I’m working on a project using the City Sample content in Unreal Engine 5.5, and I’m running into serious visual quality issues in VR mode (Oculus Pro).
When I run the game in standard PC mode, the visuals look excellent — sharp, detailed, and very close to what’s expected from the City Sample demo. However, when switching to VR mode, the quality drops dramatically:
Heavy aliasing (jagged edges everywhere)
Distant buildings and geometry flicker or shimmer constantly
Overall image looks blurry or unstable, even with a stationary camera
Here’s what I’ve already tried:
Set Pixel Density to high values (e.g. vr.PixelDensity 1.5 and higher)
Increased VR headset resolution (I’m using a device well above the recommended specs)
Set Scalability settings and material quality to Epic
Enabled Ray Tracing, Lumen, and Virtual Shadow Maps
Enabled Global Post Processing, with sharpening
Disabled Motion Blur, Depth of Field, and Auto Exposure
Tried both Forward and Deferred rendering (Forward broke most City Sample assets)
Verified instanced stereo rendering is on
Tested on a high-end PC (above City Sample hardware recommendations)
Despite all of this, the visual quality in VR remains significantly worse than in regular PC mode, and none of the common tips have resolved the issue.
Has anyone successfully run City Sample with high-quality visuals in VR?
Are there any specific engine tweaks, LOD adjustments, material overrides, or post-processing settings that work better for this scenario?
Are you talking about VR in Quest Link mode on Quest Pro, or standalone Quest (android) app?
If it’s standalone Quest app, none of those settings will work in-app: raytracing lumen, virtual shadow maps, global post-processing. In fact, all those settings will make it look worse. VR Template is the baseline you should start from. It’s better also to switch to Meta-fork of UE (now at 5.5.4 with the v78 MetaXR SDK).
If Quest Link mode, did you install and enable OVR Metrics and check what resolution it’s actually rendering in device? ~1.22x is about the best quality you can squeeze out of the Pro’s display so you’re pushing much harder than what the hardware can show. When Quest Link, VR Preview should look about the same as in-headset, so then you should start with making sure VR Preview looks right.
The City Sample project relies heavily on TSR to clean up any aliasing. TSR, like all taa solutions works best if the camera does not move. In VR you move your head all the time so TSR will have trouble anti-aliasing it. That is why most VR projects use the forward renderer with MSAA. But that won’t work with Nanite as that requires a visibility buffer and a g-buffer. You could try using DLSS/DLAA as your TAA solution, some people claim to have good results with that in VR. Btw: what version of UE are you using? The most recent one has broken taa in vr: VR in 5.6 has a smearing no matter what settings I use - Development / Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums