First, the good news: Microsoft Flight Simulator VR support has arrived today! Now, the bad news: it works very, very badly for almost everyone.
In the video above, Jamie plays him with an HP Reverb G2 VR headset connected to his VR PC, which has a Super RTX 2060 GPU – the same card I personally use. As expected, it doesn’t really cut it. However, Tyriel Wood has images that run relatively well on the Index with a 2080Ti.
In the launch announcement blog, Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, states that they want to “make this update as accessible as possible to as many VR players as possible,” so they delivered support for Windows MR headphones, such as Reverb G2, Oculus headphones, Index and HTC headphones. However, when trying to play the game via Steam, Jamie failed to run Rift S at all – Oculus is not listed as a supported device there and Windows MR is not inexplicable either. The hardware requirements are not mentioned at all in this blog post.
In the comments of our YouTube video, one of the spectators says that they tried to play on an RTX 3080 with a Valve index and considered it “impossible to play” despite their robust hardware. Reddit users have mentioned that they can’t maintain framerates above 40FPS with a 2070 Super even with the smallest possible graphics settings.
Another user, u / DeliciousPangolin claims similar results. With an index, an overclocked 9700k processor and an RTX 3080 GPU, they can still get “a 45 fps flicker at the default settings as long as they’re not in a built-in area” and even then it’s not consistent. “Even in terms of the minimum possible settings and scaling to the point where they can barely read the instruments, they can’t escape reprojection. The reprojection judge is really noticeable, because most planes have window frames at one foot, which flutter like crazy when you move your head around them to look out the windows. “
Some Oculus users have also reported a large black box that locks some of their vision into the headset, but Reddit u / BadMoles claims that you can get rid of it by accessing the Oculus Debub Tool and disabling the “Use FOV template” option.
I was unable to find an official list for the minimum or recommended system requirements for the VR version of this game. In the Microsoft Store list, the requirements listed are probably only for the non-VR version, as the recommended level only requires an i5-8400 and GTX 970. There is no way to be the “recommended” requirement for VR.
I contacted a Microsoft representative from Flight Sim to inquire about performance issues, system requirements, and ways to improve frame rate. I will update this story if I hear back. We hope they will be able to correlate this, optimize performance and work better so that we can enjoy a few VR flights for the holidays!
Tell us if you were lucky in comments below!