Gaming How do I reduce my VR GPU load?

[Mama Dizzys]

GTX 1050
How do I reduce the load on my GPU when playing games on my Oculus Rift? When playing games with smaller areas (such as Job Simulator), My GPU usage hovers around 70% As for the larger games, my GPU is constantly at 100%, which absolutely kills performance. I have a lot of graphics settings turned way down, and the performance was actually way better a month ago than it is now, although I have no idea why

 

[FAST6191]

"and the performance was actually way better a month ago than it is now, although I have no idea why"

Check for dust in fans and such things, or hot spots in heatsinks. Such things can be pretty gradual as well. Also a month ago it was early April and while I don't know what the weather was like around you it was quite possibly colder than it is now.
Did the drivers update? A lot of the time older drivers play a bit fast and loose with things and then the fixes for crashes slow it back down. Ditto the games themselves.
Are updates being cued up to download? With the current thing for forced updates and Windows still not managing not to have a simple check and download process not be a system grinder then... yeah. Don't know what other background scans or optimisation tasks might be happening (indexing, virus scans, hopefully not defrag but who knows) but check for those as well.
What is your hard drive like? SSD ageing is a thing and if the textures are being thrown around a lot from the hard drive and back again.

 

[Joe88]

The problem is the 1050 isnt strong enough for VR, 1060 is required (rift website says min 1050ti)
There are games which are just poorly optimized for VR and others which are just way too resource intensive even for the min required hardware where you need a 2080ti to even run them at stable fps.

What larger games are we talking about?

 

[orangy57]

You could always try overclocking your GPU. A 1050 won't really cut it for big VR games, but an overclock can push you over the edge to be pretty playable.

 

[Mama Dizzys]

"and the performance was actually way better a month ago than it is now, although I have no idea why"

Check for dust in fans and such things, or hot spots in heatsinks. Such things can be pretty gradual as well. Also a month ago it was early April and while I don't know what the weather was like around you it was quite possibly colder than it is now.
Did the drivers update? A lot of the time older drivers play a bit fast and loose with things and then the fixes for crashes slow it back down. Ditto the games themselves.
Are updates being cued up to download? With the current thing for forced updates and Windows still not managing not to have a simple check and download process not be a system grinder then... yeah. Don't know what other background scans or optimisation tasks might be happening (indexing, virus scans, hopefully not defrag but who knows) but check for those as well.
What is your hard drive like? SSD ageing is a thing and if the textures are being thrown around a lot from the hard drive and back again.

Come to think of it, my fan has been acting different lately. Different in the sense that my keyboard is incredibly hot in the spot above the fan. It’s also shaking in the same spot.
I still have an HDD

 

[Edgarska]

Come to think of it, my fan has been acting different lately. Different in the sense that my keyboard is incredibly hot in the spot above the fan. It’s also shaking in the same spot.
I still have an HDD

So it's a laptop. That explains it.

 

[Mama Dizzys]

So it's a laptop. That explains it.

Can I just make one thread about my laptop where someone doesn’t say that?

 

[Edgarska]

Can I just make one thread about my laptop where someone doesn’t say that?

That's not me talking, it's basic principles of physics. You need a big heatsink and good airflow to cool a GPU properly, which is why expensive gaming laptops are huge, and even then they will never perform the same as the same desktop part.

 

[Mama Dizzys]

Just cleaned out my fan, that’s the most dust I’ve ever seen while cleaning it out

 

[Edgarska]

Just cleaned out my fan, that’s the most dust I’ve ever seen while cleaning it out

If it's dustier than before then something must have changed either in the laptop or your environment.
You can also try to replace the thermal paste in you GPU with better quality thermal paste, but that's not recommended unless you really know what you're doing, and accept the risks involved.
But in the end, the 1050, even the desktop variant, is below the minimum specs recommended for VR for all but the simplest games. I have tried it with a 1060, which is the minimum, and it was far from ideal, so in this case the only solution would be to lower the internal resolution, but it will obviously look awful.