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All your VRAM are belong to us
🕑 Added 2025-10-06 19:43:33 +0000 UTCThis is a maintenance release.
A few people have been reporting crashes and/or dramatic performance drops (down to 2-10 fps) with games like Watch Dogs: Legion and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, especially with Pimax headsets.
A sudden plunge to slideshow-range fps, with the game becoming unresponsive and possibly causing a driver timeout and reset (TDR event), which might even bring down the whole system with a BSoD... almost always all of that is triggered by the game wanting to allocate more video memory than your graphics card has.
This is called VRAM thrashing, and it's the result of bad programming. Windows offers a robust way for games to know at each moment how much VRAM your system has, how much of it is free, what is the maximum amount that can be reserved for the game, how many MBs the other applications in the system are using, and so on and so forth. Just by paying heed to that feedback mechanism, games could "play nice" and never become VRAM-devouring black holes into which your whole system gets sucked, orbiting slower and slower until only a reboot can restore normal operation.
But more and more frequently I have been seeing games just pretend that information doesn't exist, and happily go on allocating video memory in huge amounts that depend only from the resolution you're playing at and from static parameters like the texture quality you've chosen, completely disregarding the state of the system at runtime. Even the VRAM guard I implemented a few months ago gets defeated with this titles, as the engine just won't heed its recommendations.
This problem is made much more evident with VR mods (compared to playing in 2D) because the VR runtime itself needs a consistent amount of VRAM to function properly, and because we employ super-high resolutions that flat players don't usually need.
In particular with my mods, you might find that if you set the PPD slider to very high values, when you apply the new resolution the game immediately slows down to a crawl and you might even not be able to bring the slider back because the user interface is no longer responding.
Or, which is even more frustrating, if you have a powerful GPU and a wide-FOV headset like most Pimax models, the mod might try to resize the game on startup to a resolution which is already high enough to trigger VRAM thrashing, so you cannot even get into the game to dial down the PPD.
Release 24.1.0 of the R.E.A.L. VR mod implements two new safeguards to try and prevent this startup loop of death. First, no matter how powerful your GPU is, the mod will no longer attempt to automatically resize the game window to resolutions larger than 4096x4096 pixels upon launch. You can still select them once you're in game of course, for example by using the PPD slider for titles in which it is supported, but it will no longer happen before you can even gain control of the game. And second, the PPD value you choose when you apply a new custom resolution from the mod overlay will not be saved to disk immediately, but only after the game has been able to sustain a minimum of 30 fps for at least 5 seconds at the new resolution. This should avoid the pitfall where you select a resolution so high that the game starts VR thrashing, and you can't dial it down because the UI is unresponsive, but the value has already been persisted to the RealVR.ini file so the next time you launch the title it will immediately resize up and begin VRAM thrashing again.
Thank you for your logs and bug reports, and let's always keep the VR torch ablaze!!!
Comments
Brandon(Post Maester)
What kind of resolution are you getting with the super set to 35PPD? I am guessing that is already pretty high? You could try lowering game settings like textures or things that also use up extra VRAM. 50PPD seems very much out of the question unless you go with a small fov. Probably even then but that would get you closer. I can push 40PPD in Cyberpunk on my Aero but that is not happening on my Crystal Light. Looks like the super has a max resolution of something like 6240 × 6280 after accounting for distortion etc. Don't know if that is accurate, but that would be out of the reach of a 5090 without using all the assistance of upscaling, foveated rendering and quad views etc. All we have is upscaling. High resolution with a large fov is like a double whammy on performance, just not very practical in terms of running AAA games modded into VR. The extra fov of the Crystal Light over the Aero for example, doesn't make me forget I am wearing a headset at all. I think high resolution but small form factor with moderate fov would end up being the best experience overall but that is my opinion 🤷♂️ Yeah, the Pimax Sharpen slider messes up 1/3 for me but 1/2 seems to work just fine. I suppose if I set the CL to less than 90hz it would probably have the same issue with 1/2 but I haven't tried it yet. I didn't have any issue with 1/2 at 90fps when using Pimax sharpening though. There are other sharpening options usually, outside of Pimax software, so not a big deal really.
Côte d’Fromage
Hi, I have a few notes on getting Pimax headsets up and running that might be helpful (and a question about the VRAM issue). I recently replaced my aging Varjo Aero (auto-IPD adjustment broke) with a Pimax Crystal Super. The resolution is a big step up from the Aero, but, as is typical with Pimax products, the setup is quite finicky and time consuming. I was able to get it working eventually (for now, we'll see if it's stable over the next few weeks!). Here's what worked for me: I used the Meta Link app to switch the Pimax Play app to the Oculus runtime, as recommended in other posts. This allowed Cyberpunk to start, but there was an issue with AER specifically. The left eye was fine, but the right eye flickered continuously and annoyingly. Adjusting the AER rate could reduce the flickering but not eliminate it. Switching to Legacy AER did resolve the flickering, but that's not a great solution since new AER feels much smoother. What seems to have resolved the issue was to switch the runtime back to the Pimax runtime, and then make sure that ALL Pimax Play visual options are unchecked or zeroed out. I found it necessary to not only turn off Quad Views foveated rendering and Pimax center frame rendering, but also to completely zero out the Pimax "Sharpness" slider, which defaulted to a nonzero value. The flickering was not resolved until I figured out that the sharpness slider is also a problem for AER. The reason I had to switch back to the Pimax runtime instead of staying with the Meta Link app's Oculus runtime is that in Pimax Play, when running with the Oculus runtime, the Quad Views tick box was greyed out, but it seems it was secretly still on. Switching back to the Pimax runtime un-greyed that tick box and revealed that it was still on, so I was then able to un-tick it. So far, the Pimax runtime seems to be working fine. There is still one issue (assuming the AER issue doesn't come back - maybe I'll be back in a few days asking for help!). It doesn't seem to be possible to go above 35 PPD without hitting the VRAM issue mentioned in this post. In fact, I got an explicit "out of VRAM" crash error, and that's with a 5090! Is there a way to mitigate this VRAM issue? Or plans for a future fix in the mod? Not being able to fully get to the 50 PPD (using lots of DLSS of course) does kind of defeat the main point of the headset.
Brandon(Post Maester)
Not that I am aware of without Luke doing it. I don't think he is going to do that because it would be a lot of work and probably require other things to get it working properly :)
Disco Dan
Hi guys, Is there a way to attach the guns & flashlight to the 6dof camera? It would fix the alignment issue when aiming up and down.
Jonathan Tate
Hmm, unfortunately didn't work for me. It said it downloaded correctly but the mod is still only displaying as a 2d screen.
Yaroslav Barsukov
For the fellow Indiana Jones sufferers: here are the commands you need to run in Steam Console to get the files for the previous version back: download_depot 2677660 2677661 7298743806437998279 1999141654808281226 download_depot 2677660 2677662 554553497718773579 4167436913423331792 (the commands won't download the files directly into the game folder, but rather into 2 new folders located under [steam]/SteamApps/content/app_2677660/depot_2677661/ and [steam]/SteamApps/content/app_2677660/depot_2677662/) The first one downloads the resources (the "base" folder), the second one will get you the executables. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! In case you've already played the October 10 version, your save will be incompatible. You can try rolling back (Main Menu --> Game Slots --> Save Rollback) if one of the older saves was made before October 10. To get the newest version back, simply do the "Verify Integrity of Game Files" from Indy's Steam menu.
Brandon(Post Maester)
Very unlikely but you never know ;) Luke tried quite a while ago but said it was a huge mess to try and mod.
Grzegorz Choszcz
Sorry for off topic - The Witcher 3 - when?
Andrew
I've been able to decrypt most of the folder names luckily but what does GRHEL stand for? There is nothing in the SPIDEY Folder. Thanks
michael whatley
sorry just going to bed midnight uk time i have fixed watch dogs legion on premix crystal light. i deleted my save files in my user dir C:\Users\mwhat\Documents\My Games\Watch Dogs Legion after that it worked fine but all your saved games will be lost
