u/Bioloko82

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share some optimization testing I did because there is a huge misconception that you absolutely need an RTX 5090 or massive VRAM to play IL-2 Korea in VR. For budget gamers like me, seeing the minimum requirements for VR let us think it would be impossible to play. I’m running a Quest 2 on an 8GB Radeon RX 9060 XT, and after messing with settings all weekend, I finally hit a beautiful sweet spot.

Here is what I found and how to replicate it if you are on a budget setup.

The absolute breakthrough here was using Virtual Desktop's FOV tangent multipliers to crop the image to 75% horizontal and 60% vertical (for me is better to have it cropped than playing with my tiny monitor and lose the inmersion). This cuts out over 50% of the total pixel workload and is not so bad. This single tweak is what actually saved my performance, freeing up the VRAM and GPU power to make "High" resolution even possible on an 8GB card. I might even try widening it a bit later since I noticed some headroom.

Once the FOV crop stabilized my performance, I just had to decide how to display the frames. Initially, I tried running Virtual Desktop on Ultra resolution with FSR Quality. It maxed my VRAM right at the 7.5GB limit and forced Virtual Desktop’s SSW (reprojection) to kick in. The ghosting was awful—trying to dogfight when an enemy plane has a blurry double-image silhouette is basically impossible.

By dropping to VD High with FSR Balanced, I realized the FOV crop gave me enough headroom to turn off reprojection entirely. I chose to set Virtual Desktop to 60Hz with SSW disabled, giving me a locked, native 60 FPS (VRAM dropped to a safe 6.3GB, system RAM sat around 13 - 15GB, and my GPU usage hovered around 90-95%).

In the game's graphics menu, set the resolution to 1080p and turn Fullscreen OFF (Windowed). Set Upscaling to FSR Balanced. Make sure your Textures are on High/2K (not Ultra/4K).Turn everything on low or off (grass quality, clouds, optimize cities, mirrors low, etc.)

Some would argue that those compromises makes the game not beautiful, but with current GPU an RAM prices is just a question of playing on VR or with a monitor.

Edit: My specs are: R7 5700X, rx 9060xt (8gb), 16 gb ddr4.

Hi! I have just bought the game, I am trying to configure the graphics settings and my Virtual Desktop settings to squeeze the maximum of my card, specially VRAM usage an RAM usage, since the VD overlay do not provide those metrics, could you give the option to show an externsive performance overlay

Hi, Could you post the vram and ram usage in the presets you are using, specially in VR. I am a low spec gamer (9060xt 8gb and 16gb ram) in Il2 great battles doing magic (image crop, 72hz, reduced rendering) to play the game at a decent fps, maybe I could find a compromise to been able to play Korea when it releases in August.