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Despite our best efforts to make LIV as lean as possible on your already overburdened systems, some of you may still experience performance issues. It could be that your PC hardware just isn’t powerful enough to do VR & LIV together - However, there are a few settings that could (and should!) be tweaked, if possible. LIV’s performance cost is directly related to the game’s cost. LIV renders another viewport, then once more for the foreground (where it will only draw pixels between the player and camera). It’s about as optimized as we can get it while compositing the result outside of the game.

You might find that LIV just puts the game over its frametime budget, making it feel significantly worse, which is why we advise anyone filming with LIV to lower the HMD’s render resolution in order to get a smoother result overall. This will not affect the resolution of the LIV output as LIV captures footage from its own camera, rather than from what your HMD sees. High Impact
  • Double-check that your SteamVR render resolution is on Custom and set to 100%. You typically don’t want to be supersampling when using LIV (although you technically could, with the right hardware), but you especially don’t want to let SteamVR auto-supersample for you as its algorithm doesn’t account for LIV running alongside your game.
  • Lower LIV’s target resolution. This is the resolution LIV will be rendering at and has a significant impact on performance.
  • Set the vrserver, vrcompositor, vrmonitor, and OBS processes to high priority in Windows Task Manager → Details.
Medium Impact
  • Change the encoder in OBS from x264 to NVENC. This greatly reduces the load on your CPU.
  • If you’re using Streamlabs OBS (SLOBS) to capture the LIV output, consider switching to regular OBS as SLOBS’ CPU usage is significantly higher.
  • Make sure you use “Game Capture” to capture the LIV output window as it is the most performant capture option. From most performant to least: Game Capture > Window Capture >>> Display Capture.
  • If you’re using a Kinect as a camera source, ChromaFree (our tool for background removal) is a bit heavy on your CPU/GPU and is still undergoing some optimization on our end.
Low Impact
  • An unoptimized avatar will cause some extra load. You can test this by switching between your avatar and one of the default LIV ones. While not directly related to performance, storing an excessive amount of avatars can cause extremely long compositor loading times (we’ve had reports of it taking up to 1 minute).
Game-Specific Settings
  • Beat Saber Lower the desktop mirror quality Disable smoke Disable MSAA