First, the good news: Microsoft Flight Simulator’s VR support arrived today! Now, the bad news: it’s running really, really poorly for pretty much everyone.
In the gameplay video above Jamie is playing it with an HP Reverb G2 VR headset plugged into his VR PC which has an RTX 2060 Super GPU — the same card I use personally. As expected, it’s not really cutting it. However, Tyriel Wood has footage of it running relatively well on Index with a 2080Ti.
In the release announcement blog Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, states they wanted to “make this update as accessible to as many VR players as possible” so they’ve shipped support for Windows MR headsets such as the Reverb G2, as well as Oculus headsets, Index, and HTC headsets. However, when trying to play the game via Steam Jamie could not get it to run on his Rift S at all — Oculus is not listed as a supported device there, nor is Windows MR inexplicably. There is no mention of the hardware requirements in that blog post at all.
In the comments of our YouTube video one viewers says they tried playing on an RTX 3080 with a Valve Index and found it to be “unplayable” despite their beefy hardware. On Reddit users have mentioned being unable to maintain framerate over 40FPS with a 2070 Super even on the lowest possible graphics settings.
Another user, u/DeliciousPangolin claims similar results. With an Index, overclocked 9700k CPU, and RTX 3080 GPU they can still only get “a shaky 45fps on default settings so long as I’m not in a built-up area” and even then it’s not consistent. “Even on the minimum possible settings and render scaling to the point where I can barely read the instruments, I can’t get away from reprojection. The reprojection judder is really noticeable because most of the planes have window frames within a foot of your eyes that judder like crazy when you move your head around to look out the windows.”
Some Oculus users have also reported a large black box blocking part of their vision inside the headset, but Reddit user u/BadMoles claims you can get rid of it by going into the Oculus Debub Tool and turning off the “Use FOV Stencil” option.
I have not been able to find an official listing for Minimum or Recommended system requirements for the VR version of this game. On the Microsoft Store listing the listed requirements are presumably for the non-VR version only since the recommended tier only calls for an i5-8400 and GTX 970. There’s no way that’s the “recommended” requirement for VR.
We have reached out to a representative from Microsoft on Flight Sim to ask about performance issues, system requirements, and ways to improve framerate. I’ll update this story if I hear back. Hopefully they can patch this up, optimize performance, and get it running better so we can enjoy some VR flights for the holidays!
Let us know if you’ve had any luck down in the comments below!
