Found that an old favorite, the RLaborie A400M works great in P3D v3 and VR. You have to use the zoom axis a bit when you are looking for buttons, but this was my first try at a big cockpit airplane…and the Rift really makes it feel like you are in a huge cockpit. The fold down HUD glass is really cool and all the 3D buttons and knobs in the A400M make this one a real treat in VR. I still haven’t figured out a way to take better screenshots when using the Rift. If I use the default “V” key in P3D, all it records is a black screen. If I temporarily go to the FlyInside desktop presentation which shows a 2D window, I can use ALT-F1 which is the NVidia screen capture (those are the ones shown), but the little windows is of less resolution than what I’m seeing in the Rift. Still trying to figure it all out…
An update on my Oculus Rift experience so far:
Sorry about doing a long post, but posting details for anyone on the fence or who might have an aging system like mine and run into similar issues, the TL;DR summary is I’m really loving VR although it did take a bit of hoop jumping to get there.
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Prep: The USB 3.0 card from this thread came in and resolved the issues with my old MB (Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3) USB 3.0 not being supported, although it took me another day of fiddling to get my MB to work with the PCIe card because it shares IRQs between the 3rd PCIe slot and other things (SATA slots), so when I plugged the USB3.0 card, my SSD drive stopped working and I stupidly thought my SSD was dying (happened before with an SSD) so wasted a bunch of time booting to safe mode, backing up Win10 etc… eventually I was able to find the culprit BIOS setting and make everything work which was a relief, I was able to move the replacement i7-6700k and new MB from my NewEgg cart back to wishlist for now since this aging system is working fine
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Once I got the oculus going I was blown away by Elite and PinballFX2, the latter was what I used to let my wife and kids try VR with, and now my wife wants an Oculus of her own… so my hand-it-down-to-the-wife and upgrade plan to the next gen Oculus is all prepped and pre-approved by the wife for when Gen2 comes out.
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Really cool how well Pinball works in VR though it’s a bummer that all the Zen PinballFX2 tables I own in Steam and Ipad aren’t transferable to the Oculus version, and they want me to buy the tables again for the new platform… Its not the end of the world since I really love some of Zen PinballFX2 tables, and don’t mind supporting the development work of bringing an awesome game to a whole new technology which allows me to enjoy it even more. Hopefully Pinball Arcade will come to VR eventually as well.
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Elite is awesome in VR! It took me a bit to adjust to the lower res gfx, but the change is scale from 2D is amazing, you sit in the ships and they feel enormous and so does landing at the stations. I find myself getting really immersed and then 4-5 hours pass by before I remember that I should be taking it easy on how many hours I do VR without a break… So far haven’t had any significant motion sickness with any of the games except Subnautica.
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I tried to get FlyInside working with P3D but it gives some error on startup that it wants me to post on their support forum, so I’m going to try to get that and DCS and iRacing working this weekend when I have time.
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Oculus Home displays this permanent annoying “Your computer doesn’t meet Rift’s recommended specifications” virtual placard at the top of Oculus Home, which you can’t disable or make go away. The irony is my overclocked [email protected] benchmarks the same as a modern i5-6500k so is well above their minimum reqs, but they have some whitelist of what is supported and if your CPU is not on that whitelist I guess they assume they can annoy you every time you start VR to convince you to upgrade
as someone who doesn’t use Facebook due to annoying crap like this, I blame Facebook ownership and some marketing deal with their approved PC builders. I found a supposed workaround to disable this on reddit, but so far it hasn’t worked. Will revisit this weekend. -
In Elite, I get a slight framerate hit when I enter the stations, and I tried to follow the instructions to create the reg entry to enable ASW, but it doesn’t seem to be working, can those of you who have it working confirm this is the right reg location or if I need to do something additional to turn it on? [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Oculus VR, LLC\LibOVR]
“AswEnabled”=dword:00000001 -
I was suffering from occasional Oculus “HDMI disconnected” messages where VR would go down then come back up, and after much googling the workaround that worked for me was to revert the Fresco Logic USB 3.0 driver that came with the 3.0 card, and instead allow it to use the default Microsoft Win10 default driver. I then used a Win10 util to hide the driver update from Win10 so it won’t update it automatically next update cycle, followed the info here: Windows Update: FAQ - Microsoft Support
No disconnects since I did this (knock on wood).
So overall I’m loving VR, just need to get ASW working and that stupid “your system is too old” perma-nag disabled.
Based on how amazing Elite VR is, I can’t wait to get P3D, DCS, iRacing, Dirt, Assetto Corsa, pCARS working this weekend.
No regrets here, just smiles and amazement that VR like this has come true in my lifetime, I remember trying my first “VR” tech demo on my C-64 to see what VR was and thinking how amazing that would be with 3D and realistic gfx, but now I have it anytime I want 
PS probably helps if I post my system: [email protected] | Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3 | 16GB DDR3 2100mhz | EVGA GTX 1070 FTW | Win10 Anniversary version
Nice write-up @Kludger. Are you on 1.8 or 1.9 of Oculus Home? You can tell by (heh) looking at the bar behind you in Oculus Home VR room. I’ve heard that 1.9 is a bit ‘disconnecty’ and that they are working on it.
For the new Async Space Warp (ASW) rather than Async Time Warp (ATW, which was mainly 3DOF interpolation) isn’t it just the 1070, 1080 Nvidia cards and the 400-series AMD ones that it works with so far?
EDIT: Ah, see you have the 1070, I forgot
Man…I hate that you had to jump through so many hoops. In contrast - mine was literally a plug and play experience. That USB mess and BIOS stuff is a nightmare though - I’m glad you were able to get it sorted. That kind of thing would be really frustrating for me because I’d think I’d broken a bunch of other stuff and end up chasing my tail while the correct fix would elude me.
From what I’ve seen over on the FlyInside forums, the developer is really quick and helpful with sorting out issues - he seems like a really enthusiastic guy.
I’m waiting for a couple VR titles to go on sale - I’m very interested in Project Cars, I should have picked it up during the last Steam Sale. I have Elite, but haven’t found a moment to check it out yet. On my radar is the (hopefully) coming support for X-Plane.
That’s great that your wife digs it. Never hurts to have them onboard. I’ve not really experienced motion sickness except for the Red Bull Air Race game (which is visually stunning) and some roller coaster demo. Ugh…
Yeah, nice write-up @Kludger. Sounds like you have an IT background the way you went about methodically troubleshooting your issues. FWIW, I spent 3 days trying to get the F1 GTN750 to load, but was eventually victorious. What an amazing tool from Garmin for pilots. For a while, I thought that you could put a fork in Garmin, so kludgy were their interfaces, both device and web. But they’ve really been hitting some home runs as of late.
All of this talk about Dirt and pCARS is motivating me to hook up my wheel tonight.
Run Steam in VR Mode, and maybe PinballFX will launch in VR Mode when you launch the steam version.
I haven’t tried ASW, but from what I’ve read, ASW should work with the 900 series cards as well. ASW has made Oculus lower their minimum hardware requirements to a 960.
Thanks @SkateZilla, unfortunately they were smart to that and don’t offer the VR feature in the Steam version… you have to buy the VR version on the Oculus store… sneaky sneaky.
Thanks @fearlessfrog I never noticed the “bar” behind me, but indeed I am on v1.9 of Oculus Home. Will look into seeing if I can revert to the older one. Also I think I found the issue with ASW, I checked and the reddit instruction I followed had the path [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Oculus VR, LLC\LibOVR] but on my Win10 machine I noticed the reg entries are at [HKEY_LOCAL_USER\SOFTWARE\Oculus VR, LLC\LibOVR] so I just created the key and value there now.
Will know for sure tonight when I finish up work.
@chipwich really glad to hear that you got the F1 GTN750 working in P3D! thats a nice bit of kit, I hate flying without it 
I think driving games are going to be great with the Oculus and a wheel, all the controls needed are right there without having to look at the keyboard.
you cant revert.
Oh yeah you’re right, 900 on the Nvidia driver side. AMD driver is just 400 so far, so no love for the 290/390 set.
Thanks that worked, also found the updated way to disable the “your computer is too old” perma-nag:
So got both ASW and perma-nag issues taken care of now hope that a good omen for the P3D Flyinside issues.
Found another really nice VR aircraft for P3D and FSX - the C-27J that I reviewed last year looks fantastic in VR. You’ll have to use a touch of zoom probably when you need to make out the smaller text, but the overall flight deck looks great (the co-pilot isn’t bad looking either) and the HUD is really nice. The large scale size of the flight deck translates well in VR but all of the overhead panels and pedestal can be easily seen and used.
Some non-VR screens from the review:
Should I be unplugging my Rift when I’m not using it?
I don’t think so, mainly to prevent wear on the HDMI socket on the GPU. It sleeps peacefully apparently.
I actually just unplug the USB
I leave mine plugged in all the time.
This will probably be a buy for me at some point…
Rowing machine…interesting. I will say, the minute they come up with a Tour de France VR where you are also on a bike…I might be into that…!
Alpe d’huez - here I come!!
Well…someone is working on it I guess…wonder if this would make me puke though…
