What is your startup guide to running VaM through the G2, and what are your VaM in-game settings if you don't mind me asking? I hated running WMR through SteamVR and felt like it brung my FPS to crawl. Something I never really got on the Q2. Am I doing something wrong?
When you say "Something I never really got on the Q2", are you saying that on the same scene moment and POV, you have a big FPS difference between a Q2 and a G2? I wouldn't expect this to be the case, please confirm your meaning.
My settings for the Pico are the same I had for the G2, and they're pretty close to the default options, just slightly higher. With a good system, which you have, these don't have much impact, and the major changer is the Render Scale. Mine's at 1, 100% the resolution of the monitor/headset.
There's many ways to mess around with the performance/visuals, in and out of VaM, but I think the most important is establishing a reasonable expectation. A rule of thumb is that if on desktop mode you get X FPS on a scene, the same scene using a headset like the Q/G2 will be around half the FPS. While on desktop you have to render for one HD screen, on a headset it's two screens, expecting fewer FPS from that extra work. It's a rule of thumb, different hardware will change a lot but you get the general sense of it.
The good thing about this "rule" is that you don't have to bother with a specific VR headset to get an idea of what you might get from it. The Q2 and G2 are close enough in terms of resolution to be considered the same in terms of GPU demands, being the G2 the higher resolution one. If you were to get a Quest 1 with a much lower resolution, your FPS would be much higher but the visuals would suck. You can have the same effect by reducing the output resolution of the headsets you have, either with Render Scale or in SteamVR, or both. Your FPS will be better but everything looks worse, but sometimes on really heavy scenes this could be usueful to do temporarily.
Here's your homework, run a few typical scenes in desktop and average how they perform, that's your baseline. With a VR headset expect around half. This baseline works if you have a single monitor, Full HD or even 4K, but dual screens, 8K, 70" stuff will naturally distort the comparison basis.
If you find that your FPS in desktop are pretty shit, then it doesn't matter your VR headset choices, there's work to be done in your VaM. Actually, there's always work to be done in VaM, what you have on a scene can wildly change your performance, that's why it's better to try multiple scenes. This can be a whole topic, so I'm stopping for now.
So, back to WMR and SteamVR with a G2. Honestly, I don't see much of a performance difference between using the G2 with SteamVR and the PIco with Virtual Desktop (OpenVR or whatever). The main issues I had was the occasional SteamVR update that would crash VaM, that was the biggest gripe. All good for months, then comes one update that takes a week to get it back working again.
You want there to be sure you have the output resolution in the SteamVR settings to be 100% of your G2 max resolution, more than that will increase the GPU demands. You can also go lower, but you'll be reducing the visuals, I left it at 100%. Do check if the resolution stated there is correct, in case SteamVR thinks you have another device, the G2's are 2160 px squares.
Ok, this is already quite big of a reply and that's because there's so many possible things to discuss. Let me know if anything here is helpful and where more focus should go.
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