My, getting long-in-the-tooth rig, really hates terrain shadows (or cockpit ones above ‘Low’). And MSAA of any flavor. Water high I haven’t tried in a long time. And when the VRam gets too close to the limits. Oh, and clouds…
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Wow, that took me back. 24 freqs, 24 land-lines, all potentially wanting your attention…NOW.
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This is all very unscientific and I should measure it etc but what I’ve been doing recently on my frugal 8GB 2080 card for VR and a Reverb is try to save about 1 GB of VRAM by reducing my main display resolution and the other attached monitors. I have a Frankenstein screen set up of this:
So a 4K display in the middle, a 1080p set up to read docs and stuff vertically and a huge 32 inch 1080p on the right (so it’s the same physical size as the 32 4k screen). Obviously that’s a lot of pixels and I can’t see any of them with the VR headset on.
What I do is hit Windows Key + p that brings up the old (and not used) Windows Projector Mode menu in Windows 10. I then pick ‘PC Screen Only’ that then disconnects the other screens, reduced the 4k to block-o-vision 1280x1024 (I think) and then I put on the headset and play the VR game (with a starting point of a bit more free VRAM.
When I’m done playing the VR game then I hit Windows Key + p again and pick ‘Extend’ and it magically puts it all back. Easy!
I don’t know if this really helps that much but I would be interested of others tried it and reported back.
I’ll do a search but one other nice WMR GPU memory saving tip is this, I recommend we all do this as it has very little downside:
To disable virtual monitor pre-allocation:
- Check Windows Update for one of the Windows 10 Cumulative Update Preview versions listed above, and install the update when available (you may find the update under Optional updates or Advanced options on the Windows Update settings page)
- Launch Registry Editor
- Navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Holographic”
- If the “PreallocateVirtualMonitors” REG_DWORD is not present, create it by selecting Edit > New > DWORD (32-bit) Value and entering PreallocateVirtualMonitors as the name
- If the “PreallocateVirtualMonitors” REG_DWORD is present (or you just created it), double-click the entry and change “Value data” from 1 (its default value) to 0 (zero)
- TRUE - 1
- FALSE - 0
Virtual monitors will now allocate when you attempt to launch a Win32 application in Windows Mixed Reality instead of pre-allocating. To reset this and re-enable virtual monitor pre-allocation, return the DWORD “Value data” to 1.
From: Windows Mixed Reality and the new Microsoft Edge - Mixed Reality | Microsoft Learn
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I kinda played with something similar. At least reducing my main (and only) screen rez. Window’s gave me grief though. However this was like a year+ ago. Might help (make it easier) if I cleaned up my Desktop too 
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Yeah, try that registry PreallocateVirtualMonitors = 0 thingy and see if the Win+P works - I’ve sort of got into the habit of doing it before putting the headset on, but it could be a nice bite of placebo as well of course.
I should really make this its own topic, but I guess people following the Reverb one are in to this sort of stuff to try.
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Yes, now that you mention it, that was how I solved an ugly issue way back then - Iwas getting 4 displays being reported when I’d plug the headset in, but I only have 1 monitor and the headset. And it was intermittent ta boot… I’d forgotten about that. I’ll check out the other.
I also found it stopped WMR monkeying around with my desktop icon placement when the HMD virtual display kicked in, so if for nothing else it’s good for that. 
In the preview build for Win10 they’ve built it in as a toggle, so hopefully no more registry key stuff soon too.
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Oh I want them! No! I need them…
I am just amazed at the level of knowledge and the ability to convey that knowledge.
You’re truly gifted! I mean that.
Sorry! Ruined your t-shirt… 
And then consider the fact that metric is a standard… 
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One other thing worth a quick fiddle around with is that recent Nvidia drivers have been playing badly with VR. It seems people tend to roll back to the ‘pre HAGs’ feature they added (circa 451.48). Alternatively it’s worth trying disabling HAGs to see if it helps, but that hurts 2D games a bit:
Also, the hungry Win 10 ‘Game Mode’ bar overlay is generally terrible news for VR, so worth switching off:
The Nvidia recent drivers are bad in VR is sort of shown as lag spikes, and is well documented (and acknowledge by Nvidia as a ‘Known Issue’) here:
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This is the way.
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I did try the “HAG” thing, on then off. I recall noticing, in DCS/VR, Off = better. OTW, I’ve not had any issues with the latest drivers. it stays Off now.
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I found use for this photo twice in the same day!
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Will give this a whirl tomorrow and report back.
You know I never looked, but it does look like it’s one of those Win10 things that’s not really very good. The conclusion of these benchmarks below:
Based on our previous results and findings, we do not recommend enabling HAGS in its current state, since we did not find any significant improvement both in terms of raw performance and frametimes stability, and we also find certain cases of significant regressions in frametimes consistency. This leads us to think that the full implementation and success of this OS feature are yet to come.
That said, the HAGS feature is still quite promising, and we encourage you to do your own tests to see how it works with your gaming rig and set of favorite games.
I think the only game I saw a slight benefit was Death Stranding, but that’s gone from the ol drive (review: good but weird, if you’ve ever want to be a post-apocalyptic horror wasteland UPS guy then you’ll love it), so HAGs be gone seems to be the way to go.
I have spoken.
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For all its warts, WMR does seem to be progressing at a steady pace and with fairly frequent updates…which is really nice. The more they can put into the UI instead of editing cfg files, the better. Of course, 24 hours after everyone is happy, Steam, MS, or HP will decide…hey…we’ve decided to go to a negative .5 multiplier so that we trick people into undersamping to provide better performance…so now we are going to need you to 2x the Steam SS…etc…etc…etc… The progress is awesome…but keeping up with where the goalposts are is difficult when you step away for a few months.
That’s why we have you… 
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I thought RTX enabled Minecraft and Beat Sabre were the only two benchmarks we are supposed to use…
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Minecraft in RTX is crazy. It renders in 4k x 8 (!) resolution using DLSS and the ray tracing is actually very pretty.
I mean it’s minecraft, so I thought it was just an elaborate joke, but…
Maybe with a 3090 I’ll be able to get a solid 60 fps. The world has gone mad!
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Haha…yeah…I said it tongue in cheek…but I noticed it was the banner advertisement in the new NVidia drivers splash screen as I was updating drivers a couple days ago…so I figured it was one of those sneaky, high process programs that actually benefits from the computational power that RTX brings to the table. Funny how all those little blocks can be so demanding!
My boys will probably love it on their new computers…they like it on Switch, so they will really dig it on the PC…
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All this talk about Frankenstein and the way had me reminiscing.
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I got suspicious right after I saw that the video is called ‘VR DREAM TEAM - …’
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