VR on Mac with 5600m not currently possible. Worked on 5500m.

[Vic-Viper]

I'm a VR developer and wanted to point out some interesting things I found out about the 5600m GPU on the MacBook Pro 16" from 2020.

The 5500m in my last MacBook Pro worked fine with many VR platforms with limited performance. I upgraded to the 5600m to find it outperformed my "VR Ready" laptop in benchmarks. However, I came to find a fatal flaw with the 5600m with VR. It does NOT support Direct Display Mode. The GPU treats the headsets as external monitors and no amount of tweaking things made it any better.

Tried this with Rift, Rift S, and Valve Index.

Direct Display Mode takes VR content and renders it directly to the headset without Windows treating it as an additional monitor.

I've tried this with Windows 10 1903 and 2004.

I also tried force feeding the Red driver from April on the 5600m. It gave me the gamer options and reported the right number of cores, VRAM, memory type, but called it a 5500m instead of a 5600m.

None of this had any effect.

Now, I have every relevant VR HMD in at my studio so I'm happy to test any configuration if anyone has any ideas.

I've included a screenshot of the error message produced by SteamVR. It stays stuck in Extended Display Mode no matter what is changed in the settings.

 

[subjonas]

Oh that’s too bad to hear. Sorry, I can’t help, but I’m curious, you think it’s a hardware or software issue?

 

[anshuvorty]

Why even do VR on a mobile GPU? And, add to that, an AMD-based one too? It is going to be a horrible experience and doing it on a Mac will make it even more so...

 

[mattspace]

Why even do VR on a mobile GPU? And, add to that, an AMD-based one too? It is going to be a horrible experience and doing it on a Mac will make it even more so...

On a windows machine, a "mobile" Nvidia GPU is effectively the same as the desktop versions in terms of performance - all the VR developers I know use laptops.

But expecting any Apple product to be VR capable is a doomed endeavour.

 

[venom600]

Did you try with the new August Drivers that support the 5600M?

 

[KenaiTheWolf]

I'm a VR developer and wanted to point out some interesting things I found out about the 5600m GPU on the MacBook Pro 16" from 2020.

The 5500m in my last MacBook Pro worked fine with many VR platforms with limited performance. I upgraded to the 5600m to find it outperformed my "VR Ready" laptop in benchmarks. However, I came to find a fatal flaw with the 5600m with VR. It does NOT support Direct Display Mode. The GPU treats the headsets as external monitors and no amount of tweaking things made it any better.

Tried this with Rift, Rift S, and Valve Index.

Direct Display Mode takes VR content and renders it directly to the headset without Windows treating it as an additional monitor.

I've tried this with Windows 10 1903 and 2004.

I also tried force feeding the Red driver from April on the 5600m. It gave me the gamer options and reported the right number of cores, VRAM, memory type, but called it a 5500m instead of a 5600m.

None of this had any effect.

Now, I have every relevant VR HMD in at my studio so I'm happy to test any configuration if anyone has any ideas.

I've included a screenshot of the error message produced by SteamVR. It stays stuck in Extended Display Mode no matter what is changed in the settings.

I know this thread is old but I’ve gotten this to work.
You’ll need the May 2021 driver from bootcampdrivers.com and potentially a thunderbolt dock. I use a pluggable 96w PD dock and with those drivers the HMD shows as a display until you open up steamVR then works flawlessly.