How To: Improve Performance With LIV

Despite our best efforts to make LIV as lean as possible on your already overburdened systems, some of you may still experience performance issues. It could be that your PC hardware just isn't powerful enough to do VR & LIV together - However, there are a few settings that could (and should!) be tweaked, if possible.

High Impact

  • Double-check that your SteamVR render resolution is on Custom and set to 100%. You typically don't want to be supersampling when using LIV (although you technically could, with the right hardware), but you especially don't want to let SteamVR auto-supersample for you as its algorithm doesn't account for LIV running alongside your game.

  • Lower LIV's target resolution. This is the resolution LIV will be rendering at and has a significant impact on performance.

  • Set the vrserver, vrcompositor, vrmonitor, and OBS processes to high priority in Windows Task Manager → Details.

Medium Impact

  • Change the encoder in OBS from x264 to NVENC. This greatly reduces the load on your CPU.

  • If you're using Streamlabs OBS (SLOBS) to capture the LIV output, consider switching to regular OBS as SLOBS' CPU usage is significantly higher.

  • Make sure you use "Game Capture" to capture the LIV output window as it is the most performant capture option. From most performant to least: Game Capture > Window Capture >>> Display Capture.

  • If you're using a Kinect as a camera source, ChromaFree (our tool for background removal) is a bit heavy on your CPU/GPU and is still undergoing some optimization on our end.

    If you have an iOS device with an A12 processor or higher you can use our app LIV Camera to record yourself with background removal and better performance.

Low Impact

  • An unoptimized avatar will cause some extra load. You can test this by switching between your avatar and one of the default LIV ones.

    While not directly related to performance, storing an excessive amount of avatars can cause extremely long compositor loading times (we've had reports of it taking up to 1 minute).

Game-Specific Settings

  • Beat Saber
    Lower the desktop mirror quality
    Disable smoke
    Disable MSAA

Was this article helpful?
24 out of 28 found this helpful