Extremely poor performance above minimum requirements

[Gorman Freedon]

I've been able to launch the game, but it has never run smoothly for more than just a moment before devolving into a slideshow. I'm running the game on a laptop with an Intel Core i7 1200H, a laptop RTX 3050 Ti (4 GB), and 16 GB RAM. It's worth noting that I'm playing the game on the Meta Quest 2 via link cable. I've read the FAQ on the mod website and as per its instructions for laptops with multiple GPUS, I've ensured that the drivers for both my integrated and dedicated graphics are updated (driver version 32.0.101.6299 for my Intel Iris Xe iGPU, NVidia Game Ready Driver version 566.14) and have also tried launching the game after disabling my iGPU in device manager and restarting. I've read that this game tends to be bottenecked by single core CPU performance, but when opening task manager to check diagnostics while on the main menu, my CPU seemed to be fine while my 3050 Ti was at near 100% utilization. I'm frankly not very familiar with how my setup should be performing with VR, so if this is perhaps a result of my VRAM bottleneck, I'll just wait until I get better hardware.

[John Helldiver]

Are other VR games, or even SteamVR Home, lagging too? Can you check your SteamVR Resolution for HL2 VR Mod? Someone else had a similar issue a few months ago and their resolution scale was almost at max which was causing the problem.

[Gorman Freedon]

Originally posted by VΛLKYRIΞ:

Are other VR games, or even SteamVR Home, lagging too? Can you check your SteamVR Resolution for HL2 VR Mod? Someone else had a similar issue a few months ago and their resolution scale was almost at max which was causing the problem.

I did in fact have my resolution scale set to 100% (1568x1568), and just played for a few minutes at a smooth 72 FPS after turning it down to 50% for the sake of testing. This is the first SteamVR game I've tried playing on this laptop, so I'm not sure if it's generally expected that I should need to set this value well below 100%, but this should suffice for the time being. Thanks for the response!

[John Helldiver]

Originally posted by Gorman Freedon:

Originally posted by VΛLKYRIΞ:

Are other VR games, or even SteamVR Home, lagging too? Can you check your SteamVR Resolution for HL2 VR Mod? Someone else had a similar issue a few months ago and their resolution scale was almost at max which was causing the problem.

I did in fact have my resolution scale set to 100% (1568x1568), and just played for a few minutes at a smooth 72 FPS after turning it down to 50% for the sake of testing. This is the first SteamVR game I've tried playing on this laptop, so I'm not sure if it's generally expected that I should need to set this value well below 100%, but this should suffice for the time being. Thanks for the response!

Glad that worked! I'm not familiar with how powerful the 3060 is but if I recall I was having similar problems in the past with other games with a 1070 and 3070ti. I can't recall which one specifically but maybe a 3060 in a laptop is power limited based on thermals or something. I'm honestly not sure but what I would do is test it with other games and see if you get similar results. Hope you enjoy the game!

One other thing that might make the experience better is switching the Quest 2 to 90hz or 120hz and see if your device can run it at those speeds. Its been a while since I've used my Quest 2 so idk if you still need to manually switch the refresh rate over but 72hz sounds like one of the lower ones. If your GPU isn't maxed at 72hz maybe try that or increasing the resolution scaling a bit and see how that goes.