TL;DR: It's difficult and complicated
. Lots of detail info you probably didn't want to know.
For reference: I play Odyssey with an HP Reverb G2 on a Ryzen 9 5900X with a 3080 Ti. Like every VR player, I've spend ages fiddling around trying to find the best middle ground between looks and performance. Also, I play exclusively in VR, never on the flat screen.
What your experience ends up being like depends on a few factors (leaving changing hardware aside); the major ones I can think of are the type of headset and thus software platform you're running on, your expectations on visual fidelity and your tolerance to frame rate. Whenever anyone says "it runs horrible" or "it runs perfectly for me" you have to take it with a grain of salt and put it in context with those people's tolerance to visuals and/or frame rate.
Personally, I've ended up with settings that look good enough for me, and I've made my peace with not running 90 fps in every situation; in fact everywhere except open space, I get reprojected 45 fps and I am fine with it. Settings wise, I run a mix of ultra, high and medium settings (can't really remember the details right now), and I run my G2 at 50% in SteamVR, which results in a render resolution in the ballpark of 2200x2200 or so per eye, if I remember correctly, so little to no oversampling (the G2 has a resolution of 2160x2160 per eye). More looks a bit better up to about 80%, but it quickly tends to tank the performance even in light situations, and from 80% upwards I hit diminishing returns and
I cannot see a difference. So I settled on 50% in favor of mostly good performance. There are other people here who crank the heck out of all settings, running the same headset I have on the same hardware on 150% at a resulting 30 fps, and say it runs perfectly for them. Others dial the settings way down because they cannot stand reprojection or dropping below their headset's native refresh rate for a nanosecond. People are very different.
There are also areas where my frame rate absolutely tanks, and there is little I can do about it; this is in places like shipyards, where 20 or 30+ NPC ships are around, at outpost and planetary AXCZs, and at the spire sites. Those are the potential areas where your frame rate will tank no matter what; at the spire sites, I get regular drops down to 30 fps or so. It sucks, but I kind of gotten used to it. Your mileage may vary.
There's also the different platforms to take into consideration. Elite has native support for OpenVR and Oculus, but not OpenXR. My G2 is a WMR headset, so there are additional "translation" layers involved that are a possible source of performance issues (there used to be a brilliant article and image explaining all that on the OpenXR toolkit website, but sadly that page doesn't exist anymore, but it's available on the
wayback machine). It's very possible that people running on native oculus have way less issues than I have running the G2 through steamvr.
About the screens and the screen resolution: I do not switch between VR and flat, I only play in VR. For that reason I run the desktop window in 720p unless I plan to record something, then I switch it to 1080p. I think the desktop window is basically the right eye (?) before applying the distortion for the lenses, so there's probably little to no gain in reducing it below 1080p or 720p, and every claim of that is probably the placebo effect
(lots of "I did this and my frame rate improved drastically!" claims probably are).
What can hurt the performance might be the number of screens you have going, physical and virtual. Out of the box, WMR creates six virtual screens, I guess that is for app pinning or something, and it
felt like that hurt performance. I disabled this screen allocation through the WMR and it felt better. But, again, it's a
feeling, not a measured improvement.
Anyway, I run Elite along with my two physical screens, and it's okay within the constraints I described above. Depending on what headset you get and what platform it runs on, I would guess having two physical screens is probably near the bottom of the list of potential performance problems you might run into.
Getting Elite to run to your personal satisfaction can be a journey. But, whatever you do and whatever settings you choose: Disable any ingame upscaling. It looks terrible in VR, can cause visual artifacts and doesn't really help your performance/visuals balance.
Also, be aware that all on foot activity is not VR, it is 2D displayed in your HMD on a large virtual screen. Personally, I made my peace with that and prefer playing on that virtual screen to disrupting my play session, taking off the helmet, walking to my desk and switch to pancake play - my VR seat is not at my desk.
Hope this ramble helps in any way
