Oculus Rift: A little trick to get better graphics than your card can handle.

Ace McPlane · January 10, 2018

ASW was created to make it so you could use an Oculus Rift with a lower end card,

but it also has another fun use.

You can get much higher graphics settings with it on, but you need to use something to monitor FPS to make sure you're not dropping below 45 FPS and causing compositor frame drops.

You can use the tray tool for that.

There are HUD's for monitoring things.

The performance hub shows FPS on the left, your performance headroom on the right and application/compositor frame drops up top.

.First turn ASW on 45 FPS and then back to auto to make sure it's activated.

.Enable the performance HUD.

.Put on your VR headset and crank the settings in your game.

.Walk around and keep your eye on the FPS. If it drops to 45 fps that's ASW kicking in.. if it drops below that, you need to lower some settings and try again.

.After you're done with that, you need to keep refining it a bit more. Now, memorize the compositor frame drop number, walk around in game for about 10 minutes and if you don't have any compositor frame drops, you're good to go. If you have 1 or 2 and you're an experienced VR user, it may not even bother you so that's personal preference, but you don't want a lot of them.

I get 1080ti level settings on my 1080 this way. I'm at about -10 to -20 performance headroom and I'm not getting a single drop or stutter.

I don't recommend this for new users though as if you're still getting used to VR, it may make you sick.

It apparently doesn't work as well on some cards as it does on others, but that's anecdotal so take that with a grain of salt.

This combined with a GPU overclock, can make a very big difference.

If you're getting drops no matter what you do, you likely have another problem going on that needs to be resolved like a botched driver update or a bad nvidia control panel setting.

Note: Compositor frame drops that happen between loading screens and when you first put your rift on don't count. Only ones that happen while in the game walking around do.