Oculus Second Impressions

Spent some time this morning updating settings, thanks in part to James’ guidance here. The result is something quite flyable, with me getting around 90 FPS in the sim at Mr. X’s KSLC with autogen on the second-highest setting (which is where I usually have it for non-VR flight, and which translates into 45+ FPS in the VR headset). Here’s the process and settings:

  • I downloaded the latest NVIDIA driver.
  • I went into the SteamVR settings and:
    • In the Developer settings turned the Supersampling down all the way.
    • In the Performance menu unchecked “Allow asynchronous reprojection and Allow interleaved reproduction.”
  • I downloaded the Oculus Tray Tool (here) and set Supersampling to 1.3 and turned off ASW.
  • I used Project Lasso (here) to dedicate X-Plane to cores (real and virtual) 2-7 and all the Oculus and SteamVR apps to cores 0 and 1. I also used Lasso to mark XP and the VR programs as high priority and high performance programs. There’s a nice video on this here, and note that “game mode” is now “high performance” mode in Lasso.
  • In the sim I set reflections off, shadows off, lighting effects to the first notch below HDR (as HDR gives us two suns in VR at the moment :-), and autogen to the second notch from the top. I also have AA set to 8x, as lower settings actually seem to give me more judders.
  • I turned of xEnviro as it only works in one eye. This also saves me some frames.
  • I did nothing in NVIDIA Control Panel, running only with stock XP settings there.

I also started with a fresh set of XP preferences. All told, this is giving me nice performance. KSLC is a very taxing airport, and sometimes when I move my head quickly I get a lag or a few judders, but overall it’s really cool. I also haven’t played with weather yet, and that will probably cause me to drop my AA settings. I did fly around in an F-18 and it was harder on the performance, so I will expect less of complex aircraft. But looking around that cockpit at 35,000 feet was nothing short of amazing. I can’t wait to do a carrier approach.

In terms of screen setup, I learned that if you press the W key while in the cockpit X-Plane will center the view wherever your headset is pointed. This is an easy fix if you are a bit at an angle from your yoke. After getting my view pointed in the right direction, I then used the keyboard keys to move the viewpoint around so that my real-world yoke and glare shield were  about the same size, height, and distance to my eye in the headset as they are to my eye in the real world. This put the real-world yoke about where it should be, and the throttle and mixture about where they should be … and led to the amazing effect of putting one of the VR controllers on the VR glare shield and having it sit there. Same with the seats – they are in the VR about where they are in the sim, which makes it easy to put something there without taking off the headset. I have some things to do this afternoon and then I’m going to give it some more time, including upping my Supersampling in OTT to 1.6.

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