8700k, rtx 3070, rift s) 32 fps over big cities with clouds (ultra clouds) that is amazing compared my x-plane experience, to be honest I was afraid about the performance but I am very positive surprised. I very welcome VR in FS2020 and its only in the beginning. Also some correct mentioned already check your settings, VR Flight Sim Guy gave some nice tips .Merry Christmas everyone.

Anyone else noticing what looks like random spikes in there scenery whilst flying since updating Ms2020?? They slowly disappear into the ground once you fly closer to them.

Thanks for the detailed review X-Check. The quality of your reviews will push Asobo to continue working on the VR side of FS2020. Pretty sure that in few weeks/months from now, this will be an amazing experience. Also, I agree 100% with what you said about DCS and the switch clicking madness of keeping our head straight. I tried DCS only twice in VR, but I noticed this on the spot ... which was a HUGE problem for me while trying to go thru many switches in complete complex applications.

My experience is pretty good. I do see room for improvement, obviously, but MSFS is what it is because it uses all sorts of cutting edge tech (despite being only DX11 for now). The thing about VR is that you more or less have to render everything twice, so you're always going to get an FPS hit. That said, Asobo will probably manage to optimize things a bit more, but I'm not expecting miracles. MSFS just really has a lot going on onscreen and offscreen as well, and apparently it wasn't really made for VR. So I'm kindof surprised that they managed to make it work at all, albeit in a sometimes kind of clunky way (I have to recenter my VR cockpit cam every time I go back to VR, for instance). Compared to X-plane VR, I do get a slightly lower FPS, but with much more happening on screen. There are thousands of trees and buildings and grass and whatnot, and if something comparable would have to be rendered in X-plane, it would turn into a slideshow for sure! Here are a few things you can do to improve performance: 1: latest drivers for everything (mainly GPU) 2: Have nothing else running in the background that has no reason to be there. The sys tray should be as empty as possible. Mine just has an audio diver and something for my RGB keyboard, and that's it! Check in your taskbar to see if there's anything else taking up too much memory or processor time, and if there is, get rid of it! 3. Mess around with render scaling in the VR section of MSFS. Setting 80 should give a pretty smooth experience (on a Rift S at least) without compromising the visual quality too much.. 70 is almost acceptable as well. 4. To prevent motion sickness, make a weather preset which has NO WIND of any kind, nor turbulence. All this wobbling around is what's going to make you sick like a dog! 5. It helps to pick a relatively simple plane. The Piper Cub gave me excellent frame rates, as well as the Robin. Even the Carenado Mooney performs fine. Planes with more advanced systems and glass cockpits are going to be more demanding on your system and reduce FPS 6. Tinker around with the VR Graphics settings in MSFS. Start with really low settings, and then reintroduce more stuff until you find a balance that works for you. 7. Make sure that Gaming mode in Windows is OFF. Also make sure that hardware Accelerated Scheduling in Windows Graphics settings is OFF. These settings are known to potentially really compromise your performance.

Just to add, I didn't experience any ill effects flying in vr, like was mentioned in the video

You need to lower your resolution to get good fps. I have a 6700K and 1080gtx and get smooth fps on medium and high settings when using my original Oculus Rift. Why? Because my resolution is at 80%. Also, as long as you can turn your head without judder, you do not need to have 90fps, especially with ASW turned on. And anyway, VR is blurry by default. It's part and parcel of where today's tech level is. It is not the same as using a 4K screen. My first impression, especially given my lower specs (compared to new PCs), is that VR is amazing so long as your expectations are reasonable.

Sim is just past the 4 month mark since release and VR will take some time since it only launched yesterday so they'll obviously be aware.

I played it myself, and its it's just amazing.

I have a basic Shadow PC with a GTX1080 and I love it. Yes it's jittery at times but the experience of flying anywhere in VR really makes up for it. I'm sure it will improve but for now it's a fantastic Christmas present!

Guys, I am an xplane fun but I love msfs 2020 also! I tried with oculus Rift S and I was astounded from the living experience that I was experiencing. On my oculus software also it gives me some kind of a net layer that makes it kind of blurry, I don’t know why Grate video !

This is a bug in the nvidia drivers on the new 3000 series cards. Not msfs2020 www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/402768/valve-index-missing-dropped-frames-since-nvidia-d/ it's affecting all headsets. Read the post and upvote as not everyone is aware.

I couldn't get it to run at all. As soon as I switch to vr (and I've adjusted my settings) the game just got stuck at 1fps and in the headset it was a constant black screen and nothing would move or work till I switch back to desktop when it instantly goes up to 30fps.

You can lock the mouse by pressing the center scroll wheel down on the button your using. This will keep the button from moving off.

Have you followed the guide for installing OpenXR? Maybe you can save performance here if you didn't setup it correctly

I’m running an intel I9-10900K + 3080 + HP G2 and I almost thru up after 5 minutes. I got my G2 a day before Msfs VR released. I spent a few hours setting up DCS. Went from 11 FPS to 60 FPS with lots of things turned Down. I think Microsoft needs to really work on their VR drivers. I miss my Oculus rift S for the drivers, but I can’t go back after experiencing the resolution on the G2.

Have you tried disabling ASW? I can handle ~30-40fps in VR flight sims like you, and so disabling ASW has eliminated all the weirdness, making it much more enjoyable to play. You can force ASW off in the Oculus debug tool.

Has Direct12 been release with the VR update? I'm asking because when I updated MSFS today in Steam, I saw a Vulkan API logo for a second before it vanished. The same thing happened in the X-Plane 11 11.50 BETA.

Great video I thought I was doing something wrong as I too have a rtx 3090fe 64Gb of ram i9 10900k cpu and I've tried getting it smooth but no matter what I be lucky to get over 30fps flying out of Heathrow let us know if you sort it out thanks

Great video, strangely enough I didn't have the same experience. I played for about 3 hours last night, in all fairness about one and a half of those hours were spent tweaking the settings because I wanted to run the game on ultra settings and MSFS20 clearly had different ideas. However, once I cleared up the constant crashing and freezing apparently due to high settings, I spent the final hour and a half flying over the dreaded frame eater known as NYC at night. Again, not the smoothest experience I've had first time playing a game in VR but I didn't get sick or notice any major issues when I got it to actually stop crashing. While it was crashing though I did notice that it would stop for 1 to 3 seconds and the screen would turn black then return, not sure if they did that on purpose. I'm going to give it another go tonight and hope that no new issues occur. **I may not have the tool you are using via Oculus though. My specs are below in case anyone wondered. RTX-3090 (manually overclocked) i7-97K 32gb RAM After consecutive crashing on ultra, I tuned the settings mostly high (buildings, trees, grass, clouds, waves) with just about everything else on low

Hello captain how are you so what’s the best bild for MFS and for VR ? Thanx a lot 😇

I9 9900, 2080 Super and Quest link - getting stable 38fps flying over New York with most VR settings set to high. I was and still am amazed how well it runs in VR.

Hey X-check! Use the oculus tray tool and use ASW mode at 18hz. I am running 9900k 1080ti and I can almost run max graphics settings on rift s and it’s a great experience ! Hope it helps as much as it did me :)

Will the VR work on my pc? i7-10700KF CPU @ 3.80GHz 3.79 GHz with 32 Gig ram and RTX 3070 ?

Which VR headset is the best for a reasonable price?

You can turn of ASW in the oculus config tool thingy (I forgot the name there is a dev tool -> looked it up.. Oculus Debug Tool) ... Don't know if that works for you... I was so disappointed with the current state of VR that I didn't even get to 10 minutes.. I was totally annoyed that it didn't center right. And I couldn't get it to center right (and if it's not right my inner ear thingy (your balance sensor so to speak) will start to object like it did with you).. k maybe it was a bit more then 10 min (just tinkering with settings) but I never actually got it to a point that I wanted to fly with it... But I just know you can turn off ASW. And I thought it might help... My guess is you just end up with a really choppy framerate... I'm with you on the "I don't need the touch controllers".. I actually don't even want to use them in a flight sim... a lot of how I play is with a Hotas and the stupid things always get in the way drop off the desk when not using them... I love not having to use them... But Ima do what you did.. Just forget VR launched until it's better.

If you are running Flight Simulator 2020 from the XBox Game Pass, how do you use the quest 2 to run in VR mode? When I try it it it says no headset (VR) detected... help 😊

What is the best VR-Setup for playing Msfs 2020?

Out of curiosity, if you turn down the graphics details far enough, combined with scaling, do you eventually get enough performance for these problems to go away? If so I'm curious to see how the sim looks at that point :)

We only can use a mouse? How can you fly with a mouse? My Thrustmaster HOTAS controller wouldn't work with this?

Does anyone else find it hard to read the numbers on the gauges / instruments in VR. Whilst I love the immersion, I find it really trciky to read small numbers on the instruments, it seems like the resolution is not enough in my Dell Visor WMR headset?

I bought this on Monday and started installing on Wednesday. It’s still installing! I bought it for the VR and was hoping it would work. Thank you for the heads up

Performance for me hasn't really been an issue. My specs are a core core i5-9600k OC and watercooled, 16GB DRR4-3200MHz RAM, and an RTX 3070. My problems come with oculus link being SUPER buggy, which I experience pretty much everywhere. I am going to be switching to the Reverb G2, whenever that comes at least, and hopefully that'll be better. The warped frames seemed to be more of an oculus link problem than anything. Whenever I get those, I simply unplug my headset, disabling link, and plug it back it. This fixes the issue, so I'm skeptical that oculus link needs some work for games or sims like this... UPDATE: I got my HP Reverb G2 in today and tested it in MSFS. It ran very smoothly, and I was even streaming it on discord, which will usually tank performance. Seems to me that the bad VR is just an Oculus problem...

Hey quick question, how are you recording your VR view? is there something OBS can do?

Screen Stretches While In VR, if I take of my headset and look at my screen while moving my headset i see what I'm supposed to see in my headset, but when I put my headset on and move my head everything follows my head movements! I've been trying to figure this out for 2 days now! Everything is up to date, seems to be a problem with steamvr and FS2020 but can’t figure it out. and my Win10 version is 20H2

Hi! I'm just wondering if you are running the Oculus Software Public Beta? From what I understand, if it's not the case, you're not having full openXR support for your Oculus headset. I have a Quest 1, and unfortunatelly, Link is not supported for Quest 1 in public beta, so I'm not having a good experience either. By default I think your frame rate is just caped to half the frequency of your headset (half of 80hz, 40fps), I experience the same (72hz of Quest 1 gives me 36 fps, from lowest to high settings) Maybe running the Beta software from Oculus, thus improving/enabling OpenXR support fixes it.

I loved it once I got rid of the black box bug.

3090 and an o+...feels fine to me. Dcs mfd/ddi/screens what have you are miles easier to read and way more clear, but this feels a good start..reverb coming Monday so will see how much clear it is

Im using the rift S and its really buggy im not sure if Im missing anything, I've downloaded all of the updates etc.

There are a 64 G and 256 G quest 2 VR. Do I need the larger storage if I only using it for this sim only?

The ASW part is messy because its role IS to have smooth movement while at 40FPS, if your game runs at 70, ASW will force it to 40 and then drop 1/2 frames, which is normal. Alyx is a fully VR game optimized to run at 80 FPS, ASW has nothing to do here since the game runs at the expected 80FPS most of the time. With your current graphical settings, it seems your game doesn't reach the 40 FPS required for ASW to work properly, it is at 35 FPS inside your cockpit, therefore ASW is lost and cannot reproject correctly, hence the multiple artefacts you got. Try to at least have your framerate at 40FPS, or you can may be try Oculus Tray Tool which allows you to force ASW to run at lower FPS than 40. (or 45 if your max is 90)

Same issue for me. Oculus quest 2 via link, 3090 fe, i9 9900k, 32gb 3600 ram. 😢

Since you have a decent system and Rift S, just lock the sim via OTT to 18 or 30fps, and with ASW it will be 80fps in the headset. It's a bit stuttery here on my system (8086k and 1080 8gb), but I can run scenery at high. The only issue is shaky headtracking with Oculus and OpenXR, not sure how to solve that.

Did you setup your steam vr settings correctly?

How I get urs to work i hav gear pc but msf is so broken it when it not teleporting me all over the place it just doesn’t work and if I wanted to refund it wouldn’t work send game hundreds of ours to download

Guys please help, I see how everyone enjoys the very with msfs, but when I’m at the cockpit I see the ruder pedals...LOL would appreciate a solution you might provide me regarding I assume the right clicks to move my view from the rudders to the actual height of the cockpit :)

I dont play it on my oculus. You cant even read things on the glass instruments. Its fun but not good (sharp) enough for me

@X-Check why don't you just switch off ASW?

I use track balls to replace mouse easy to find and wont move around

Thanks man, I really feel the same. It is a kind of alpha version experience. I think in a year it will be fine, but after 5h tweaking several settings I have a almost playable VR situation, but it does not feel very nice, I can play it 15min or so, before my eyes cannot take it anymore and my stomach neither. Half Life Alyx I can play for hours. It’s a good start, but a long long way to go. Maybe Dx12 will fix some performance problems

What are you controlling the plane with

You might want to turn settings from high to medium, I have a RTX 3080 and Intel i9 9900k, Graphic settings medium to low, texture and volumetric clouds on high, with reverb G2 on 70 render scale. Running locked at 30fps, looks great runs smooth. Can't expect much more than that when the sim runs at less than 60fps on 4k high settings on flatscreen. They did an amazing job, and the future I'm sure will bring more optimization and more fps 🤞

is this the steam version or the xbox store version? If steam, try it on the native microsoft store to see if its any better

I play on Ultra settings in VR and dont' loose any performance from vr settings. I get some bad hitching when loads come in or initial lag loading a city. However, I get 40fps in oculus on vr mode and 40fps on Ultra settings on a 3080, even in new york. So if you running current gen hardware you should be fine running this game on ultra settings in vr.

I have a RTX2060 and before the London update I was getting 40fps in cockpit and 50-60 in external. The performance is a mess.

Man..... I was so excited when vr support came out and adversely, so disappointed when I tried it. I guess it's not just me! subscribing...thanks

5900x, rtx3080. High on all, with ultra on clouds. 130 resolution, 150 on details. 40fps - quest 2

After a bit of tweaking and disabling ASW I get good performance in most scenarios, no artifacts, and no nausea. R5 3600, RTX2070 Super, 16gb RAM. I think it's a good start and will only continue to improve, hopefully with the addition of motion controller support.

Check out a couple of the VRFlightsim guys latest videos on MSFS 2020 VR he goes over some settings he's used to greatly improve the VR experience after flying the VR Beta version 50 hours. He might be helpful for you! I've not even set up my msfs 2020 yet but now that VR is out and with some of his input I'll be working on mine too. Good luck!

When I first tried it, it was awful. Then I tried settings from flight sim forums and it was pretty awesome in a small plane. I7 9700k / 2080ti.

Just did my first flight in VR with the C172 on a short night flight and I found the experience positive. I had only a couple of issues that were pretty minor. Ran smoothly and no issues controlling the plane though I could see some room for improvement to make it super fluid. I would say it's a great first step. I'm running a AMD 2600 with AMD 5700 and 16gig of RAM and the hard drive is M2 NVME 1TB. I'm using a Samsung Odessey $300.

I'm running it on and I7 GTX nVidea 1050ti 32 gig using my Gear VR via VRidge Riftcat. Rendering 60. I jump into the Pitts Special at my local Aerodrome and it gives me such a great feeling of not only immersion but the lifelike really fun aspect of flying, kicking in almost all your senses. Of course over time it will become better but by then I'll probably shell out the money to get an upgraded system of course,to experience it more fully. I'm a real world glider and powered aircraft pilot getting into aerobatics over the years so I know what it feels like. So yeah it does a great job at recreating that for me.

Did you try disabling the ASW? Works better for me

I don't measure performance - I'm only interested in how it feels. On an Intel CPU it ran very well for me..... BUT.... The graphics in the mid and long distance were garbage, no auto-gen whatsoever. Surprisingly, the clouds looked kind of 2d (unlike X-Plane) and they had weird triangular artefacting around the edges. On my system, in VR, X-Plane 11 Vulcan runs much better and can be run on maximum graphical settings, so I get horizon to horizon autogen. When coupled to using the VR controllers, it really improves your spatial awareness of the aircraft - plus in X-Plane 11 you can walkaround - literally anywhere! I will see if I can do some more tweaking, but for me, at this time, X-Plane-11 is a much better experience in VR!

Nice review of the VR implementation. Luckily, I do not have same "body" experience as you and I have G2, 8700K + NV1080TI. I can fly for 1 hour and feel great. I did tone down the graphical fidelity to make performance bearable. Like you, I hope that Asobo will continue optimizing this feature and also will implement VR controllers too.

I'm playing on a 2070 super with valve index and haven't had any issues. My experience has been amazing.

Actually, I experienced that the cursor remained on the switches as I moved my head around. Such as adjusting the altitude value for the AP whilst doing a turn and looking around. What I have seen on the forums is that a lot of people are having significantly different experiences and issues. Something that has been a problem with the sim from day one. I love your videos BTW xcheck.

Can someone with a Rift S PLEASE post a tutorial on how to set it up?

Did I hear right that FS2020 only runs on one thread?????????

By the way it is possible to turn ASW off using ctrl+num1 I find that ASW is nice if I am already able to run the game well but if I am not maintaining a good framerate and ASW is running all the time then it looks better off.

How low of a render scale do u think I’d have to run on to get a 40fps average on a 2060 with i7 9750 lol

Cant wait for it to be optimized, and for me to recieve my reverb g2 (very high resolution) should be awesome! Maybe they should ask valve for advise. HL Alyx runs smooth on almost every system and is very very well optimized

They really need to add that mouse behavior to flat screen mode, too!

Hey X-Check, commenting to let you know i enjoy your content😁

Does not appear to work correctly on the Oculus Rift S. If they get that fixed it will be extremely realistic. It works except there is a black circle in the view.

right ctrl+0 or right ctrl+1 with the quest/quest 2 to turn off the ASW, its worth it.

Compared to other VR games, the head tracking in FS2020 wasn't good enough for me to fully enjoy it (Rift CV1), and the scale didn't seem right as well. I'm guessing that CV1 isn't officially supported and therefore won't work as intended.

yeah i can dogfight in war thunder seemingly endlessly on my quest 2 with no side effects. that being said, i dont drop below 90fps in war thunder. thats the difference.

Hahaha exactly how I felt about running DCS in VR on my old 1070.. "no self respect here" lol

Yep can't say I've experienced any of the problems in msfs that you've mentioned in your video, I'm running on a I9 cpu 32gb of memory and a 1660 ti graphics card on medium graphic settings and using an acer Windows mixed reality headset set at 1080p, frame rates are smooth and can endure quite sometime in vr I must've spent 3 hrs this morning just flying around in the m20 ovation

I am playing with a 2060, original HTC Vive, and HOTAS which blew my mind. Its been my #1 VR experience so far, and for any HP Reverb G2 owners I'm curious on your experience. With the original Vive its impossible to read any small text, plus the screen door effect diminishes the realism. Still a must try for any VR owners.

I got myself an Oculus Quest 2... So it's really nice that I can try this out soon when I get a new PC.

The problem you show at around 7 minute mark only happens to me when I have pressed space bar to recenter VR. Don’t do that and re center manually with the arrow keys and that won’t happen. At least for me. I get between 25-30 fps in VR with ultra settings. I have similar performance on my computer except for the GPU (using an RTX 2080ti), so you should be able to run the game better than that. Edit: The issue for me gas been solved by using the beta version of the Oculus software

i have a very old and low end acer wmr headset. and even with it it works amazing for me. the only issue - is performance in big cities - but it's more a problem of my mid-specs pc I think. vr itself works just perfect

Serious question. Did you really expect a superb performance in the first rollout of a DX11 based application when VR was implemented? Or was it just a good opportunity to get some views? Give it some time. If there is one title out there that will make it eventually, it's this one.

This is all interesting and I am shocked to hear you are having issues on your Quest 2 with the hardware you have to drive Q2!! I am running a Nvidia1660 super and of course it can not drive the Quest 2 beyond 1080p. Any settings beyond that creates a very unpleasant slide show. I was going to buy a 3080 to fix my Q2 performance issues but I think I will hold off until performance issues get resolve. In the mean time my 1660 super is driving my old Rift headset just fine with a lot of high and Ultra settings. Not the best resolution but very playable. I can snap my head around and the scene changes quickly and smoothly. I am loving the flight experience at 1080p. Looking forward to more resolution though..

19 years later, I put my butt back in a simulator ... What was my job for 11 years, would not appeal to me. I was waiting for the VR to be sufficiently mature to get back to it. War Thunder, DCS, VTol VR ... and now, finally! FS2020! With VR, the immersion is there ... The flaws too, I find myself wanting to select buttons ... not accessible ... Argh ... The confusion between the desire to touch the real buttons, and having to do with palliatives ... graphically with 4k on a flat screen, we could be happy: 8.3mp seen by each of our eyes .... but in VR, visual acuity is reduced ... by two .., one eye has only 3.75mp on the Quest2, a little bit insufficient ... 20 years later, the technology is not yet there, to have its simulation close to reality at home (without the G) I think the Hotas recipe is not suitable for this generation of aircraft and this imaging technique ... VR is good for warbirds, not on buttonhole planes ... The Hotas, it's good with a 4K screen ... but we know now, that the immersion level, it sucks. In VR, those who have tried Vtol Vr have understood the fun of touching the buttons with the "fingers", but the virtual stick has its limits ... in my opinion, you need a real joystick in the right hand, and in the left hand a Oculus Touch controller magnetized on a linear guide rail. The idea being to take a normal throttle, to free it from the handle and on the potentiometer to put a magnetic base there. We therefore control the throttle with the Oculus Touch installed and when we need to operate a button, we do so by raising our hand (the controller). Autonomously, the Quest2 allows the identification of hands and the pitch of the fingers, if this function existed with the link (connected to the PC), then it will be great! We could press the buttons with a full hotas, coupled with the "voice attack" program and its vocal commands, we would then have the panacea.

My biggest issue is not performance, but the fact that cockpit scale is wrong. The cockpits appear up to 20% smaller in VR then they actually are in real life. I am a Cessna 172 pilot with hundreds of hours in the 172R and 172S. The VR scale of the cockpit is just plain wrong.

dude. i run halflife alyx over 120fps with the valve index running 120hz. ON a 3600 with a 2070super! ultra settings....... idk what res your headset is but valve index is 1440x1600x2. so unless its like 4k or something, you have some setup issues..........

Im using 3060ti with reverb g2 and openXR. rendering @70 is aweome.

How about turning down your settings?

In VR on some days it just crash after I switch to VR ... on other days it works just fine ... so what???

Just my opinion, the clarity of the cockpit could be better, and it has flickering issues at times that make your eyes go nuts. Using Quest 2 as well. It needs help.

I know that airstrip! That’s in Lesotho. Beautiful country to fly.

you need to force ASW to always on for this game, makes for a much better experience (I'm using a 2070 with some settings on ultra, reflections, windshield, etc.)

vc controller support will come in the future, there is a limitation currently on how the animations are made

VR is what I was dreaming of from the first time I tried MIcrosoft flight simulator 4.0. I had no idea how but it’s was a dream now a reality. WOW! I started a night flight with the Cj4 leveled at 5000 feet and handed control to the Auto pilot then I sat in the back of the plane and looked out the window as a passenger. Haha what a rush

I dropped the values for shadows shimmer, and sunspots. This fixed the jumping for me. Fresh budget build just for the game and oculus but only slightly over the minimum game reps.

Agreed, and with the 1080p res in my Vive it looks terrible as well.