MarkDH

16:9 form factor is what I would recommend, with or without a head tracker (probably with). I went with a 48" OLED, up from a 32" 1440p monitor, so retained basically the same resolution (pixel density). For my money, it was an LG OLED48B65LA. This has everything - OLED, Gsync, VRR, HDR, 144Hz. It's also a damned good TV even if I stop using it for flight sim. Expensive, though (£1K).

I would be tempted to source a used one to try. I reviewed the original Alpha yoke at length and also the more recent Alpha LITE, but I have not tried the XPC yoke. My worry is that the LITE yoke felt significantly worse mechanically than the original Alpha. I can only speculate why this should be, but given that the XPC was released in between the two we might wonder which one it feels most like. The XPC has contactless sensors, of course, but has little relevance if the product isn't mechanically up to the job. You can find my reviews on my YT channel.

I am interested in this tool, but can it do realistic air-to-air views of the kind shown in this video? (I can't see this in any of the videos I have watched so far.)

I can't speak for that particular monitor but yes, this is probably the best guaranteed upgrade you can do and you will notice a huge difference in quality. I say 'guaranteed' because as a relatively modest resolution upgrade you are unlikely to have performance issues and by staying at 32" you will still get a great sharpness boost at 2560 x 1440. I say this from personal experience, as this is the configuration I run. I have seen others recommend ultra-wide displays, but I would caution against this even if you are using a head tracker. The ultra-wide aspect ratios do not match your natural human vision so you will inevitably have dead space in your peripheral vision regardless of how close you sit. All the old arguments against 3-screen displays apply to modern ultra-wide displays, except more so because unless you spend silly money you display will be smaller than a traditional 3-screen setup. You will end up with a narrow letterbox, which limits your view of the cockpit and usually means you will zoom out too far, which in turn means you will notice distortion of the image at the extreme left and right of the image. If you're going to do this, you'd honestly be better buying a big 4K screen. This will cost less than an ultra-wide screen, and it will let you run an ultra-wide aspect display in a window, or a proper 16:9 aspect with or without a head tracker. VR is not a straight alternative, even if your PC can run it acceptably. I have a Big Screen Beyond 2e, and the performance and quality are good but I am still ambivalent because of the major compromises VR requires. Even using the radios and GPS is painfully clunky with VR.

The SU5 native support is somewhat better but it still doesn't implement all the Opentrack functions. You can't add curves, asymmetry or dead zones to axes. You also don't get the full 'Camera Boost' setup, although I don't find Camera Boost very natural. And you can't turn off the 'return to centre' behaviour when you toggle head tracking off, which is where we came in!

Yes, assuming you run Tobii with OpenTrack (which you should for full functionality), you can map a key to pause/resume. You can do pretty much everything TrackIR can do. See my video here for the details (skip to 26:28 for the settings).

I think this is a premature diagnosis! Seems more likely the problem was something other than overheating.

I saw a report of an Nvidia RTX5070Ti overheating after SU5 was released for MSFS 2024. Normally this would not have caught my eye, but I have that same card and just yesterday I experienced the same thing myself. I ran MSFS 2024 for the first time in a few weeks, and of course it installed SU5. It worked fine and I ran for a good few hours, but then I started to get rendering glitches that persisted after restarting MSFS and even rebooting the PC. I suspected temperatures and after finding a way to monitor GPU stats I could see MSFS was basically working the GPU hard all the time and temps were in the up to mid-60s sort of range. The card was very hot to the touch, but all fans were working. If I let it cool down things went back to normal. This was running VR headset (Bigscreen Beyond 2) but the high temps persisted when not in VR mode. Is it plausible that this is a software matter and not a physical cooling deficiency? I have seen other reports, but it's the internet and I worry that I am seeing one person's experience reported in different places. I guess if it's software it will get fixed in due course. If I see this consistently than maybe I can try falling back to MSFS 2020 for comparison.

I don't have the SU5 beta but ny advice would be to use Opentrack, which is a lot clearer and has access to all the available functions. It looks like Asobo is converging on all the same settings available in the tobii/Opentrack setup, but they are still falling way short. The curves, for example, appear to be missing, and the ability to set up asymmetric axes. The tobii web site gives very clear instructions on the one-time Opentrack setup. Once you have it installed, you get a much clearer options page in the tobii GameHub. Asobo should also rename the 'eye/head tracking ratio' option to acknowledge that eye tracking and head tracking are distinct functions with no real connection. In the Opentrack/Gamehub setup you can turn either on or off independently. Likewise 'camera boost ratio', which is even more cryptic than just calling it 'camera boost'. Assuming 'Camera Boost' still works the way tobii describes it, If you have this slider set to anything other than 0 the 'eye tracking vs head tracking ratio' will be ignored and eye tracking will not move the view at all. 'Camera boost' basically uses eye tracking as a YES/NO flag to modify the 'sensitivity' (i.e. amount of motion scaling) of an axis depending on whether your eyes are looking straight ahead or not. (Most of the Camera Boost settings are also missing from the Asobo setup page.) If you want to see some of this in the sim, my recent video demonstrates and compares the setup features available for tobii and TrackIR.

I wonder if you have the 'head auto center' option turned on? That would make it appear to drift if you were looking at your EFB for more than a few seconds. Otherwise, I haven't experienced this but I also haven't flown a whole lot with the Tobii beyond testing it out. Maybe I will experiment and report back.

I have done a moderately detailed comparison of the Tobii and TrackIR in the following video. Many thanks to @andy1252, who generously donated his Tobii so I could make this!

I had the original TQ6 and if I remember correctly the tension adjustment needed you to exercise the levers throughout their entire range ten times or so to redistribute the tension evenly. That said, I found the TQ6 levers a little bit stop/start in operation for small changes, so I'm not sure I would buy another one. The Neo looks eye-wateringly expensive but I see it also appears to have lift gates for the beta and reverse zones, which is new.

This is the purpose of the 'True View' flag in the TrackIR software. If you have True View turned on, the translation frame of reference is clamped to the rotation frame. If you don't have True View set, the two reference frames remain independent. It sounds like the Tobii software doesn't have an equivalent to this setting (or maybe you don't have it turned on!)

It's under 'experimental' at the bottom of the settings menu. It's very easy to do. The following video shows it for MSFS 2020 but I think it's just the same in 2024.

If it behaved as you describe, this would mean that zooming in and out was just the same as moving the camera forwards or backwards, which it manifestly is not. You are also using 'FOV' very loosely (FOV is an angular value measured from a given position, so it doesn't change when you move the camera forwards of backwards.) Here's a challenge: (1) Take a screenshot (of any scene). (2) Zoom in substantially (enough to make an obvious difference). (3) Move the camera - in any way you want - and try to get the view you captured in step (1). You will not succeed. For small zoom changes you may get something that looks close to the original screenshot, but they will not overlay exactly. For larger zoom changes, they will be completely different, and in particular you will see less distortion further away from the centre of the image. BTW, I can see only two material differences between the XPlane dialog above and MSFS 2024: (1) you can't set the horizontal and vertical FOVs independently (does this have any practical use?), and (2) you cannot set the FOV manually in degrees (so you have to set it by adjusting the zoom).