The Ultimate VR Performance Guide

This is the ultimate VR performance guide to help you get the most frames possible out of your PC. No matter what graphics card (GPU) or processor (CPU), this guide will help you get the most our of your computer, specifically for virtual reality (VR) games. This video covers the basics; such as updating your drivers, windows power plan, windows game mode, Nvidia settings, Discord settings, and more; all the way to installing AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) mods such as VR Performance Toolkit.

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0:00 - Intro
0:27 - Measure Performance
1:31 - Update and Restart
2:12 - Nvidia Control Panel
2:39 - Windows Power Options
2:52 - Windows Game Mode
2:32 - Close Everything
3:49 - Discord Settings
4:21 - Select Game Window
4:43 - Lower Monitor Resolution
5:57 - Don't Use SteamVR View
6:30 - Air Link & Virtual Desktop
7:40 - Oculus Mode
8:22 - SSW, ASW and Motion Smoothing
9:14 - Lower in Game Settings
9:34 - Lower the FPS
10:32 - Supersampling
11:42 - VR Performance Toolkit
13:51 - Link Sharpening
14:09 - Overclocking (kind of)
15:13 - Hardware Issues

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#vr #metaverse #competitivegaming

[AEXLAB]

OpenXR Toolkit is now incompatible with VAIL. It is known to cause severe game-breaking performance issues (it's been described as headset wobbling). We do not recommend using it with VAIL anymore until it is fixed.

[dank]

Another more niche tip: if anyone happens to use wallpaper engine, make sure to set your wallpaper to pause when another application is in fullscreen. For multiple monitors using wpe, it helps to maximize another low demand window like notepad to pause those ones too. Really good video btw!

[maloiik]

wish this video came out 5 months ago when i started with vr, it's most of what I've painfully and slowly learnt in this time, condensed in a single video. Amazing, super packed vr performance setup overview, gj!

[cybersix]

Awesome video! Ive seen a loooot of performance guides, but I’ve never seen almost every performance improvement option so well laid out and explained so well. Great job!!

[myhondoz]

Literally asked for this yesterday, perfect timing. Great tips, thank you been really want to play vail properly.

[hisdarkestfear]

Bonus tip: You can use Alt + Enter to turn fullscreen previews into windows, and then scale them smaller if you don't need a large preview on your desktop :)

[ProgrammistMusic]

Exellent video. A small addition to monitor resolution regarding the image with the Quest 2 per eye resolution of 1920x1832 pixels. This is not the resolution which is actually being rendered by the game or used to be displayed on PC. The render resolution is up to 1.5x times higher depending on your VR settings because due to barrel distortion being used.

Maybe i missed this in the video, but the actual render resolution and STEAM VR supersampling option is missing here and those have the biggest impact on performance. So first of all make sure that STEAM VR resolution is set to 100% to match the render resolution being set by the VR software. Then go to your VR resolution setting, e.g. for Quest 2 you can set this either in the device graphics settings from 0.6x to 1.3x or in Virtual Desktop you can select from five different quality settings.

Start with a refresh rate of 72Hz (you can even try 60Hz using Virtual Desktop) and set the quality to the lowest possible first. Monitor your performance using either Virtual Desktop overlay or fpsVR for STEAM VR. Make sure you have all additional supersampling settings above 1.0x disabled in your game. You will see the maximum performance possible on your PC with those settings and give you an idea how and where to optimize. You can try to set the resolution to maximum just to see how much your PC tanks and is useful to suggest your possible optimal setting. Then start increasing the resolution up to a visual quality you are happy with. If your PC can't hold a stable framerate at that point start using additional supersampling tools like FSR or DLSS, preferably in the game first (e.g. No Man's Sky in-game DLSS).

I would suggest to go for "Balanced" on DLSS first. Even if you game runs good with DLSS switched off you can try to increase the VR resolution and then apply DLSS (or FSR), which can give you a sharper image with the same performance. In No Man's Sky for instance the high Virtual Desktop setting (2496x2592) using DLSS Balanced looks sharper then medium (2016x2112) without DLSS (using the in-game anti-aliasing) or even DLAA switched on. I also would recommend to set the sharpness in Virtual Desktop to 72-100%.

Although most games are not that CPU heavy, there are some games, that are not optimized for CPU. Again, No Man's Sky is a good ("bad") example here. On a RYZEN 9 3900X the CPU really struggles sometimes to keep up even a low framerate of 72Hz or 60Hz, especially if you have multiplayer switched on. Using fpsVR you can monitor the CPU load, so if your system runs bad, it's not always the GPU.

[drexperior]

Changing power mode to maximum performance keeps the GPU clocked at its highest all the time, even when not loading 3D spaces. It is best to keep it on normal or "Optimal Power" if you have the option to do so.

[tomtommerson]

Best VR guide I've watched on YT. Wide variety of tips and straight to the point, unlike most of VR videos I've seen. Immediately saw better performance thanks to your video.

[robertweekes]

1:30 Never do the “quick install” graphics driver, select “clean install” option every time. (It should remove old registry files for you).
If you start to have crash issues, use a software tool to remove all GPU & audio drivers then do a fresh install of the latest Nvidia driver.
Also, turn off fast boot 👍🏼

[d_shadow.]

After following the tutorial, my oculus now runs at 3/4ths the fps with half the resolution and now stutters and stops like never before, all while burning up my pc even more.
Thanks Alex, very cool 👍

[DevotedPastafarian]

in the oculus debug tool, you can set the fov tangent multiplier to .8; .8 to cut off the region of the screen you cannot see. by default about 20% of your width and height is rendered outside your physical field of view, especially with the glasses spacer. With you rendering 80% of each direction, you render only 64% of the original pixels with no change to what you see.

[HEK-TIK]

why am i watching this? i dont have a headset

[forcemuhai]

What a great video, even though I knew most of this, picking these tips up from like 10 different videos was a literal pain in the ass.
Finding all these tips in a single video is literally like a blessing. Job well done my dude.

[JRo]

This video felt like taking a sip of water out of a fire hydrant. My ear buffer is still playing back 10 mins later lol. But absolutely fantastic content. I'm going to try each one of these tonight. Thanks!!

[CaveyMoth]

I like to monitor performance in SteamVR using fpsVR. It allows you to see your CPU and GPU frametimes separately, as well as RAM and VRAM utilization. So you can more easily find out what your bottleneck is.

[Fwuzeem]

It's worth mentioning that for audio latency it's worth getting it as low as possible, and the sound card can make a big difference. If you want to half the latency make sure the sample rate is double what it was, and then if you have the option you can lower the buffer size to 32 or 64 samples.

[MultiDarkZen]

Also about oculus mode if you want all your steam vr games to run in oculus mode just do -oculus in the launch options of whatever vrgame and it should run in oculus mode by default

[Brt]

My performance increased so much, thanks. I used a bunch of performance options and i can now run quest 2, 120hz, offbrand link cable and some other better options with these




on a high end laptop btw

[tyadei]

wow i couldnt thank you more, these tips made an entire world of difference, i was running 30 fps in beat saber and it was stuttering ALOT, but i used the settings in the video and i was astonished by the results, i was running 90 frames with it only dropping frames when it was loading the song, Thank you so much AEXLAB.