Nvidia Users: Low Latency Mode and VR Prerendered Frames

[TheBalt]

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to make a post regarding this to any Nvidia users. Personally – Im on a very weak card compared to standards nowadays, a GTX 780 TI. I still manage to get games to run well enough on lower settings but I really decided to experiment with Low Latency Mode and VR Prerendered frames in the Nvidia Control Panel and my performance has shot up exponentially.. maybe there might be some input lag, but I was playing The Sinking City at like 720p and barely pulling off 45 frames minimum for timewarp; I went in and put low latency mode to “on” and VR Prerendered frames to “2” and now the game is running totally smooth at 1080p pulling 45 FPS for timewarp with basically no framerate drops.

Now i dont know how much this will help other users, I just wanted to point it out, considering how weak my card is I imagine alot of you dont have a need for this, but, if you wanted to squeeze out some extra performance from your pc, this might be an avenue you could take. I mean it literally took Sinking City from 720p with low/medium settings to 1080p with High/Medium settings and it wasnt even running smooth at 720p, now its basically flawless at 1080p with increased settings..

So just wanted to point it out to anyone who wanted to give it a try.

You access Nvidia control panel from your desktop with a Right Click. Click Nvidia Control Panel. Once its open go to “Manage 3d Settings” and then click the tab for “Program Settings”… youll have to add the .exe of the game, but if youve recently played it, hit the “add” button and it should list your recent games youve launched, or just select the browse button and find the .exe in your PC.

Once youve done that, go to Low Latency Mode and VR Prerendered frames and fiddle with them a bit. Low Latency is off by default, I just switched it to “on” for now, there is an ultra setting but I was happy enough with my performance increase to not fiddle with it anymore. Then towards the bottom is VR Prenndered frames and I set that to “2”. At the bottom will be the “apply” button, select that before closing the window.

I actually didnt just see a performance increase with Sinking City, I did it in the Surge as well and same thing, went from a lower resolution with low/medium settings to 1080p with medium/high settings and more antialiasing to smoothen the picture.

Just wanted to point this out to any ‘low power’ users like myself.. not gonna lie, its like having a whole different graphics card. And i was playing the Surge with it and the ‘input’ or ‘latency’ lag they warn about was indecipherable to me. Might make a difference in a fighting game or something but it worked plenty smooth for the surges relatively quick combat.

Well, just wanted to point that out in case anyone wanted to give it a shot – you can easily revert these settings by just going back into the Nvidia control panel and setting it all back to default if it doesnt work for you.

Good luck, hope it helps somewhat for anyone trying to get smoother framerate and increase your settings on top of it

[angelayla]

Thanks for the information, I’m going to try!

[TheBalt]

angelayla wrote:

Thanks for the information, I’m going to try!

The effect mightve been primarily from the vr prerendered frames now, im not sure. I did a full reinstall of windows recently so everything got reset to standards, i saw the low latency thing and clicked it on and did the vr prerendered frames and saw an improvement… but the description for low latency sounds counter intuitivie to the effect i was having. So im not sure if that option is necessary, but really, saw a def improvement for some reason, may have been the prerendered frames primarily though. but really did go from barely 720p playable – low settings low anti aliasing in sinking city to 1080p with anti aliasing and medium/litte bit of high and rock solid for some reason when i was dipping at 720p

[dborosev]

Thanks for the info. May try it out if things get sloggy one day.

[zeveral]

Just an FYI, NVidia’s Low Latency Mode is the same thing as AMD’s Anti-Lag option. Both reduce the number of pre-rendered frames on the CPU before that information gets sent to the GPU. It’s basically just a fancy name for the (now removed) maximum pre-rendered frames option that used to be in the driver.

The main purpose of the option is to cut down on input lag, but it has the added benefit of increasing the framerate in a lot of cases (not all), especially when you have a high end CPU and a mid-range GPU. On a high end GPU you’ll definitely get better response times, you just might not get as much of a framerate boost. The major downside is because there’s little to no buffer with the option turned on, you can end up with stuttering in the game if the CPU isn’t able to get frames to the GPU fast enough.

I’d recommend turning the option on on a game by game basis, turning it on globally is probably a bad idea (really, turning any driver option on globally is a bad idea).

The VR pre-rendered option works much in the same way, but I’m not sure how vorpx interacts with that part of the driver (if at all). Generally speaking though, you want the option set as low as possible.

[TheBalt]

I think this mightve been why i saw a boost – i have a low end card, 780 ti, but my cpu is decent, i7 4930k. that would make some sense why i saw a little performance kick up then, thanks for the explanation!

[Destroy]

There are so many options settings nowadays, it really is confusing what to turn on or off.

Thanks for the tip.

[RJK_]

@TheBalt

Which driver version are you running ?

[Dave]

thx, i will try it in Fallout 76 (G3D) with the newest nvidia driver !

[Ogrescar]

The default nVidia setting for VR pre-rendered frames is 1. That’s generally considered to be stupid and should be changed to “use the 3d application setting”, or at least a value greater than 1. Unless you like stuttering.

[zig11727]

Question

Increasing pre-rendered frames also increases lag
So if running low latency on ultra pre-rendered frames shouldn’t be more than 1.

[Ogrescar]

I’d think that ultra low latency would override the setting for pre-rendered frames. I don’t know why you’d want to run a headset with ultra low latency turned on though.

Since I changed pre-rendered frames from the default value, I get better framerates, practically no stuttering, and can run games at higher resolutions (including 4K, which was impossible before).

Anyway, my cpu/gpu don’t like the default value. Years from now, perhaps decades, when the mythical RTX 3080 emerges from the shadows, I may change it back.

[zig11727]

The reason to ultra low latency is when using Virtual Desktop Wireless to steam PCVR games to Quest 2.

[Ogrescar]

I’m certainly not an expert on the matter, but from what I’ve read, the latency settings are not very effective when compared to other methods of reducing latency, like capping your framerate to prevent the gpu from getting overloaded.

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