Hi.
After a lot of testing I’ve figured out how to…fix my War Thunder VR experience so I’ll share it with everybody here…I hope I’ll help somebody here since there is not much info online and in the support website for War Thunder you cannot find much info.
I have pretty OK pc to put it lightly
Ryzen 7 5700x3D CPU
Gigabyte RTX 3090 (24 GB)
and 32 GB of ddr4 memory (3200 Mhz)
and the game is installed on a NVME drive with 3500 MB/s speed.
and I’ve also enabled my Resizable BAR setting in my Bios for maximum performance.
and finally I use Virtual Desktop to connect to my Meta Quest 2 VR Headset
(and yes I have dedicated ROOTER just for VR gaming).
For me game was running OK-ish in VR but after the big update last month with the new “settings” the game was struggling for me and that drove me mad, I wondered why with my setup the game does not run smoothly, I’ve lowered my settings and everything but nothing helped…I’ve installed open XR toolkit, and tweaked that but that did not help at all, I’ve realized that War Thunder’s VR implementation is not perfect more or less but I love the game and I have around 800 hours + in VR playing jets…
So I started experimenting and I’ve found how to run the game smoothly with maxed out settings with 120 fps in VR without any Synchronous Spacewarp (SSW) ((frame generation)) or without having to lower my settings.
Feel free to try this out and let me know if it helps for you as well.
Disclaimer. Tweaking this settings does not mess up with your anti cheat of the game or anything, what we are going to do is tweak some Driver level settings for your graphics card and force it to use those, rather then the poorly implemented ones in the game.
- Make sure to backup your settings before you do this, If you want try increasing the settings of the game to it’s maximum and then do the steps bellow to see will this will boost your performance and visibility.
- Disable Antialiasing in the game (yes I know many people play like this in VR since it gives you more clarity but at times the jugginses starts to bother you)
Since there are only DLSS, TAA, FXAA and Temporal Super resolution available in the game we come to the first problem, how to get clean picture without sacrificing performance and clarity. (all of the above mess up your HUD in cockpit view more or less or make it blurry.
I play with F16A mostly for fun and i can tell you with those Anti aliasing options the game looks like crap.
Luckily for anybody with Nvidia GPU you can go around that and by force the GPU to use different Antialiasing method called MFAA (if you wonder how it works here is a video of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nef6yWYu0-I )
Simply go to your Nvidia control panel and then to Manage 3D Settings.
Next select your Program Settings and select the War Thunder exe from the drop down menu. (War thunder aces.exe)
here we are going to brute force the application to use MFAA
Simply check the feature Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA) and turn it On
(and don’t forget to turn OFF your anti aliasing in game before doing that).
- So now once we’ve fixed the antialiasing and we can see better, we most definitely want to run the game better and smoother.
Previously I though that maxing out the settings is pointless, and to a point maybe is but personally for me I want to fly with the way the game was meant to be played more or less, at it’s MAXIMUM (or for me at least).
Problem comes from the way the game handles multiple cores of the CPU for some reason. I always though the game utilizes Multi threading, but after some tinkering I’ve realized I was sort of wrong even with my 3090 and the best in slot CPU the game was still struggling. and the frame drops were mostly noticeable on maps like Afghanistan when you fly and there are tons of buildings under you, my fps dropped to 35 45 fps , and In VR you can puke when the lag starts…
So I’ve figured what will happen if I force the game to run multiple cores at once on my CPU, and take off some of the load of the GPU, and funny enough this made my game to go in fps drastically up from 68 - 80 fps (my FPS used to very depending on different locations) to 110 120 now. But for my own insanity I play with locked 90 fps (since my Quest 2 will burst in to flames when playing at 120 fps for 3 hours).
Here is how to enable this.
Back in the Nvidia Control Panel we want to turn on one more setting and that’s
Thread Optimization > On
while Thread Optimization is not recommended for other games, in War Thunder for some reason it improves the GPU and CPU loads way better then the way the game works in VR if that setting is turned off.
Another option I would recommend you turning on is
Antialiasing - Transparency > Multisample
this one reduced the jugginses on trees and other transparent objects in the game.
I’ve did some tests and I’ve been playing all night long for the last 3 hours with this settings, and I can tell you, the game runs at constant 90 fps, and the lowest drop I got for 2 seconds was 88 fps when I spawned in my plane in sim Battles.
I hope this helps some of you who play with VR glasses.