I’m new to VR flying, but my goodness do i love it. There’s nothing like a bit of depth perception and spatial awareness to help control the beast.
I have a couple of quality questions.
I have a rift s. PC is i7 7700k, 16gb decent corsair ram and a gtx1060 6gb card. It’s slightly underpowered for taking the settings up but my bank balance is slowly but surely working on that.
My question is this: i have noticed that text, for example on the load screens is shimmery almost blurry and certainly hard to read. The menus screen in the vr hangar is mostly okay but then some text on panels and the vr map for example is really hard to read. This isn’t the case in other vr games I’ve been trying ( no mans sky, elite dangerous) Also not a problem anywhere in the oculus home. I have managed to run at pretty much max settings (full 8x AA and FXAA and those things maxed , though I’ll be honest I don’t fully know what they mean) if i play out at sea on the oil rig for example but the problem persists. I’m also using an older aircraft - i fell in love with the ec135 so I don’t know if that has an impact with the panels.
Hi Nathan. I don’t own a Rift myself but I believe you can do oversampling in the Rift software, which may help you with that. Have you tried giving it a try?
Which sim? I think you’re talking about X-Plane? I certainly have the same issue with the loading screen text there with my Rift-S. My PC is broadly similar to yours - I7 6700K, 32 GB RAM & a GTX1070Ti. I had a GTX1060 6GB previously though, and it did struggle with any oversampling.
You might benefit from the OVR plug-in to adjust the oversample inside X-Plane, but your system specs are really the bare minimum for VR so you will lose valuable framerate. You need maximum texture resolution for the gauges to look their best. I fly the X-trident Bell 412 a good bit & that really helped with reading the gauges.
Tried the glass-cockpit freeware Bell 429? The instrument display is hi-res & easy to read in VR.
Even though I have acceptable VR FPS now, the clarity of the image in the Rift-S still isn’t quite there. The Reverb-G2 looks promising but that will require another graphics card upgrade.
I believe it has to do with the resolution you set in the flight config. the higher the setting the clearer the gauges get - along with the scenery. If you have custom scenery, you’ll need a pretty fast GPU to keep it from stuttering. Also, to help performance, you can turn anti aliasing down all of the way.
Remember that your computer monitor and your headset have different resolutions - so it may appear clear on your computer monitor, but your headset will be a little blurrier. If you’re into beautiful, realistic scenery and cockpit, you’ll need to get a fast graphics card to bump that resolution to maximum.
This information is from the WMR and OpenXR worlds, but I think it applies all over.
If close text is blurry but trees and buildings are clear, this is a known thing. It’s not really a bug or an issue, but more of a balancing act.
Note, if you’re on MSFS and the taxiway signs are unreadable, it’s not your gear. I hope they fixed that but I haven’t flown out of a major airport in some time so I don’t know.
But the balancing act comes down to your Steam resolution per eye (Steam VR Settings → General and it also appears under Video). Additionally, in MSFS you also have a resolution slider under General settings (make sure you’re looking at the VR mode settings). The default setting is 100, which would be hard on your graphics card. 120 has sharp text, but it forces the whole screen into that resolution so it can be brutal on frames. 70 or 80 gets butter-smooth frames, but the edges of things are a little blurry. That’s not bad on a building but a real problem with text you’re trying to read.
This article is aimed at MSFS but I think most of it applies to OpenXR, and the concepts discussed are applicable everywhere. The article is something we all should be familiar with.