VR experiences IL-2 Korea

[JG4_Moltke71]

Since a while I my experience is not that bad anymore and the game is enjoyable.

I’m skipping anti-aliasing (though it will become necessary once biplanes enter the picture; without it, they look terrible from a distance).
 

I sacrificed cockpit reflections but have mirrors on max settings (only with that I can see in the mirror my squad still have bombs/rockets on board or not). 
What surprises me, however, is that the image isn't always smooth, even at 90 FPS.

But at all I have a good picture, however, this becomes somewhat less significant as the aircraft structures become more complex and the distance increases.

Ground attacks appear as ground attacks and not as slide shows 

Enemy presence depends wich side I play, parity when I play US, enemy superiority when I play reds. AAA on medium and ground units on low.

Graphics high, clouds high, grass normal, in the NVIDIA settings I set the energy settings high but changed there not too much.

In some situations I would like to use the phrase of the radio chatter when I request a situation report and they answer: „could be better“ 🤭😅

But I definitely have my moments where I realize: "Hey, that looks good!"

This is the status right now, let’s see where we are after the next patch and latest in a half year 

PS: Please do not make Carrier scenarios in Deck ops  a CPU Killer like D-Day in great battles 😅😅

Edited September 3 by JG4_Moltke71

[Hotdognz]

On 9/2/2026 at 9:57 PM, SonicGBOMB said:

That's odd, I'm running a 4080 Super with a Crystal light at full native and lots of settings turned up and its smooth as silk for me. I'm using 90hz mode locked to half frame rate in the Pimax settings and it gives a solid 45 frames pretty much no matter what. With a 4090 you should have no issues though the Ultrawide at full native would be much more of a GPU Hog than the Crystal Light, might need to use DLSS for that.

SonicGBOMB Im trying what you suggested 90hz locked at half frames but im getting 22 fps in free flight P51 no enemy, with out some settings from you for your IL2 graphics its really hard to compare and comment on what you are seeing.

[SonicGBOMB]

13 hours ago, Hotdognz said:

SonicGBOMB Im trying what you suggested 90hz locked at half frames but im getting 22 fps in free flight P51 no enemy, with out some settings from you for your IL2 graphics its really hard to compare and comment on what you are seeing.

Sorry for the delay, I've just taken delivery of a Bigscreen Beyond 2e and have been trying to get an equally smooth experience with that, so far having limited success.

As to my settings, firstly in Pimax software I'm using: 100% full native, lock to half frame rate and surprisingly I found good results also using 90hz upscale mode. Now I know this degrades the image quality however to counteract that I'm then using sharpening set to 100% which seems to recover most of the losses.

In game settings as follows:

General Graphics - High

Full screen - Enabled

Upscaling - DLSS Quality (or Disabled and using MSAA x 2, I find both produce similar results in quality and framerate)

Enable VR - OpenXR

Distant Landscape - x3

Horizon Draw - 130km

Distant Buildings - Enable

Pilot Body - Disabled

Canopy reflections - Normal

Shadow Quality - Low

Cloud quality - High

Grass Quality - Low

Mirrors - Complex

Anti alising - (blanked out if using DLSS or set to MSAA)

Rate - x 2 (all my GPU will handle!)

Dynamic Res - Off

Sharpen - Enable

SSAO - Enable

Indirect lighting - Disabled

Terrain - High

Landscape - Sharp

HDR - Enabled

Gamma - 1.0

Use 4k - Enabled

Cities - Memory Saver

VR resolution - 100%

The end result is a very sharp, smooth and pretty experience. I suspect the Pimax software is doing much of the heavy lifting here to produce such a smooth experience. My test for clarity is to jump into the Mig15 and ensure I can read the tiny number "2" that's below the fuel gage. I can just see that with full native and no upscaling and I'm still able to see that using the settings above. The only artefacts I really notice are a tiny amount of ghosting on a fast moving aircraft but its minimal and I can live with it.

As for the beyond 2, this is a whole different story and I'm struggling to get a comparable smooth result, even with resolution brought back to 0.85. I did get something close at one point however when I came back into the sim it was a juddering mess so nots sure whats going on there. Steam smart smoothing is horrible, gives the canopy frame jelly effect and its just not acceptable.

There is also a very definite VRAM leak, I can fly for an hour perfectly fine than out of nowhere get the insufficient VRAM message. If I then leave the game, come back in I'm good again for another hour or so. I'm tending to agree now that the game is not that well optimised for VR and the Pimax software for me has been painting over the cracks.

What I would say however its that IL2 Korea is providing by far the most fun I've had in an online server in a flight sim in a very long time so I'm more than happy to stick with this sim while they iron out the bugs. Its a far prettier place to be than DCS or GB so no surprise its more demanding on my GPU, I would however very much like to see foveated rendering added even though the developers stated that for them it didn't make much of a difference, I'm quite sceptical of that!

 

[T24_Martin]

I tried yesterday again and immediately switched back to GB. It could be such a great experience, but I just tried it from time to time and the performance is a disaster. 

I will stick to GB until this is sorted. Such a shame! Was really excited to fly over Korea, but this is literally impossible at the moment.

 

7800x3d, RTX 5090 + Dream Air

Edited September 7 by T24_Martin

[Hotdognz]

On 9/7/2026 at 9:31 PM, SonicGBOMB said:

Sorry for the delay, I've just taken delivery of a Bigscreen Beyond 2e and have been trying to get an equally smooth experience with that, so far having limited success.

As to my settings, firstly in Pimax software I'm using: 100% full native, lock to half frame rate and surprisingly I found good results also using 90hz upscale mode. Now I know this degrades the image quality however to counteract that I'm then using sharpening set to 100% which seems to recover most of the losses.

In game settings as follows:

General Graphics - High

Full screen - Enabled

Upscaling - DLSS Quality (or Disabled and using MSAA x 2, I find both produce similar results in quality and framerate)

Enable VR - OpenXR

Distant Landscape - x3

Horizon Draw - 130km

Distant Buildings - Enable

Pilot Body - Disabled

Canopy reflections - Normal

Shadow Quality - Low

Cloud quality - High

Grass Quality - Low

Mirrors - Complex

Anti alising - (blanked out if using DLSS or set to MSAA)

Rate - x 2 (all my GPU will handle!)

Dynamic Res - Off

Sharpen - Enable

SSAO - Enable

Indirect lighting - Disabled

Terrain - High

Landscape - Sharp

HDR - Enabled

Gamma - 1.0

Use 4k - Enabled

Cities - Memory Saver

VR resolution - 100%

The end result is a very sharp, smooth and pretty experience. I suspect the Pimax software is doing much of the heavy lifting here to produce such a smooth experience. My test for clarity is to jump into the Mig15 and ensure I can read the tiny number "2" that's below the fuel gage. I can just see that with full native and no upscaling and I'm still able to see that using the settings above. The only artefacts I really notice are a tiny amount of ghosting on a fast moving aircraft but its minimal and I can live with it.

As for the beyond 2, this is a whole different story and I'm struggling to get a comparable smooth result, even with resolution brought back to 0.85. I did get something close at one point however when I came back into the sim it was a juddering mess so nots sure whats going on there. Steam smart smoothing is horrible, gives the canopy frame jelly effect and its just not acceptable.

There is also a very definite VRAM leak, I can fly for an hour perfectly fine than out of nowhere get the insufficient VRAM message. If I then leave the game, come back in I'm good again for another hour or so. I'm tending to agree now that the game is not that well optimised for VR and the Pimax software for me has been painting over the cracks.

What I would say however its that IL2 Korea is providing by far the most fun I've had in an online server in a flight sim in a very long time so I'm more than happy to stick with this sim while they iron out the bugs. Its a far prettier place to be than DCS or GB so no surprise its more demanding on my GPU, I would however very much like to see foveated rendering added even though the developers stated that for them it didn't make much of a difference, I'm quite sceptical of that!

 

Thank you for your settings, I set them up last night and was getting a reasonable image and 45FPS, it felt smooth in a single free flight in a P51, I still think the overall land textures and hills look really bad but I believe that's the game engine now and not the settings.

Its given me a reasonable start point, so thank you very much.

[SonicGBOMB]

15 hours ago, Hotdognz said:

Thank you for your settings, I set them up last night and was getting a reasonable image and 45FPS, it felt smooth in a single free flight in a P51, I still think the overall land textures and hills look really bad but I believe that's the game engine now and not the settings.

Its given me a reasonable start point, so thank you very much.

Interesting they look pretty sharp to me, the only issue is the tree lines in the distance on medium, they have a translucent effect until you get closer but that's part of the game setting to reduce GPU load, the land textures and tree lines are improved between the Medium and High settings so maybe try that if you card will handle it. There seems to be a very big jump in GPU demand switching between Low to Medium but only a small increase going from Medium to High.

From experimenting with the BSB2e there are definitely some odd things happening, High settings perform far better than VR optimised so definitely avoid that. I also get better performance using DLSS on High than on Balanced, I really don't think the DLSS implementation is working as it should as not giving much back in the way of performance gains for me.

Speaking of the BSB2e, it was driving me crazy with stuttering until I found the per application setting in Steam VR which has throttling turned on automatically, any time the frame rate was dropping just below the native 75fps it was instantly throttling it back to 1/2 frame at 37fps and then back up again once its able, each resulting in stuttering. (not using smart smoothing as it looks horrible) In IL2K the frame rates are all over the place for me so was happening very often, mostly happily sitting at 75fps at altitude or low level away from base however the moment I get low over a city or airfield its dropping right down. Disabling the auto throttling has now left it running pretty smoothly with the odd drop down into the 50s-60's when low over cities etc which I can live with but definitely needs some optimising done there...

Edited September 9 by SonicGBOMB

[Muas]

Is there a way to get a single image on the screen when flying in VR, instead of the double lens view of the head set?

[YoYo]

22 minutes ago, Muas said:

Is there a way to get a single image on the screen when flying in VR, instead of the double lens view of the head set?

Use in startup.cfg:

or_render_eye = 1

[Hotdognz]

1 hour ago, YoYo said:

Use in startup.cfg:

or_render_eye = 1

Anything else that should be in the Startup.cfg that's important for VR ?

[Panthercules]

13 hours ago, SonicGBOMB said:

the per application setting in Steam VR which has throttling turned on automatically

Where did you find this setting?  I looked all over the place in mine and could not find anything like this.  Is it something unique to  the BSB2e?

[YoYo]

6 hours ago, Hotdognz said:

Anything else that should be in the Startup.cfg that's important for VR ?

No and no any performance impact, but you will see 1 image on 2D monitor from the headset, not both images. It looks better simply.

[Antagonista]

объясните как получить приятную картинку в quest 3, а то у меня игра выглядит как первый принц персии, пиксели и 40 фпс
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700KF (3.40 GHz)
32,0 ГБ
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (31 ГБ)

[YoYo]

45 minutes ago, Antagonista said:

объясните как получить приятную картинку в quest 3, а то у меня игра выглядит как первый принц персии, пиксели и 40 фпс
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700KF (3.40 GHz)
32,0 ГБ
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (31 ГБ)

Welcome to the club!

Btw. Check this topic, it may help you:

Keep your fingers crossed for the changes in the patch, too.

[SonicGBOMB]

On 9/10/2026 at 3:15 AM, Panthercules said:

Where did you find this setting?  I looked all over the place in mine and could not find anything like this.  Is it something unique to  the BSB2e?

Nope its generic to Steam VR. It took me ages to find it and was the cause of my stuttering. You have to go into Steam VR - settings - Video - Per application settings

Scroll down towards the bottom and you will find Throttling behaviour, change that from Automatic to fixed. That will then pop up an FPS slider allowing you to set your max frame rate, I have mine set to 75hz which is the BSB2e native. With that set it will now stop itself jumping back and forth between 37fps and 75ps every time the frame rate drops slightly which for me was causing notable stuttering. I also have smart smoothing locked to disabled as I don't really like the artifacts.

Based on the above I'm really quite happy with the end result now and its generally very crisp and smooth other than low over large cities, for the first couple of days however I was ready to send the BSB2e back as it was driving me bonkers!

[Panthercules]

Thanks for the info!

Unfortunately, Korea doesn't show up on the list there (I guess because I didn't get it through Steam?), and I can't find any way to add a game to that list 😕

[Redeye]

1 hour ago, Panthercules said:

Thanks for the info!

Unfortunately, Korea doesn't show up on the list there (I guess because I didn't get it through Steam?), and I can't find any way to add a game to that list 😕

Start the game up and have it running then alt-tab to SteamVr settings. With the game running it will be there. Then you have to quit the game and start it backup to have the settings ‘catch’.

Edited September 14 by Redeye

[SonicGBOMB]

16 hours ago, Redeye said:

Start the game up and have it running then alt-tab to SteamVr settings. With the game running it will be there. Then you have to quit the game and start it backup to have the settings ‘catch’.

Above is spot on...

I also bought the pre release version which is stand-alone outside of Steam so need to have the game running to see it...this one was yet another part of the headache I was having being new to Steam VR. Having used Pimax, Oculus and Virtual Desktop software over the years I initially found Steam VR quite frustrating however I'm thankfully starting to know my way around it quite well now...

Its still far less grief than having to install a custom ISA card with a header cable onto your cutting edge 8mb ATI graphics card and deal with Win 95 IRQ conflicts as it was back in the 90's trying to get the Forte VFX1 headset working with EF2000! 🤣 

[Panthercules]

21 hours ago, Redeye said:

Start the game up and have it running then alt-tab to SteamVr settings. With the game running it will be there. Then you have to quit the game and start it backup to have the settings ‘catch’.

Still no go ☹️

When I do that it does now show IL-2 Series in the list, BUT there's no setting for throttling behavior on that screen:

Maybe that function simply isn't supported for/applicable to the Reverb G2/Oasis driver combo?

 

[SonicGBOMB]

18 hours ago, Panthercules said:

Still no go ☹️

When I do that it does now show IL-2 Series in the list, BUT there's no setting for throttling behavior on that screen:

Maybe that function simply isn't supported for/applicable to the Reverb G2/Oasis driver combo?

 

I see in the parent menu you have "Advanced Settings" set as Hide, change that to Show and see if that helps open up the additional settings?

[Panthercules]

4 hours ago, SonicGBOMB said:

I see in the parent menu you have "Advanced Settings" set as Hide, change that to Show and see if that helps open up the additional settings?

Actually, it is already set to "Show" - that's how it started showing that per-application setting in the first place.  After I pressed the "Show" button, the highlight moved to the "Hide" button - I guess to let you know you could press that if you wanted to hide.  I checked while I was at it and that screen looks the same for other games besides Korea - no throttling setting.

[SonicGBOMB]

15 minutes ago, Panthercules said:

Actually, it is already set to "Show" - that's how it started showing that per-application setting in the first place.  After I pressed the "Show" button, the highlight moved to the "Hide" button - I guess to let you know you could press that if you wanted to hide.  I checked while I was at it and that screen looks the same for other games besides Korea - no throttling setting.

Fair enough, as you say it must be specific to the G2/ Oasis driver, I don't really know much about that setup at all I'm afraid...

[Redeye]

1 hour ago, SonicGBOMB said:

Fair enough, as you say it must be specific to the G2/ Oasis driver, I don't really know much about that setup at all I'm afraid...

Fraud that goes for me too. I run a Quest3.

[YoYo]

I’m curious how Steam Frame will work with IL-2 Korea. It’s already on the market.

https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steamframe

[VISHNU]

Korea is unplayable for me.   I get up to 70fps in GB and 20-30fps in Korea.  It sucks and until I can afford upgrading my computer, I guess it’ll sit stagnant on my HD. 

[YoYo]

7 minutes ago, VISHNU said:

Korea is unplayable for me.   I get up to 70fps in GB and 20-30fps in Korea.  It sucks and until I can afford upgrading my computer, I guess it’ll sit stagnant on my HD. 

Hey, check out the guide; maybe it’ll help you with the settings:

Another point and some (hopefully) positive news - is that a patch is coming out this Tuesday to improve VR optimization. So, it’s worth checking the simulator out after patch 1.004 drops.