The Ultimate VR Performance Guide

Maybe you don’t have the best pc maybe you’re trying to record or stream or maybe you’re playing a game that’s still in development and isn’t completely optimized well in any case vr is very demanding and so i’m always looking for ways to improve performance time stamps are

Included so if you already know about one tip skip ahead to the next one and by the end i’ll show you a mod that lets you increase performance by more than 60 without lowering the quality at all but before you try that let’s make sure we

Get all the basics out of the way the best way to measure your performance in a game is your frame time for steamvr you can easily see your frame time by clicking on the menu here in the steamvr window and hitting display performance graph what this graph is telling you is

How many milliseconds it takes to render a single frame to hit a consistent 90 fps you would need a frame time of 11.1 milliseconds or less if it takes more than 11.1 milliseconds to render any frames that’s where your fps will drop below 90 and you’ll notice performance

Issues you can see a similar but more confusing graph for oculus games by going to program files oculus support oculus diagnostics and oculus debug tool.exe just open that up and then set the visible hud to performance this will display a graph in your headset that tells you your fps and your headroom

It’s slightly more confusing than the steamvr’s performance graph but you can use either tool to see your actual in-game performance now i recommend jumping into whatever game you play the most and measuring your current performance before implementing any of these tips in this video so that you can

See if you get any measurable gain and performance personally i was able to decrease my frame time by more than sixty percent by going from ten milliseconds to four milliseconds with just one of these tips so the very first thing that you should check when you’re having performance issues is if you have

Any updates make sure your operating system is up to date and then make sure your gpu drivers are all up to date as well once all of your drivers are updated make sure you restart your computer and even if you didn’t update any drivers it’s really important to regularly restart your computer for

Better performance even if you regularly shut off your computer every single night you still should do a full restart in order to fully kill all processes clear ram and clear processor cache this is because windows has a fast startup option enabled by default that creates a

Deep hibernation file in the pc to help it boot up faster and while it’s great for booting up more quickly it’s known to cause issues and weird bugs over time so if you’re having performance issues restart your computer and see if that helps now nvidia has some basic settings

In the nvidia control panel that you can mess with to optimize your system if you’re using amd they should have similar settings in the nvidia control panel go to manage 3d settings in the global settings scroll down to power management mode and change it to prefer maximum performance below that go to

Texture filtering quality and change that to high performance there’s other settings here that you can mess with but just adjusting these two settings can give you better performance and won’t decrease the quality in any perceivable way whatsoever next windows comes equipped with an option to use less

Energy and as a result it gives you slightly less performance you can make sure you’re not using this mode by finding your power options in windows and making sure high performance is selected windows also has a built-in option called windows game mode that basically gives the game your playing

Priority access to the system’s resources it also stops notifications and updates from interrupting your gameplay this generally helps a little bit to improve performance but there are anecdotal stories of it having the opposite effect and decreasing performance usually from temporary bugs that are quickly resolved in updates so

If you’re having bad performance it’s worth trying to see if this setting will affect it one way or the other to turn it on or off just type game mode into the windows search bar to find the game mode options and there you can toggle it

On or off now this should go without saying but close anything you’re not using especially any chrome tabs because chrome is hardware accelerated meaning that it uses the gpu to run better some people go as far as going to the task manager to stop windows update going to

The control panel to stop windows defender and even disabling the windows search indexer i don’t recommend going as far as any of that because you kind of want windows defender running at all times but any processes or programs that you can close you should close so that

All of your power goes to the game related to that if you’re not using discord specifically you should shut that down completely and make sure it’s not just getting minimized to the tray i do this by going to my discord settings windows settings and then turning off

Minimize to tray now if you are using discord while playing games like to chat with your friends for example make sure you have hardware acceleration turned off you can find this in the settings under advanced basically this uses your gpu to make discord run smoother which kind of like chrome means less gpu

Processing is going to the game potentially causing performance issues and all that so turn that off if you have to use discord while playing games with whatever game you’re playing make sure it is the selected window basically just make sure that the last thing you clicked on before going into vr was the

Games window on your pc some games make it so that the game won’t have the full cpu processing when the window isn’t in focus not all games are like that especially vr games but since there’s no way to really know it’s a good practice to just make sure your window is the

Last thing you click on before going into vr one great way that you can increase performance really easily is by lowering your monitor’s resolution to as low as possible whenever you’re playing a vr game you’re essentially rendering the game two times one time per eye and then one of those renders gets thrown

Onto your pc as a preview window in some games the preview window is set to auto scale to match your monitor’s resolution in which case you’ll be getting less performance if you have a monitor with a higher resolution than your headset and even if the game doesn’t auto scale and

It just renders the exact same resolution as your headset you could still benefit from lowering the resolution if you set it to something lower than your headset’s resolution so for example if you set your monitor’s resolution to the lowest possible resolution which for me is 800×600 you’ll get a nice increase in

Performance than if you just left it at its default 1080p 2k or 4k again this is dependent on the preview window options that the developer chooses when creating their game some options they can choose use up a lot of performance while others don’t cost hardly anything in any case

It’s really difficult to know what options they’re choosing so if you are having performance issues it’s worth trying just to see if it gives you a little bit more performance if you use virtual desktop you can do this automatically anytime your headset connects to your pc by selecting this

Option here in the virtual desktop settings otherwise just right click on your desktop display settings and here you can lower the display resolution now if you’re a streamer or you’re recording videos you may be tempted to use steam vr view or oculus mirror for your streams and recordings i don’t recommend

Doing this as having a second preview window greatly decreases your performance and streaming already takes up so much processing you want to save as much processing as you can really the only time you should use the steamvr view or oculus mirror is if you have so much headroom running the game that

You’re probably not even watching this video as long as you’re not playing a game with a terrible preview window like skyrim for example just use the default game preview window for your streams and recordings if you’re having performance issues if you’re streaming pc games to your quest 2 through airlink or virtual

Desktop or even through oculus link you’ll always get less performance than if you’re using a natively cabled pcvr headset this is because you’re not only rendering the game twice now you’re compressing that game footage to send it over wi-fi or usb to the headset and then specifically with wi-fi streaming

Depending on how good your router is you could get some performance hitches that have nothing to do with your pc for a full guide on how to set up airlink and virtual desktop for the best performance check out the video in the description but essentially you just need a

Dedicated router in the same room as your quest and connect it to your pc via ethernet assuming it’s a decent router you’ll get decent network performance wi-fi 6 routers work best and i recommend buying one dedicated for vr streaming and nothing else also lowering the bit rate will increase the

Performance when streaming over wi-fi so definitely try that if you’re having issues in any case if you’re using specifically virtual desktop to stream then you can see if the performance issues are coming from the pc or from the network by just looking at the performance overlay which tells you how

Much latency is coming and from where if you see spikes and latency from the game then your pc is having a hard time running the game if you see more spikes coming from the network then you know it’s a router issue and not your pc another tip for playing with quest or

Really any oculus headset is to make sure that you play the game in oculus mode for veil when you hit play on steam with an oculus headset you should see a dialog box asking if you want to play in steam vr mode oculus mode or observer mode using oculus mode with an oculus

Headset will give you a nice boost in performance since steamvr isn’t running with it so make sure you choose that when playing veil for other games make sure you have oculus set as the default runtime and then purchase and play games through the oculus app instead of steam

If you want better performance if you do buy games through steam you can use a mod called open composite to play those games without actually running steamvr which gives you the same performance boost it’s super easy to install and the download for it will be linked in the

Description if you’re using airlink or virtual desktop you can also try one of their versions of space warp or if you’re using a steamvr headset you can try their motion smoothing airlink uses asynchronous space warp which essentially forces the pc to only render half of the frames while extrapolating

The other half you can turn this on or off in the oculus debug tool which can be found at program files oculus support oculus diagnostics oculus debug tool.exe virtual desktop uses synchronous space warp which essentially does the same thing except that the headset is extrapolating the missing half of frames

Instead of your pc you can turn this on or off in the virtual desktop settings steamvr has motion smoothing which works very similarly and you can turn it on or off by going to the steamvr settings and then video settings all of these work to increase performance but not without

Some warping that i personally really don’t like so i usually try to keep all of these settings off but if you have a really bad setup it may be worth having them on for smoother performance now this should go without saying but if you’re experiencing poor performance especially after trying everything so

Far you should try lowering the in-game settings you may have a high end rig and think you should be able to play on max settings but even with my rtx 3090 half-life alex still recommends that i use high fidelity instead of ultra so just try lowering everything down a

Little bit to get slightly better frames if you’re still experiencing performance issues after all that then you just might not have a good enough pc to render the game at full resolution and frame rate so the next step would be to reduce the resolution and frame rate in

A second i’ll show you how to reduce the resolution without lowering the quality but for now let’s reduce the frame rate if you’re trying to hit 120 fps lower it to 90 and if you can’t hit 90 because your rig is performing that bad try just

Hitting 72. a lot of people like to leave the max fps really high just to see if they can hit it but this can cause issues let’s say you have your headset set to hertz and you’re hitting around 90 to 100 with a few drops down to 70 or 80.

In this case lowering the max frame rate to 90 will give you some extra headroom to consistently hit 90 all of the time and then you won’t have to deal with weird reprojection issues or stuttering that happens when you drop down to 70 or 80. hitting a consistent frame rate

Without stutters is arguably more important than trying to hit a higher frame rate so just go ahead and set it a little bit lower 90fps is fantastic for your vr and 72 is probably the lowest i’ll go lowering the resolution will of course make the game look worse and if

That’s your only option go ahead and try that but both amd and nvidia have released their own versions of super sampling called fsr and dlss respectively which will allow you to render the game at a lower resolution with the pc upscaling it to the full resolution with their technology the

Result is an image that looks almost as good as full resolution but giving you way more performance some games have one of these technologies implemented natively in the game in which case you just go to your game settings and turn it on if you have a compatible gpu we

Made sure to include amd’s fsr with veil specifically because fsr is gpu independent so no matter what gpu you have even if it’s an nvidia gpu it will work with fsr and you’ll be able to get that performance boost using it in veil i was able to reduce my frame time in

The armory from 10 milliseconds all the way down to 4 milliseconds in veil we have a couple different levels that you can set it to depending on how much performance you’re trying to get and at the time of making this video you do need to restart the game for changes to

Take place if you’re playing in oculus mode that said most of your games haven’t implemented either technology into their games but there is a mod that will allow you to use these super sampling technologies in almost any vr game even if they don’t have it implemented natively vr performance

Toolkit is a mod created by f holger that allows you to use fsr and other super sampling tech with any open vr or oculus game the mod also includes fixed foveated rendering which essentially renders the center of the image at full resolution gradually dropping the

Resolution as you go to the edge of the screen with the default settings i couldn’t even tell that this was on using both techniques in the mod i was able to get about 20 increase in frames and i couldn’t tell the difference visually after going back and forth

Several times so it is definitely worth trying even for a small performance boost and even if you’re playing a game like veil that has fsr built in natively you can use this mod with the super sampling disabled so you can get the performance gains from fixed foveated rendering to install just download the

Latest version from github by going to the link in the description hitting releases on the right and then downloading the zip file once that zip file downloads you need to extract the files and copy them over to the game’s main executable for steam games go to program files on your main drive steam

Steam apps comment then select in your games folder and digging through the folder until you find an exe file with that game’s name for boneworks it was in this boneworks folder right here just copy all of your files into here for oculus games they’ll be located in program files oculus and then software

For games that use unreal engine like vale the first exe file you see probably isn’t the main executable instead keep going into the game folder binaries win64 and then there should be the main executable copy all the mod files into here if you ever want to uninstall the

Mod just delete all the files that you copied over and you’re good to make sure the mod is properly installed open the game and then press ctrl f1 while in vr this will start the mods debug tool which will visualize the radius to which foveated rendering is applied if you

Don’t see something like this with red around the edges then you probably copy the folders into the wrong spot or the mod just might not be compatible with that game once you have the mod installed you can edit the settings by opening the file called vrperfkit.yml by right clicking and then

Selecting open with notepad here you can change whatever values you want to change then save the file you can change the render resolution the fixed foveated rendering radius size and much more this file also explains all the different hotkeys that you can use to change the

Settings such as ctrl f1 which we used before to turn on the debug mode and make sure the mod was even working another way to improve the look with a lower resolution is to use oculus link sharpening you can activate this in the oculus debug tool found in program files

Oculus support oculus diagnostics and then just make sure that link sharpening is set to enabled and with that enabled you should be able to lower the resolution a bit to increase performance without a major difference in the visual look now the last thing i recommend you do to improve your performance is to

Mess with overclocking settings now many beginners tend to stay away from overclocking because they’re worried about messing something up and that’s fine but msi afterburner has some really simple settings that you can adjust if you want to increase your performance without actually overclocking so download msi afterburner go to the menu

Settings and just check unlock voltage control unlock voltage monitoring and force constant voltage and then with that take the power limit slider and move it all the way up this will also bring up the max temperature slider which is fine but what this is doing is essentially letting your gpu use a

Little bit more power to do its job it might run a little bit hotter as a result so you should also mess with a fan curve to make sure you’re giving it plenty of opportunity for cooling but overall this is just one little setting not even overclocking that gives you a

Really nice performance boost now if you do want to try overclocking i recommend finding a good tutorial for msi afterburner and following that but essentially after boosting the power limit you’d need to increase the core clock slightly and the memory clock but again i recommend following a tutorial

So that you know what you’re doing and know what to do if you accidentally go too far and end up with stability issues if after trying all of these tips you’re still getting bad performance you might have another underlying issue or just might not have a good enough pc to run

Most vr games just remember that games use your gpu and cpu to render the frames and depending on your setup you could be bottlenecked in one area and not the other we’ve had people come to us wondering why they can’t run our game on their 3080 ti but they’re using a cpu

From 2011 so while their gpu is hitting frame times just fine your system has to wait for the cpu to catch up also make sure you’re installing your games onto an ssd drive if that’s an option if you don’t have an ssd or m.2 drive go out

And get one this will greatly improve performance especially for graphically heavy games with lots of textures and assets like open world games trying to run these games on a slow old hard drive will cause major performance issues even if you have the greatest gpu and cpu this is because your system will be

Waiting around for several gigs of data to go in and out of the vram from an old slow drive using a faster drive like ssd or m.2 gets rid of this issue completely another important thing to keep in mind is cooling if your pc is getting too hot

Your system will cut performance to cool it down so make sure that you have plenty of fans and if you’re using a laptop go out and get a cooling pad as this is the biggest issue for laptop users now if you want to upgrade parts

To your pc or if you’re buying a vr ready pc for the first time check out this video that we made covering the basic pc parts and what you’ll need for a decent vr gaming setup and if you have any other tips for improving performance leave them down below in the comments

And maybe you’ll be able to help someone else out