Laptop VR

So I’m pretty excited that my weak-ish little laptop actually has just enough oomph to power my Odyssey +. I came out to work today to sit around and wait for my pager to go off (it hasn’t yet!) and decided to bring my O+ with me and see how it would play with my Asus laptop. This isn’t a “power” laptop, rather it is the one I picked up prior to going to Australia that I felt would give a good mix of battery life and some game playability.

Specs:

ASUS UX331U

  • 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-8250U
  • 8GB DDR3 SDRAM’
  • Intel UHD 620 + Nvidia MX150 2 GB GDDR5
  • 256GB SATA3 SSD
  • 13.3-inch FHD display
  • 2 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 3.1, 1 x HDMI, 1 x microSD

All of that in a nice, slim, lightweight unit that is great for hauling around in my flight bag. I ran the Microsoft WMR “Is Your System Capable of VR” application and it said it was OK. Not great, but passable. So I brought my gear to work, downloaded the applications (SteamVR Windows WMR), and tried out my favorite VR title - VTOL VR.

To my surprise, it plays pretty well. Now, it isn’t as awesome as playing on my desktop at home with the 1080, but it works well enough. I tried 100% and 200% Steam VR settings and 200% was a bridge too far, resulting in stuttering and black rendering artifacts on the edges. The best mix of picture and performance seems to be right around 125%.

It is best to stay away from the S-Cam in the game though, as I found that resource hog has a detrimental impact on FPS. I’ll try out a few more games tomorrow if I have some time. I expect stuff like Beat Saber will be fine, but the resource heavy stuff like DCS World will probably be a no-go. I’ll try it though…and perhaps AeroFly FS2.

It definitely won’t be my go-to VR experience, but it is nice to know I can do a little light VR stuff while on the road. I can’t wait to go into the FBO and sit in the passenger area with my HMD on.

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Is this a case of “don’t worry passengers, I’ve totally flown this in VR before!”?

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So this experiment has been a bit of a fizzle. Apparently the M150 isn’t enough oomph. While VTOL VR runs great…that is about it. Aerofly 2 just dumps me back to the Steam interface and even Beat Saber doesn’t run smooth enough to make it worth it. So I’d have to either get a laptop that had a better video card or just keep the VR experience a home thing. :thinking:

How fun the titles are will make or break it, but the Oculus future is Beat Saber on something like this:

https://www.oculus.com/quest/

I mean, it’s a glorified phone OS, so nothing for the flight sims etc, but it might work for others that don’t care about stuff like that (the fools! :slight_smile:)

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Yeah…the right kind of games would be fun on a Go. I’m such a die hard sim fan though that anything less than Aerofly or X-Plane capable makes me grumpy. I just don’t want to carry another bulky laptop around with me (oh…there is the matter of carrying an O+ too…lol…but nevermind that…). Usually the laptops with the mobile high end GPUs have an enormous power brick too…I was starting to walk in circles on the ramp when I was carrying my flight bag to the airplane.