HoloLens 2 Emulator visual updates extremely slow

Question

I installed the latest version of the HoloLens 2 Emulator (10.0.20348.1501) on my Windows 10 Pro machine. I have 32GB of RAM, 11th Gen Intel 8 Core CPU, Nvidia 3080 (mobile) graphics card.

Initially I thought that the HoloLens emulator was super slow (an input such as trying to move the pointer can take 10, 20, 30 seconds to show up and sometimes doesn't even show up).

But upon testing some more, I've realized that my inputs are going through immediately (as I can tell from the sound feedback), it's just the visual feedback which is not updating. This testing is just inside the OS (without trying to launch an app I developed).

Any ideas what could be going on? In the performance monitoring tool, everything looks fine.

Answer 1

In the end, the only way to fix it, was to disable graphics switching in the BIOS, and set to Discrete only - despite the fact that the Nvidia GPU Activity shows that the GPU turns on when I launch the emulator.

Answer 2

If the emulator takes 10 seconds to update the graphic, there should be configurations issues. Based on my test, though I cannot say it works fluently in my PC, the HoloLens 2 emulator runs at around 15 fps. There is delay but should be work fine for testing. (I am running it with Nvidia 1080 (mobile), with a much older CPU than yours.)

Please check the document on Using the HoloLens Emulator - Mixed Reality | Microsoft Docs and make sure you have configured your computer properly.

1. In BIOS
   • Intel VT -> enabled
   • Intel VT-d -> disabled
   • Hardware-based Data Execution Prevention (DEP) (or any Intel data protection related feature, display name could be varied) -> disabled
2. In Windows
   • After BIOS configuration is done, completely shut down your PC, then boot. (Directly reboot may not apply changes).
   • Run dxdiag to check:
   • DirectX 11.0 or later (12.0 in my PC)
   • WDDM 2.5 graphics driver or later (3.0 in my PC)
3. Hyper-V Checking
   • Enable it if it is not. Reboot is required.
   • If it is already enabled. Disable it -> reboot the PC -> enable it again -> reboot
4. Others
   • For the laptop, make sure the power supply is plug-in and it is not in power-save mode. Check the GPU payload (around 36% in Nvidia 1080 mobile)

Then you may run the emulator again to see if this issue still exists.