Having recently picked up a HP Reverb G2 headset and being excited to play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, I thought I would share my settings with the game running nicely with this headset and my Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics card.
It is no secret that MSFS 2020 is a game that will stress even the highest spec of graphics cards. The 3070 not being the highest-rated GPU you can get right now won’t let you max the settings for MSFS 2020 and provide optimal FPS, but it is adequate with some tweaking.
These settings are a culmination of trial and error and numerous Reddit threads, blog posts and other settings/feedback shared by other VR users (not always necessarily Reverb G2). Settings will always be dependent on the type of hardware you have, what drivers you have installed, what apps you have open and other variables beyond this post’s control.
Game settings
The following settings will give you the best quality visuals as well as adequate performance for the Reverb G2 WMR headset. The 3070 is not one of the higher spec 30xx series cards, so it can only be pushed so far for VR purposes.
Before we get into the game-specific graphics settings, you need to disable V-SYNC. If you do not, the refresh rate will be limited to your monitor.
- RENDER-SCALING: 100
- ANTI-ALIASING: TAA
- TERRAIN LEVEL OF DETAIL: 50
- TERRAIN VECTOR DATA: MEDIUM
- BUILDINGS: MEDIUM
- TREES: MEDIUM
- GRASS AND BUSHES: MEDIUM
- OBJECTS LEVEL OF DETAIL: 50
- VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS: MEDIUM
- TEXTURE RESOLUTION: HIGH
- ANISOTROPIC FILTERING: 8x
- TEXTURE SUPERSAMPLING: 2X2
- TEXTURE SYNTHESIS: MEDIUM
- WATER WAVES: MEDIUM
- SHADOW MAPS: 1024
- TERRAIN SHADOWS: 256
- CONTACT SHADOWS: OFF
- WINDSHIELD EFFECTS: HIGH
- AMBIENT OCCLUSION: OFF
- REFLECTIONS: OFF
- LIGHT SHAFTS: OFF
- BLOOM: OFF
- GLASS COCKPIT REFRESH RATE: HIGH
One thing to keep in mind is that these settings are more of a baseline of which you can adjust to suit your tastes, and in some cases, out of necessity. If you’re flying in less busy areas like deserts and small island areas, you can increase Render Scaling and Terrain Level of Detail values up. For busy cities like New York or London, you’ll have to come back to the baseline.
Where these settings will differ for you is CPU bottlenecks. MSFS 2020 is a notorious game for CPU bottlenecks, and in VR, more CPU is needed than rendering on the monitor. This means if your CPU can’t handle VR, you might even have to bump things like Volumetric Clouds down to low.
Considering I do not have the highest spec GPU, I am surprised how good MSFS 2020 works with these settings in VR. I find it difficult to play MSFS 2020 any other way now I have tried VR.
