Oculus Quest 2 settings for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

The current state of PC based VR in 2021 ranges from:

  • OMG this is incredible, it’s so immersive it feels like you’re really there!

to

  • The low FPS is terrible, stuttering and motion tracking lag, ugh this is making me seasick

I just got an Oculus Quest 2 to use with Microsoft Flight Simulator with the Link cable. I was surprised that out of the box it’s actually a terrible experience with MSFS, horrible framerate (< 10fps), and jerky, laggy head tracking. I could only handle it for about 5 mins before taking it off. My initial reaction was that I was disappointed. I know from reading online though that plenty of people are using a Quest 2 over Link successfully and are pleased with the results, so some searching around found a number of threads recommending optimal settings.

tldr; if you’re prepared to spend time tweaking driver and and app settings, the Quest 2 with MSFS really is an incredible experience, and for the low cost (compared to something like the G2 Reverb), I’d definitely recommend it. To get it running smoothly though, you need to make a number of updates and config changes in a number of different places:

  • Disable any onscreen display overlay type apps, e.g. in onscreen display in Ndivida settings and disable the Window 10 Game bar. There seems to be a known issue with onscreen display apps that either the Quest, the Link drivers, or MSFS cannot handle correctly right now, resulting in the display in the headset flickering back and forth between MSFS and the Oculus Home app
  • Update the Oculus software to Beta and accept the updates to run latest beta versions
  • ymmv but for me the SteamVR approach was much less smooth than the Oculus OpenXR software. Try both and see what works best for you. Others reported the SteamVR software was smoother for them

Here’s my specs for comparison (specific details here):

Asus X570 mobo

Ryzen 5 3600XT

32GB DDR4 RAM

Corsair MP600 m2 NVMe SSD PCIe Gen4

RTX 2060

There are a couple of useful threads where you can find the majority of these tuning tips, these 2 specifically:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/quest-2-2080ti-link-fs2020-set-in-ultra-best-performance-simple-setup-guide/346291

and

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/my-2070-super-vr-settings-and-suggestions-index-steamvr/321913

For the majority of my settings I followed these exactly and tweaked slightly to get the smoothest settings I was comfortable. Here’s screenshots of the relevant parts:

Nvidia control panel:

Oculus app: 90hz and 1.3 was recommended in one of the threads, but I went with 80hz and 1.0 that I found was much smoother:

Oculus Tray App – start as Administrator and leave running when you run MSFS:

0.8,0.8 FOV had a significant improvement to the framerate. Any smaller than this, like 0.7,0.7 and I could noticably see the reduced field of view in the headset.

Link settings:

I’m not sure how much difference these settings made. I played around with the Bitrate for example between 250 and 500 and didn’t notice any improvement to the quality or the framerate.

For me, the combination of all the above settings with my hardware resulted in very playable and smooth output in the headset. I don’t think the graphics are as sharp as they could be, but I’d rather have smooth and less sharp than super sharp and detailed but juddering around when I move my head.

I was very surprised that the Quest 2 does not produce good results with MSFS and the link cable out of the box, but following some of the recommendations you find in the linked forums threads should get you good results.

Downgrading nvidia drivers on Debian 8 to legacy version 304

I have an old HP desktop with onboard nvidia 6150 graphics, and I’ve posted before about installing  the legacy 304 drivers, and installing latest nvidia drivers to support an nvidia 750ti.

I recently moved the 750ti card into my 2008 Mac Pro, so now when booting the HP desktop into Debian with the latest nvidia drivers, Cinnamon crashes, and all I get is a default/low resolution display. So time to go the other way and downgrade back to the legacy 304 drivers (I won’t be moving the 750ti back to this machine).

Taking a gamble that I wouldn’t need to uninstall anything, I followed the steps in this post to install the 304 driver using this command:

aptitude -r install linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver

This gave the error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 nvidia-legacy-304xx-alternative : Depends: glx-alternative-nvidia (< 0.7) but 0.7.3~bpo8+1 is installed.

… accepting the yes option resulted in no changes, so I uninstalled the package it was complaining about:

sudo apt-get remove glx-alternative-nvidia

This removed a number of the previous 375 driver related modules that I had installed for the 750ti card.

Cleaned up anything no longer needed with:

sudo apt-get autoremove

and then rebooted, and success, back to regular 1920×1080 resolution

Installing latest Nvidia 361 drivers on Ubuntu / Linux Mint

I’ve posted a few times about installing the nvidia-304 legacy drivers on Linux Mint, which I’ve been using on an HP desktop which has nvidia 6150 graphics on the motherboard.

I just upgraded to a shiny new geforce 750ti card which runs in this same HP, powered through the PCI-E slot so and doesn’t need any additional power (which would have required ugrading the PSU too).

To upgrade my nvidia drivers in Linux Mint, it seems the latest 361 drivers are not available in the main apt-get repos, and even if you add a ppa, it seems they’re not there yet either. Luckily, to install from the download on the nvidia site it’s pretty easy.

To summarize the steps I took based on the instructions here:

  • remove the current nvidia drivers:
    sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
  • kill the current Mint DM:
    sudo service mdm stop
  • sudo the driver .run executable downloaded from the nvidia site.. chmod +x it if needed. Reboot, and done! Running the latest drivers!