F1 24 VR working consistently again with Quest 3

Like a few  people, I experienced issues with VR following a December update (IIRC 1.09, which included some significant upgrades to game graphics). Up until that point VR in F1 24 was a great experience… crystal clear and incredibly smooth, deeply immersive. 

I was having an amazing time throwing the car around Qatar when that update hit. Unfortunately, it all went to hell, just in time for a holiday break!

A few days ago I cracked the issues. Posting this here in case it will benefit anyone (including potentially for VR players in the upcoming F1 25 release)

Tl;dr disable asynchronous space warp in the Oculus Debug Tool. If the game still seems off, lower the refresh rate. If all else fails, use Steam Link (assuming you have wifi6) and it’s slightly **bleep**ty looking foveated encoding. If that doesn’t work, it might be a minimum spec issue.

I tried everything I could think of, on and off for a few months

• Multiple help threads in EA support (despite a total lack of help from game devs, thanks guys)
• Elimination of all startup programs
• Removal of potentially problematic bloatware / utilities
• GPU overclocking, power curves, etc 
• Swapping out my 33FT powered Syntech link cable with the official Meta 15ft
• Endless in-game graphics tuning
• Lots of fiddling with the oculus debug tool
• Different permutations and sequences of tracks, like COTA/Baku/Qatar (sometimes the first track would work and the rest would be **bleep**)
• Air Link, Steam Link, VD, and Link cable
• New wifi 6 router

I eventually got on the trail when I noticed Steam Link was super smooth, up to some minimal wifi stuttering. Tuning my house wifi setup helped with that, and I started messing with Meta Air Link. That seemed to work really well, but I’d still occasionally get these incredibly bad 1fps disorienting floating screen effects. 

Eventually I noticed folks in other games having really bad glitching and image lag issues with Asynchronous Space Warp, turned it off, and problems were almost all gone.

The remaining is the reality that the graphics were enhanced in the December update. Frame rates are lower on some maps when they weren’t before. I messed around with lowering and increasing refresh rates (to find good vsync spots) Lowering the refresh rate resumed butter smooth game play, still high res (encode resolution width 4032).

In-game VR graphics settings don’t seem to matter much, encode resolution width and refresh rate are your main levers. Using the link cable gives max bandwidth (assuming a late gen USB3 port) and stability, so you can push the highest, clearest resolution with the highest framerate.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Specs

I7 10700k

RTX 3080

32 GB DDR4 3600CL16

Quest 3

Link cable