VR Preview not working/lagging/crashing

Hello guys. I am just starting a project for VR and have stumbled across severe technical difficulties as I have literally just started to learn UE 5.

There are two parts to my problem. My first problem is upon creating a project with VR Template, I ran the VR Preview, the HMD (Pimax 8kX) goes to the blank SteamVR Grid screen and displays nothing after that and I have no idea how to make anything display. The 3DOF of the headset works with the game window open, it’s just that the screen is not displaying the actual content.

My second problem is if I create a blank project (scalable quality preset), then the VR preview works. BUT, upon EXITING the preview, everything starts to lag and become unresponsive. If I change the blank project to (maximum quality preset) then UE 5 just crashes immediately after exiting the VR preview with the error (requested texture2d x size too large: 21152, Max: 16384). And I also have noticed every time after exiting VR Preview (with a blank project, not VR template) my GPU (RTX 3080) is at 100% usage even with SteamVR closed (this is causing the lag and crashes I’m guessing?), with just the editor open.

If anyone can tell me what I’m doing wrong then that is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Try disabling SteamVR, or uninstalling it completely. This worked for me recently after struggling to diagnose the issue.

I’m running into this also. It happens after I run my first PIE session. Did you solve it?

Two years on from the OP here and I’m seeing this on 5.1. I’m noticing that the rendering pipe isn’t actually clearing correctly and the headset is just reprojecting the last frame from before the preview was closed, and when observing the task manager afterwards, I see spikes in usage whenever I do anything that prompts the UI to redraw (essentially every action). I also see sporadic warnings for VRAM capacity limits being reached. My running theory is that this afflicts either pimax users specifically or steamvr users broadly and if I can make the preview disconnect correctly from the headset I can fix the issue.

(Translate by DeepSeek)
Hello, everyone!
I’m very excited to introduce to you how I solved the problem of extreme lag after the VR preview.
This problem seems to be caused by that, after VR Preview renders the image, for some reason, when exiting the VR preview mode, the last rendered frame will be used as a texture map of a material in the scene. The resolution of this material is quite large. On my computer, the default monocular resolution is over 4000*4000.
Although rendering such a texture map wouldn’t cause lag under normal circumstances, it DOES in VR scene.
The reason for this problem is a bit strange, and is worth further study later.

So, how can we solve the problem of the excessively large resolution? Where can we adjust this rendering resolution?
In SteamVR → three horizontal lines → Settings → Video → Monocular Resolution
Adjust this value to the lowest. It seems that this value doesn’t affect the clarity during development.
Then, close the UE Editor and restart it. Open the VR preview.
And then you’ll be surprised to find that the lag is gone!
This solution seems to reduce the resolution of the last frame from the previous preview rendered in the scene. This significantly reduces the video memory usage, making the editing process in the UE Editor run smoothly again.

(Chinese original)
大家好!
我非常激动地向各位介绍我如何解决了VR预览后的极端卡顿的问题
这个问题看上去是因为VR渲染出画面之后,因为某些原因,在退出预览后,会导致最后渲染出的帧作为场景中的一个材质的贴图使用。这个材质分辨率相当大,在我的电脑中单眼分辨率默认为超过4000*4000。虽然正常情况下渲染这样一个贴图不会卡顿,但是在VR场景中会,这个问题的原因有点奇怪,这个值得后续研究。
那么,如何解决这个分辨率过大的问题?
这个渲染分辨率在哪里调整?
在SteamVR->三条横线->设置->视频->单眼分辨率
调整这个的值到最低,似乎这个值并不影响开发时的清晰度。
然后,关闭UE Editor并重新启动,打开VR预览。
然后你就能惊讶的发现卡顿没有了!
这个解决办法似乎可以将场景中渲染的上次预览的最后一帧的画面分辨率也降低,这极大程度降低了显存的占用,使得UE Editor的编辑流畅度变得正常了