Hi OrthicViper.

Are you aware of Motion Smoothing?
Did you disable VSync?

Its important to do this because the engine syncs to the monitor and not the HMD. In nVidia control panel under "manage 3d settings" you could sometimes force VSync off there if you dont get your desired results inside the game.

Some games might not work properly no matter what you do. In my experience it is rare though. Sometimes legacy reprojection also makes a difference.

FYI While you are in game with Katanga you can hold the select button on a xBox remote to access the SteamVR dashboard (unless you deactivated the default setting). From here you could access to settings more user friendly. There are two settings icons in here at the bottom of bar for Mixed Reality but should be the same for the index. Settings icon and Mixed Reality / ValveIndex icon.

I've tried so many settings including the ones I mentioned with SteamVR's motion smoothing off and on each time I changed something on HelixVision. I've had v-sync off the entire time on the game and on the nvidia settings. I never tried legacy reprojection but I will but I doubt it will fix the problem.

I tried legacy reprojection and that didn't help. I tried playing Strider on 1280x720 and 1920x1080 set from the in-game options with the helixvision VR Profile resolution also set to match and the frame rate setting there limited to full followed by half for the refresh rates of 120hz and 144hz. On 1920x1080 fpsVR reports Katanga has a CPU frame time of 1ms and GPU frame time of 3-4 ms. Still appears so jittery. Is my visual system not compatible with microstutters or something going on with how HelixVision works?

Are you using Super Sampling? Try lowering this a bit.
Your power management is set to performance in the control panel? I've forgotten about this before and it make a huge difference.
Not a 100% sure how this works but you could play around with Virtual Reality pre rendered frames in the control panel too. This could eliminate double rendered frames and reduce stuttering.
Do you use on-board USB3 or do you use PCIe for USB3?
I know in the beginning I had serious trouble with this because my PCIe card's usb3 ports didnt function properly because of the drivers. So i got another one from Amazon that fixed the problem. You might want to go to your motherboard's website and make sure you have the latest drivers for USB. Try another USB3 port.
Also, what windows are you using? There were some improvements from from 1809 upwards.

The other option you could try is to set a custom resolution and refresh rate in the control panel that matches your HMD. But you need to be careful here. I got a custom resolution of 3150x2000@90hz to register. But when you activate this in game your monitor will go out of range. But in your HMD it would still work. When you do it on your desktop you might need to restart to get it working again. Or you need to use a different port or cable (from display port to HDMI or vice versa) to bypass restarting. Never do this on your desktop. Only in game. Its just important to get the custom resolution/refresh rate to register then you could use it in game. Your monitor will come back in range when you exit the game.

You might also want to use DDU to refresh your drivers if you haven't already. Just be aware that you need to back your profiles up otherwise all your custom settings will be gone. Are all the games performing the same? If so, there might be a driver/software problem.

I started using this with a 1080ti and think it was the perfect place to start. It is almost twice the speed of a 1070. I also owned a 1070 before the 1080ti. Think the 1070 is the bare minimum.

I don't believe SteamVR uses a setting called super sampling unless that is what the render resolution deals with. I tried setting that around 1280x720. I have tried VR pre-rendered frame settings of 1-4. I had already added custom resolutions of 80, 90, 120 and 144hz for my monitor. As for the USB settings I don't think they would help since my VR performance is good outside of HelixVision. Geforce 1080 Ti is only ~40% faster than what I got but maybe it is enough to fix things but with how much I reduced details already and even tried a simple game like Strider I don't think performance is the issue. I last updated windows 10 which I am using just within the past few weeks. My PC also is also set for performance and not power saving.

I tried Portal 2 and it was the first time I saw any game look very smooth on HelixVision but the GPU and CPU frame time was nearly the same as what I could get on Yakuza and Strider and yet those two games were very jittery. Although when I looked at a portal my frame rate would get like 4x worse and the game animated very jittery.

What is the correct way to measure if your games on HelixVision are getting a sufficient frame rate?

I was under the impression that Custom resolution multiplier is SS. That is in the video tab of settings. You can do it per application.

The only game I'm really having serious trouble with stuttering where I tried every trick in the book was Remember Me. I know for sure it is something to do with Katanga/Helixmod because there are no issues in 3d vision or Tridef.

Not sure how the Index operates. Someone with the same HMD needs to chime in. I'm on mixed reality. So the software is Mixed reality for SteamVR.

I've mentioned everything i ran into myself. If no one sees your problem start a topic for the Index. Someone might notice it who knows exactly what you are experiencing. It appears there might be a bottleneck somewhere. DDU improved matters for me before. Have you tried 425 driver yet? Can tell you in the beginning it takes some time to set it up correctly and you need to experiment a lot. This is not plug and play even though I know that's where they aim. After a year of using this there are still valuable things I learn. Think there needs to be posts pinned on tips for every headset at the top here.

Do you own 3dvision? You could use HelixVision with regular 3dV too. That has also helped me before where Anaglyph failed in performance. But don't ask me why. Believe it has something to do with full screen optimisation.

Did you try to disable full screen optimization? Its a windows feature and you disable it in the properties of the game exe file as far as i know.

For jitter that you see in the HelixVision environment, that can happen if the Katanga app is being starved of GPU resources. Check your GPU usage while running, and make sure you are not topping out your GPU at 100%. You need a little headroom for the Katanga environment, and a good target is to leave 5% GPU free.

We actually want vsync to be on in games typically, because if the game is free running, then it can use up all GPU resources and starve the Katanga app. However, we don't generally expect this to matter because we apply the MaxFrameRate at 1/2 the HMD frequency, so the game should be running at 1/2 the Index. If you've set the Index to 80, the game should run at 40.

Check your frame rates with Steam overlay, or maybe Afterburner and make sure the game is being capped at a reasonable frame rate. What you see with Katanga taking 1ms per frame is about right, and normal operation.

What driver are you running? As noted, it can possibly be worth doing a DDU reinstall of the driver. On fairly rare scenarios people have run into performance problems with drivers that are subtly corrupted.


For your hardware configuration, I'd recommend setting the game itself to 720p to start with.

Set your SuperSampling (steam resolution) to 100%. An Index is a very high resolution headset and the 1070ti is probably not quite enough to drive SuperSampling at a higher value. It might even be worth trying under-sampling at 85%, at least for experiments.

Set the HMD to 90 Hz as a way to lower the GPU requirements. 80 would also be OK, but it should be fine at 90, with the game itself running at 45 with the max frame rate specified in the VR Display Profile. 120 would be pushing it too hard with a 1070ti, and unlikely to be successful.

One thing that we don't make sufficiently clear is that when you are running a game in HelixVision the game itself will require 2x the performance that it does in 2D. 3D Vision creates a stereo image by drawing each eye separately, and that second eye costs the same in terms of performance. Since you can get 240 in 2D, that should still be fine here at 120- higher than the needed 90.

Start with those settings as a reasonable compromise of quality vs. performance and check if you've got some GPU headroom left. If you do, you can then tweak some parameters up to improve the quality. Most noticeable impacts will be from SS, then game resolution.

I decided to look up the single threaded benchmark scores for the i7-7700k and compare them to the top offering from Intel and AMD and a theoretical processor that might work good with this game (since it seems mine will not) and what it would need to score at a minimum.

i7-7700k score: 2,764
Ryzen 7 5800x score: 3,515
i9-11900k score: 3,764
Theoretical Yakuza 0 HelixVision Edition CPU: 4,146

Since the i7-7700k released in January 2017, I guess I still have some years of waiting. And yeah, must be the CPU I need to upgrade since my GPU usage looked like it didn't need over 60% utilization. I will call AMD and Intel with my findings on this matter and let them know of this issue. I am sure they will address Yakuza 0's performance with great urgency.

Thank you masterotaku for filling in the gaps here. I did not realize Yakuza was CPU bound at this level.

As an additional note- 3D Vision itself makes a CPU bound situation worse, because the doubling of the drawing for the second eye can make the bottleneck worse. So it can sometimes be worse than a 50% frame rate hit like here. GTA5 suffers from the same problem, closer to a 70% frame rate hit. This is the misnamed 3-core bottleneck.

If your GPU is only at 60% that seems clearly to be CPU bound. You might try to find in-game settings that make less work for the CPU. Like draw distance, fewer NPCs, things like that.


One thing that can help for HelixVision in particular is to set the frame rate limit to 30, or 1/3 of your HMD frequency. Or with the flexibility of the Index, find an even divisor of the frame rate is a consistent frame rate. You might be able to run at 40 fps without stutter for example, and could then use 1/2 of the 80.

Try setting it as low as 30 with a HMD frequency of 90. That sounds terrible, but in practice I found it to make the game play much smoother and more compelling in other games like Fallen Order. The stutter and frequency drops and beat frequencies tend to be a worse experience than a lower frame rate.

But everyone is different, you may not find it acceptable. For 3D Vision in particular, there is a tradeoff between quality versus performance, and it's worth experimenting to find the spot that works best for you.