The day after 2024 was released (which I think was about 6 weeks ago?) I signed up for the $1 Game pass 2 week trial. I decided not to buy it based on that trial and continued tuning my newly acquired Pimax CL for 2020.

Anyway having found the sweet spot settings for the Pimax in the last few days, I considered buying 2024 to see how it would go. Before doing that it crossed my mind that perhaps I could get another 2 week game pass trial at this stage and indeed I could. All the same account info. No funny business I got another $1 two week trial just a month or so after my previous one ended. Just a heads up for anyone looking to give it another go but not confident its ready for prime time.

Already I'm having a horrible experience with it! In 2020 you are prompted to press spacebar to centre your view when entering VR mode. I 2024 you are prompted to press shift but pressing shift does nothing and you are forced to Ctrl Alt Delete your way out!. Good grief!

Yeah, you'll want to assign a custom keypress for that. I've got a T.Flight Hotas One, so I assigned the enter/exit VR and the center screen commands to the two Xbox menu and navigation buttons because they are easy to find with the headset blocking your view.

The controller assignment menu can be frustrating so expect to spend a bit of time figuring it out before you do something you'll regret. Probably the trickiest part is deleting multiple assignments which conflict with the one you're trying to set. It's not that hard, but good luck.

Game-pass is a no-brainer if you play other games. I have Stalker 2, Indiana Jones, and FS24 installed at the moment, saving me a couple of hundred dollars!

8 hours ago, strider1 said:

Game-pass is a no-brainer if you play other games. I have Stalker 2, Indiana Jones, and FS24 installed at the moment, saving me a couple of hundred dollars!

and you can play all of them in the cloud - even 2020 - no need to install !!

So after my second trip around the Block with MSFS 2024 my observation which applies to VR only and may not be valid for a 4000 series GPU is that beyond all the buggyness and of that there is plenty, it is visually stunning on Ultra setting. The PG seems to improve on higher setting and of course its everywhere not just in big cities. However on lower settings that provide reasonable frame rates its well less impressive than 2020. On ultra setting on my system on a 1920x1080 screen flying around NYC I was seeing up to about 50fps. not sure what that would translate to on 4K. Maybe 25fps. Not that that matters since I'm exclusively VR now. On ultra setting in VR I was looking at high teens and low 20s but beyond the judders and stutters it looked very good! But you cant play at that FPS. Even on the default low setting profile I was still only getting 30fps but the visual on those settings are really bad IMO. Very grainy and cartoonish looking. On the other hand I'm looking a very sharp  and acceptable medium setting in VR in 2020 at about 40 fps in my Pimax CL. That is displayed at up to 90fps using Pimax built in scaling. I think it will need a 5090 for VR. I'll give it another go for a dollar when I get one of those.

I'm getting a solid 45 fps from my r9 7900x and rx 7900 xt combo with the 90hz upscaling and frames at half the refresh rate. I think the 7900 xt rates at less than the 4080 so I think that a 5090 would be overkill.

I did try the Pimax CL at high level render quality settings but it wasn't until I cranked it down the medium that I got an acceptable performance. The medium quality visuals are fine with me.