Playing PC games in Bigscreen

Playing games in Bigscreen is easy to do, but you may need to tweak your settings to get the best performance.

System/SteamVR Settings

The very first thing to check is your Windows power mode is set to High Performance rather than anything else such as Power Saver - these modes will dramatically inhibit performance, giving you poor framerates and choppy performance.



If you are using SteamVR, you will also want to double check your headset is running in Direct Mode - if it isn’t, your SteamVR will show a warning that performance may be degraded.

You can try toggle this by right clicking on SteamVR, choosing Developer and then picking Developer Settings. Select Enable Direct Display Mode and restart of SteamVR when prompted.

General Game Settings

It’s hard to cover every setting that might appear in your game, so here’s a set of common ones we tend to change:

• Anti-aliasing: The easiest target, as AA is the most GPU-intensive processing you can use. It’s also diminishing returns - right now AA is less useful as headsets have lower resolutions and you likely can’t see rough edges. We recommend disabling AA entirely inside your game.
  
• Supersampling: Also incredibly GPU-intensive, we recommend setting this to off or low.
  
• Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or 2560 x 1440. Higher resolutions will push your GPU to the limit.
  
• Post-processing: Disabled
  
• Effects: Medium
  
• Reflections: Off
  
• Vsync: Enabled
  
• Texture filtering: 8X or less
  
• Frame rate limit: 60

Leaving the frame rate uncapped will almost certainly cause you to have poor performance, as this results in the game using all the GPU power it can get, and not leaving enough for Bigscreen to render the screen in VR smoothly.

Bigscreen Settings

There’s a bunch of settings you can adjust in Bigscreen to optimize performance for games with higher demands, such as Overwatch.

The absolute best environment for performance focused gamers is Bigscreen’s Void environment - it’s optimized for playing in VR and has minimal effects. Others, such as Andromeda are marked with a green leaf and are optimized for gaming as well, but still have a performance impact.

We recommend working through these options, from top to bottom, but only once you’ve tried adjusting your game:

Anti-aliasing: Disable it entirely and you may see a marginal improvement in performance.

Supersampling: This method renders games at higher resolutions than are available, then down-samples the image to the native resolution of your headset. We recommend either 1.0x or 0.5x if your PC is unable to maintain a stable 60 FPS.

Other Software

f.lux: Some users have reported f.lux can interfere with performance, particularly as your game launches or adjusts window resolution. We recommend disabling it before jumping in, if this happens to you.

Game Specific Settings: Fortnite

Start up Fortnite and click the settings icon on the top right to get started.

We’re assuming you have a GTX 1060/1070 or higher, but even on our GTX 1080 which we used to test these settings Fortnite needed some tweaks out of the box. Make sure to play around and get it just right so you can game without worrying about frame rate!

Here’s our recommended settings to start with for Fortnite to get the best experience:

• Screen Mode: Full screen (be sure this isn't windowed)
  
• Resolution: 1920 x 1080
  
• 3D Resolution: 720p
  
• View Distance: Far
  
• Shadows: High
  
• Anti-aliasing: Medium
  
• Textures: High
  
• Effects: High
  
• Post-processing: Medium
  
• V-Sync: On
  
• Motion Blur: On
  
• Frame rate limit: 60

Once these are set, jump into the game within Bigscreen and see how it feels. It should be silky smooth, provided your graphics card meets the VR Ready specification.

If you notice poor performance, check you're in one of Bigscreen's game-optimized environments, such as Andromeda or Void before changing anything else.

Otherwise, troubleshoot by lowering these settings in Fortnite next:

• Anti-aliasing: Off
  
• Post-processing: Low
  
• Texture: Medium
  
• Effects: Medium
  
• Motion Blur: Off

[lepetitgamer666]

dont work steamVR says that I most connect my headset even if I use it to control the PC

[Ookami]

Go to Steam general settings or the settings for that specific game, and switch off steam theater mode

[Rukir Gaming]

Some games launch in Steam Theater mode, how to disable that?

[Zaerroeh]

For games that don't have a frame rate cap option or still seem to be hogging resources, you can try limiting the frame rate in the nvidia control panel on a per app basis. There are some other useful performance options in the nvidia control panel that are often not included in the in-game menus. As well as adjusting process priorities in your task manager if your cpu is the bottleneck, as is often the case with flight simulator.