This guide is meant to help people get better performance in VAIL VR, mainly on low-end systems. The game is still in Beta so what is listed here may not always be accurate as things change.
(This guide has been written for VAIL version 0.7.75)

The main settings you want to turn down are as follows:

• Anti-Aliasing
  
• Shadows
  
• Post-Processing

There are the big three that will eat up your performance. Effects is usually fine on medium or high in my experience and you can crank texture quality up with no issues. Everything else keep on low for good performance on lower-end systems. You may have better luck on higher-end systems but stay away from anti-aliasing for the time being.

Additionally, some maps run better than others, so what works for one map may not work on others as well. Again, changes are being made all the time, and performance optimizations are near the top of the dev team's priority list.

There's also a lot you can do outside of VAIL to get better performance. You can:

• Close background programs like your web browser, other game launchers, etc.
  
• Check Nvidia control panel and under Manage 3D settings make sure DSR - Factors is set to off, otherwise it supersamples your game and that eats up performance.
  
• Check what resolution your headset is set to, as sometimes your headset resolution may be set to a higher resolution than 100%. If it is, turn it down to 100%. The picture quality boost is not worth it over the frames you save in my experience.

VAIL has a native Oculus mode, so using that will help with performance as well, but what is mentioned below also affects Oculus mode and still helps greatly with performance.


(I don't know if this works for Quest, but the guide should still be the same. Turn off Mobile ASW as well just to be safe.)

If you have an Oculus Rift Headset, this part of the guide will help you massively. ASW (Asynchronous SpaceWarp) is automatically enabled on all Oculus Rift headsets and essentially is the bane of all Oculus users trying to get decent performance. ASW checks to see if you're getting a stable 90 fps (80 on rift s) and if you aren't it caps your framerate at 45 fps (40 on rift s) and reprojects every other frame to get you up to 90 again. For rather obvious reasons, you want this off. Unfortunately, turning it off isn't easy, and you have to repeat the process every time you launch the Oculus app. So it's a hassle but it's worth it in my opinion. (Alternatively, you could put OculusDebugTool on your taskbar to save time.)

Here's how:

• Make sure your Oculus App is open, as it clears debug settings every time you close it.
  
• Go to (main drive) -> Program Files -> Oculus -> Support -> oculus_diagnostics
  
• Next, launch OculusDebugTool.
  
• Then, turn Asynchronous SpaceWarp from Auto to Disabled.

This section has been made redundant because VAIL now has native FSR 2.0 integration, but I'll keep it in anyways.


AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is an upscaler that giver you better performance in games for less performance cost, with slightly worse visuals. Normally it requires quite a bit of setup, however luckily for us someone made a gui for it[github.com], so it's way easier to use now. Installation is pretty self explanatory.

I hope this guide helped you! Please let me know if you have any more ways to get better performance, and I'll add it to the guide.