4Game

Greetings, fellow VR CMDR's…

A very quick & dirty review of Update 7 for VR players, based completely on my experience and settings. As with all things, YMMV. TL;DR: It still sucks in Odyssey.

Specs: 10700K @ 4.8GHz, 32MB Memory, SSD's, 2080ti (mild overclock) Headset: Samsung Odyssey+, Re-projection force-on in Steam (max 45 FPS)

Software: fpsVR

Game Graphics settings:

Odyssey: VR Ultra preset gave the best overall performance out of all the presets and better than any tweaking to the settings I performed, tinkering with Fidelity CAS or FSR made little difference in performance or visual clarity.

Horizons: I followed CMDR Exigious' recommended settings, and I use EDProfiler to switch between Odyssey and Horizons.

Gameplay: I simply shuttle between two orbital stations in the Wyrd system. Take off, supercruise to the next and land. No on-foot testing was done, simply because I don't care for it in it's current implementation (2D screen projection).

Frametime Results (lower is better):

Odyssey: GPU Frametime of 21-38 in-station, 15-34 outside the station, Super-sampling at HMD 1.0/Steam 100%

Horizons: GPU Frametime of 11-18 in-station, 8-12 outside the station, Super-sampling at HMD 1.0/Steam 350%

Summary:
HUD Text in Odyssey is still nearly unreadable in VR Ultra, with shimmering everywhere. Fidelity CAS and FSR settings did little to improve any visual quality. Using VR Ultra and supersampling set to 100%/1.0, the game is marginally playable. Set steam Supersampling to anything higher than 100% and frametimes go stratospheric, and FPS tanks with too much stuttering to play at all.

Horizons is still the clear choice, hands-down, for VR performance and graphics clarity.

I've found that the only way to mitigate aliasing in this game is to crank up Steam super-sampling as high as the graphics card can take. In Horizons, this is quite effective, but absolutely tanks performance in Odyssey. I also tested in-game super-sampling, but it resulted in higher frametimes than using Steam Super-sampling, which has been a consistent thing since I started playing and tinkering with graphics settings in this game.

Overall, I think VR performance between Update 6 and 7 is barely improved, if at all. Certainly not enough to make Odyssey my default instance. In Update 6 I couldn't find a combination of settings that allowed anything playable. In Update 7, I could at least stand it, but I didn't last more than a quick run between stations two or three times before going back to Horizons.

FDev has more work to do on optimization and figuring out Anti-Aliasing. At this point, I'll probably wait until then end of the year before I fire up Odyssey again.