Running VR on a potato

[ind33d]

I bought a Meta Quest 2 to fuck around with on my laptop (GL63 9SDK) and tried to run HL: Alyx. Although the performance was poor, it was obvious that with sufficient settings tweaks I could make the game run fine. I was less concerned about the game not running—some textures were red, I assume a VRAM bottleneck—and more concerned about my laptop going on fire.

What kind of software optimization is out there to make VR run well on shitty machines? I feel like with smarter occlusion culling and maybe dynamic resolution you could make most VR games run on a 1050. Are there homebrew projects aimed at helping potato VR reach mass market adoption? VR games on AIDS settings are still better than 2D ones at 4k. It also helps that a lot of VR titles (Doom 3, Skyrim) are old and don't require amazing GPUs in the first place.

Apparently my performance should have been much better than I was experiencing. Then again, I just kept all the settings on auto-detect.

 

[tritosine2k]

What kind of software optimization is out there to make VR run well on shitty machines? I feel like with smarter occlusion culling and maybe dynamic resolution you could make most VR games run on a 1050.

eye tracking, but they were naive AF about it and now they want to model your eye ball in 3d

you want 16x MSAA even 2x supersampling is weak substitute you are early adopting hard now.

 

[StippleAlpha]

Are you running wired, or wireless? I think *think* that wired might run a bit better because the graphics card doesn't have to crunch nearly as hard to encode the video as it does for wireless, which has to be small enough to transfer over the air. I dunno what the fuck you're doing, but for example if you play racing games where you're just sitting around on your leather ass, then trying wired might help.

If you're wireless, then making sure you have a good connection to your wi-fi with little packet loss might help? When packets are getting lost, the computer has to decide whether to hold onto the video frame and re-transmit it, or to give up and drop the frame.

As I'm writing this, I've realized that I don't really know what I'm talking about and what I've said might not help at all--and that you asked for software optimizations... But I figure I'll post this anyway

 

[ind33d]

Are you running wired, or wireless? I think *think* that wired might run a bit better because the graphics card doesn't have to crunch nearly as hard to encode the video as it does for wireless, which has to be small enough to transfer over the air. I dunno what the fuck you're doing, but for example if you play racing games where you're just sitting around on your leather ass, then trying wired might help.

If you're wireless, then making sure you have a good connection to your wi-fi with little packet loss might help? When packets are getting lost, the computer has to decide whether to hold onto the video frame and re-transmit it, or to give up and drop the frame.

As I'm writing this, I've realized that I don't really know what I'm talking about and what I've said might not help at all--and that you asked for software optimizations... But I figure I'll post this anyway

I've been messing around with Doom 3 Fully Possessed VR via link cable to my laptop. Holding your flashlight in one hand and your gun in the other and being able to aim them independently is mindblowing. I hate teleport-to-move; someone said reducing walk speed instead to prevent motion sickness is the way to go. The real problem is that it's so immersive you'll forget to save, and saving/loading in VR feels really disorienting.

Wired runs fine, but the Meta Quest 2 link cable seems comically loose. My PC is on WiFi, so I don't think Air Link will even let me run games, even though my wireless speed is extremely high. I could probably buy Virtual Desktop and see if I can brute force it.

I think Doom 3/HL2/FEAR and other games from that era are the VR sweet spot. You could probably run them just using a headset's onboard hardware, and that's without further optimization like using shadows to reduce the amount of onscreen geometry, aggressive LOD, or low-poly art styles like Wind Waker. I legitimately think that there is an industry conspiracy to prevent VR from running on low-end hardware in order to sell more GPUs.

 

[Doktor Best]

Are you running wired, or wireless? I think *think* that wired might run a bit better because the graphics card doesn't have to crunch nearly as hard to encode the video as it does for wireless, which has to be small enough to transfer over the air. I dunno what the fuck you're doing, but for example if you play racing games where you're just sitting around on your leather ass, then trying wired might help.

If you're wireless, then making sure you have a good connection to your wi-fi with little packet loss might help? When packets are getting lost, the computer has to decide whether to hold onto the video frame and re-transmit it, or to give up and drop the frame.

As I'm writing this, I've realized that I don't really know what I'm talking about and what I've said might not help at all--and that you asked for software optimizations... But I figure I'll post this anyway

The compression process is the same between wired and wireless since the cable is no direct videofeed either. The only thing wired has as advantage is less latency and more bandwidth.

I would try upscaling with fsr and increasing foveated rendering

 

[Poseidon00]

If you can get VR to run on an AMD Ryzen 3 with 8 GB RAM (lol) let me know, I bought a laptop for like 70$ and it's all I got rn

 

[ind33d]

I can run 2077 on high, but Doom 3 BFG will lag in VR when enemies despawn, probably related to the particle effects. Otherwise the performance is rock-solid. I'm not sure which settings to dick around with to fix that. I guarantee you can n*gger rig VR to run on low-end systems. Programmers just can't optimize for shit

 

[Doktor Best]

If you can get VR to run on an AMD Ryzen 3 with 8 GB RAM (lol) let me know, I bought a laptop for like 70$ and it's all I got rn

I would just go standalone at this point. You wont get nowhere but vomit town if you try to run pcvr on that rig.

 

[Perkel]

I got my friend into VR and he only has 1050 in laptop.

I just tried to test what could run on it from VR library like skyrim fallout elite etc. and you would be suprised that with enough tweeacking you could play on that laptop 1050 vr games.