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  • Passthrough in Virtual Desktop

I have long been bummed that PCVR doesn't natively support passthrough to be able to use my GPU. However, I've been playing around with the Virtual Desktop app passthrough and, while a bit clunky, does work. The image quality is slightly better (I'm guessing because the application layers involved aren't optimized for this use-case), but you sacrifice some control over being able to control passthrough. I'm still testing parameter sets for optimized performance/quality, but here is what I have so far for anyone that is interested:

Sys specs: 3060ti, wifi 5ghz

virtual_desktop>Menu>Streaming:

  • vr Graph Quality: medium
  • VR Frame Rate: 90
  • Sharpening: 70%
  • VR bitrate: 120 (This setting tends to cause a lot of lag, start low and bump up)
  • VR Passthrough: enabled R: 0 B: 0 G:0 Similarity: 8% Smoothing: 0%
  • Gamma 1.0
  • Sync Spacewarp: disabled
  • Snapdragon on
  • rest of the boxes default

virtual_desktop>Menu>Settings
Didn't have too much effect on deoVR but I bumped the bitrate to 100mbps, lowered framerate to 72, boosted on, environment low. I think these settings are just for virtual desktop, but I hallucinate that if anything is running in the background it could be sucking up resources.

Then finally when you open up deo, everything will be passthrough. When you open a video I set the default contrast lower to get rid of the "fadedness" look then increase the brightness as needed to get the image back. You might also notice a contrast value (for me it's around -20% where passthrough turns of, I go to this point and +1 or +2 is perfect. It's a per video thing) Then you should be able to enable passthrough and adjust your RGB.

I stress that this isn't perfect and I don't think it's officially supported, but fun to play with anyway. I do believe there are tweaks (especially to the RGB settings in vr desktop settings) to make this better. Enjoy!