Long-awaited support for Microsoft Flight Simulator VR became available on 22 Dec 2020.
Below are the playing video with support for VR, which is available in version PC games. Support PC VR allows you to access all the features of Microsoft Flight Simulator with the help of headsets, and supports any device OpenXR. This means that Oculus, Valve, HTC and Windows Mixed Reality supports this game (but not so simple).
Support for Microsoft Flight Simulator VR
For context, the gameplay is running on the HP Reverb G2 using the Thrustmaster joystick and PC graphics card 2060 Super through Steam. First, the performance was set on custom settings developer Asobo default for VR and it worked very slowly — it was slightly better (but still not very) in this video, although some of the graphics settings were changed from medium to low.
To enable support for VR, you need to run the game in the standard version and then activate the switch in the main menu. As shown in the official new video from developer Asobo, support VR Flight Simulator even allows you to display a menu of the game in three-dimensional space, when you play for a much smoother experience, and you can lend a helping hand to hold the mouse and interact with the user interface during the flight.
Also included in this update, two new training mission for the Airbus A320neo, a new livery and, as promised earlier, the snow in real-time, realistic and ice cover using Live Weather. Also there are a number of tweaks and fixes, although, without a doubt, today’s patch for virtual reality will make much more mistakes that need to be corrected in the coming weeks and months. You can see the full patch notes here.
Performance issues even on high-performance equipment
In a blog announcing the release Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, said that they wanted “to make this update as accessible for the maximum number of players VR”, so they also provided support for Windows MR headsets, such as Reverb G2, as well as headsets Oculus, Index and HTC. However, when you try to play a game through Steam users were unable to run it on Rift S — Oculus nor or Windows MR is not listed in the list of supported devices. In this blog there is no mention of hardware requirements.
One user said that they tried to play on RTX 3080 with Valve Index and found that it was “unplayable” in spite of their powerful equipment. Reddit users mentioned that can’t support a frame rate of more than 40 frames per second with a 2070 Super, even with the lowest possible graphics settings.
Another user, u / DeliciousPangolin confirms similar results. With Valve Index, overclocked 9700k CPU and GPU RTX 3080 they can still only get “shaky 45 fps at default settings”.
“Even at the lowest possible settings and the render scale to such an extent that I can barely read the writing, I can’t get away from the projection. Shake re-projection really noticeable, because most planes have a window frame within feet from your eyes that shake like crazy when you turn your head to look out the window.”
Some Oculus users also reported a big black box, blocking their view of the inside of the headset, but the Reddit user u / BadMoles claims that you can get rid of it by going to the tool Oculus Debub Tool and disable the option “Use FOV Stencil”.
Generally a great difficulty to find the official list of minimum or recommended system requirements for VR version of this game. In Microsoft Store, presumably these requirements apply only to the version without VR, as recommended requires only a i5-8400 and a GTX 970.
