GAME IS UNPLAYABLE ON VR

Hate being this person but VR is almost unplayable (for me.) The visual's and performance are an absolute mess. I've never had any of  EA F1 games before this. I was honestly expecting a huge difference compared to other VR sim's "in a good way" seeing this is a big company  and a new release. Boy was I wrong!  No mouse menu support or vr controller support? Feel like i'm back on my dev kit one, the game looks from that time frame. I don't know if the shaking is "porpoising" or performance issues. However that "porpoising" happens even when I'm sitting in the garage. I may record what I see via my headset for a visual POV. I'm just a bit burnt out from all this problem solving at the moment and wanted to give some feedback regarding the experience. I honestly want this to work!

New install of windows drivers everything up to date (BIOS/Chipset/GPU with DDU clean)

I've played with PC power settings, NVIDIA control panel settings. from Oculus refresh rate to resolution, to the debug tool settings "many profiles and variations.

I haven't tried using side quest profile settings.

Running over Virtual Desktop Streamer connection at 1200mbs. Didn't try over link cable, USB c/c which is 3gig connection. I'd rather not use link cable. I may test it out.

I purchased EA's subscription to get early access and out of the time owning it I've literally spent 4 or 5 figuring out the GUI but mostly playing with settings and testing them. None of which have made any difference. 

However on flat screen the game runs beautiful looks amazing. 2k 165hz everything on max 100+ FPS on bench.

Now, would I recommend this game to anyone in vr? Probably not, at least not with a similar system, or less. I'm just in shock that Modded Assetto Corsa given the age of it is not even comparable regarding performance and visuals. Running Content Manager with version 0.179 SOL 2.2 with 2022 F1 car pack from SDD.

Unfortunately at this point in time I'm disappointed in the amount of time it has taken to produce 0 results which are somewhat playable. I don't think my VR standards are high?

I'll be going back to AC until my triple monitor setup is ready then I'll give this game another try then.

Rig:

      TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi)

      3070ti OC liquid cooled rig "gpu/cpu" temps are low on memory and dies

      16gb ram 3600 cl 15

      3700x. flk 1800 no OC or performance bias. All cores 4350/4325 cpu load 20ish%

      Sabrent NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2

I did post this in another thread, but worth mentioning here. It may help with your issues. For me personally - I'm running latest Nvidia drivers and using Virtual Desktop on a Quest 2 to play VR.

From my extensive benchmarking and testing the main cause of stuttering is having Ambient Occlusion turned on in any form. If you set Ambient Occlusion to off in the settings I can promise you it will help with smoothing out the framerate and the head turning stuttering. I'm using a RTX 3070 and can set everything to high except for Ambient Occlusion and get a stable 72fps per eye (non SSW or ASW). I can even go to very high VR preset and turn Ambient Occlusion off, and only get a slight stutter here and there.

Here are some tips to find that sweet spot for you with framerate:

1. To benchmark properly you need to make sure SSW (Steam) and ASW (Oculus) are turned off. Otherwise it is only going to report half framerate while using the GPU to calculate every second frame.
    
2. In game - I'd start with the medium VR preset, except for Ambient Occlusion, which as mentioned needs to be turned off. I'd also set the in game AA to TAA only (nothing else works really well in VR and even Codies have suggested this in earlier testing). I'd also turn on Dynamic resolution in the Video settings, set it to around 80% and leave it on Balanced. Dynamic resolution allows to drop the resolution in game if for some reason there is a drop in fps. The three settings relate to how crisp you want it to look. If you'd rather suffer a slight fps drop before dropping in resolution, set it to Lazy. If you want the resolution to drop to preserve fps set to Aggressive. Balanced is between those two options.

    
3. In terms of VR fps - start with 72hz. If you are prone to motion sickness, up this a bit to 80hz.

    
4. Once you set these options up - run the Benchmark tool (remembering to turn on the FPS meter before starting it). If things are running well you'll be able to turn your head and there will be no stuttering. After the race starts what you want to see is the fps consistently hovering around 71 or 72fps.

    
5. If it isn't making it to those figures, first thing to try is going to the VR menu in game and overriding the steam resolution settings. Drop it to 90% or lower. Benchmark again and see if you hit that magic 72fps. If you are constantly hitting 72fps, you can increase the value beyond 100% (I'm on 120% with my base per eye resolution at 2016x2112). I find this overriding steam value excellent and it doesn't seem to use as much CPU / GPU power as changing the super sampling in the steam menu or other method.

    
6. This is the best way to test raw performance. If you are close to 72fps and are happy with the settings just turn SSW / ASW back on if you wish.

    
7. If you have headroom. ie it is staying at 71-72fps all the time during the benchmarking (with SSW/ASW disabled in VR) then you can start upping the graphic settings to High. Start with setting the High VR preset and turning Ambient Occlusion off. See how you go.
    

@SochilVR @Grocs_Blech Thanks for sharing your experience guys. I did also extensive benchmarking and testing with all combinations of settings.

@Grocs_Blech Thanks for the very detailed explanation. I will try to replicate your settings

Forgot to mention my equipment:
Quest 2 with link cable
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.81 GHz
Geforce RTX 2070
16.0 GB RAM

Settings:
VR Ultra-Low setting
74% Resolution on SteamVR (1920 x 1936)

@Grocs_Blech questions about your settings?

1 - What are SSW (Steam) and ASW (Oculus)? where I can find out these settings?

2 - How about the oculus refresh rate. Did you keep the recommended 72Hz?

@paulosoaresf SSW is for when you are using the Virtual Desktop application (wireless streaming) in Steam. As you are using Quest 2 with link cable you won't have to worry about that one.

Asynchronous Warp (ASW) can be found in the Oculus Debug Tool (normally abbreviated as ODT). This can be found in the Oculus folders - "C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-diagnostics"

Usually this is set to Auto by default, but if you want to benchmark properly you'll need to set this to Disabled. When playing though, it might still be a good idea to leave it on Auto. Keep in mind that whenever you restart the Oculus software this will return the setting to its default settings. Always close and re-open ODT once you've have restarted the Oculus software before making any changes.

Yes, I'm running with the default 72hz. It actually feels smooth when the framerate is hitting that.

Just as a side note - I actually find the performance much better on Virtual Desktop (when set up correctly via a 5ghz internal wifi), though you should have some luck with Oculus Link as well.

Good luck and let me know if you have any more questions.

I don't understand how whoever did the VR for this game, didn't realise oculus vr headsets shouldn't be using SteamVR to run their headsets.

the headsets come with their own VR software for link.  And it doesn't like sharing with SteamVR. 

AC, ACC, automobilista 1 and 2, Pcars 1 and 2, ETS2, ATS2, and so on and so on, none of them require SteamVR to play in VR on Oculus headsets.

you can run both oculus software and steamVR on all of the above listed games, but they take performance hits if you do.

having 2 different softwares trying to control one headset.. is just stupid.

I couldn’t agree more with this post although I was quite surprised at how well SteamVR performs with the Quest for this title. That said, I’m left wondering if there is more performance to be had if EA allowed The Quests to use its own Oculus software.

Ok so here are my results after way too many hours of testing on a 3080/5800x  Ahah. As many people in the forums have mentioned that subtle jittering sensation when moving your head/looking left and right (dirt 2.0 all over again) is present but not as horrible as day 1.






Settings that won't change 

Oculus software



Debug tool settings




F1 22 graphics - Running Medium preset 


As @Grocs_Blech has mentioned, ambient occlusion must be off and in Video settings, game AA on - TAA as this seems to always render the best performance regarding jitters.


In F1 22, VR settings steam render res is staying at 100% and the bottom 3 settings (god rays, motion blur, and stencil) are all off.


I will not be attempting to use SSW or ASW as I've personally gotten too used to 90hz native playing Iraicng and assetto Corsa.


Our target is 90hz smooth gameplay which is achievable on all other popular sim racing titles 🙂








Link cable oculus runtime results (WORST performer)

I experience no real frame drops with the odd drop to 85 fps, this seems to be the most "jittering experience however the one with the most graphical fidelity.

Most importantly using the link cable seems to promote steam VR crashes in random instances (can't really isolate the reason), hence the need to search for other solutions.










Link cable Steam VR runtime results (Still crashes but much better performance than the oculus runtime)

This is very interesting, the frame drops are rare and only to 87fps with much less jitter, However, link cable still seems to cause crashes particularly as you change from different sessions


In order to use the steam, VR run time head to stream VR settings -> developer tab -> current run time click change to steam VR. HOWEVER you must boot STEAM VR before booting the game up in order for it to use the steam VR runtime, otherwise, it will revert to the oculus run time (regardless of what steam says) this was shown in the Virtual desktop performance overlay.



Virtual desktop Oculus runtime results (Optimal)

Using the High "VR Graphics Quality" in the Virtual desktop settings produced an Ultra smooth experience (so how 10ms lower app latency than the link cable) with the same rare drops to 88 fps.

the jittering its the same as the LINK + Steam VR combo and miles better than the Link + oculus run time. the visual fidelity wasn't as crisp as the link cable.

 Ultra quality in VD settings induced frame drops to 83 which increased jittering.









Virtual desktop Steam VR runtime results (CLOSE Second)

Almost Identical results to the Oculus runtime, ever so slightly more frame drops (2-3%) but a little less Jitters.



All in all, this was the most painful experience and EA defiantly needs to fix the jittering and optimization of VR as a whole. Specifically, the random crashes using the link cable :/, once this happens it's going to be a great experience



@Grocs_Blech id love you to try the SteamVR runtime vs oculus runtime on VD and let me know what you think