So by now it's pretty well known that there are some wonky VR performance issues with the last several Radeon drivers for the 6000 and 7000 cards. The exact nature of the issues seems to vary from person to person, but generally involves bad frame times and lag in VR despite having plenty of horsepower in non-VR titles. For me, this manifested as good performance in SteamVR home, but the moment I opened any VR title, my frame times would jump from around 4 to around 400+ ms. I benchmarked my system (Ryzen 5 5600g, Radeon RX6650 XT, 16GB of DDR4) and found that it performed within the margins of expectation. I spent several days troubleshooting but no settings seemed to help. I eventually tried dropping the resolution of the tv that I was using as a monitor from 4K to 1080p to fix an unrelated graphical issue with the frame-time graph on the HMD, and the performance got a significant improvement. It still had frame times in the 100s, but it was better, despite the VR preview window being set for much lower than 4K to begin with. I disconnected the tv altogether, rebooted, used the start button on my Index, and it came up and performed flawlessly. Having no display connected prevents the frame-time graph from showing up in the HMD, so I don't know exactly where my frame times were with no display connected, but it seemed flawless to my eye. I tried reconnecting my tv, but I set the resolution to 800x600, and tried it again. VR titles still performed perfectly, with frame times well under 6 ms. I'm not sure why this makes a difference since the VR projection window on the display is set for a low resolution already, but something about the resolution of the primary display is causing a huge bottleneck.
I hope this helps someone else having the same issue.
