Direct Oculus SDK support

Discussion in 'Wish Lists' started by MarcG, Feb 27, 2018.

  1. MarcG

    MarcG Registered

    Joined:
    Oct 4, 2010
    Messages:
    6,854
    Likes Received:
    2,234
    This has been brought up before but I think it needs re-mentioning and I would like S397 to re-visit the possibility at some time in the future, direct SDK support for Oculus has a very good chance of improving performance for Oculus Rift users as has been proven in others games (see one example below).

    I'm not saying it *will* help RF2 but there is a chance it will improve performance alongside other general optimastion passes that S397 bring to the table, I'm also not asking it for it tomorrow (priorities and all that) but I hope at least it can be reconsidered as SteamVR alone is not as good as it could be for us Rift users.

    From the X-Plane game the developers have found it to be true:

    https://developer.x-plane.com/2018/02/x-plane-11-20-vr4-is-live/

    11.20 VR4 is Live on the servers. Aside from the usability fixes that Ben already mentioned, the major ‘feature’ in VR4 is…Oculus users will no longer need SteamVR. If you downloaded it just for X-Plane, go ahead and remove it. It will no longer be necessary.

    As we said we would do from the very beginning, we investigated the relative performance of X-Plane through the native Oculus SDK versus SteamVR and what we found, through data collection, is that the overall experience for Oculus users was better by going through the Oculus SDK directly. I know many of you are thinking “Duh! I told you that a month ago ya big dummy!” and yes…yes you did. Fortunately/Unfortunately, we try not to make engineering decisions based on gut feelings and anecdotal evidence when we have a way to collect actual numbers. We wanted to tackle a majority of the usability issues affecting everyone before we looked into performance.

    In the various A/B tests that we performed, we found that going to the Oculus SDK directly got us about 25% improvement in frame rate. This does not necessarily indicate that there’s anything wrong with SteamVR itself. There are several factors influencing the performance in VR. First, Oculus has their “home”, that little bachelor pad where you hang out while waiting for games to load. SteamVR has their “home” as well. When you use SteamVR, BOTH are running on your machine. Those houses are not free and X-Plane is already CPU bottlenecked so anything consuming CPU resources is going to directly affect performance. (I noticed an Autodesk updater in my task manager that was stealing 5% of my CPU consistently. That too was decreasing my performance….every bit matters!). Going directly to the Oculus SDK removes the SteamVR house from the equation.

    Sure, getting 25% improvement is a huge win, but that’s NOT the biggest win. The biggest win, in my opinion, is that Asynchronous Space Warp (ASW) works MUCH better even at very low frames rates down to about 22.5fps. It appears as though the timing of the frames is critical for ASW to work properly. Being at 22.5, 30, 45, 90fps feels smooth! Being in between those frame timings seems to make ASW lose its mind creating an annoying judder; the opposite of what ASW is supposed to be doing for us. Oculus seems to be V-Syncing us to hit those intervals, allowing their algorithms to make reliable timing decisions and predictions. It’s my suspicion that SteamVR was just not hitting those intervals, causing ASW to flip out.

    TLDR; Performance for Oculus will be on par with what Vive users have been seeing all along. The smoothness of the rendering seems consistent even down to 22.5fps. If you’re a Vive user, you will still, of course, need SteamVR as that IS your native SDK. If you’re a WMR user, you will still need SteamVR. I have not seen any reprojection issues with WMR like we have with Oculus. Supposedly the upcoming versions of SteamVR have some performance improvements coming for WMR users as well so we’ll be sticking with SteamVR for all headsets other than Oculus. That can always change in the future…based on data.
     
  2. TheMattyOnline

    TheMattyOnline Member

    Joined:
    Nov 21, 2016
    Messages:
    590
    Likes Received:
    483
    I have brought this up numerous times and have always got the same answer - No plans to support 2 SDK's.

    Even allowing for the added development time, it simply cannot be a coincidence that iRacing, Assetto Corsa and Project Cars 1/2 all run super smooth and flawlessly in VR (Oculus direct support), and rFactor 2 and RaceRoom are a constant battle to adjust to try and run acceptably(Steam VR support).

    I understand from a development point of view, the desire to streamline and minimise work, but not if this leaves Oculus users short changed.
     
  3. 2ndLastJedi

    2ndLastJedi Registered

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2016
    Messages:
    1,873
    Likes Received:
    1,198
  4. Hazi

    Hazi Registered

    Joined:
    Jan 15, 2012
    Messages:
    917
    Likes Received:
    146
  5. JimmyT

    JimmyT Registered

    Joined:
    Jan 16, 2012
    Messages:
    924
    Likes Received:
    578
    I'll register a +1 here as well. Hopefully everyone with Oculus will post here so a true indication of numbers is available.
     
  6. RNelson

    RNelson Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 7, 2011
    Messages:
    145
    Likes Received:
    59
    I don't run Steam VR and I can already run rF2 with the Rift.
     
  7. nipzon

    nipzon Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 23, 2011
    Messages:
    247
    Likes Received:
    35
  8. Mark Fuller

    Mark Fuller Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 10, 2016
    Messages:
    343
    Likes Received:
    99
    Could you enlighten us?
     
  9. Mibrandt

    Mibrandt Registered

    Joined:
    Apr 4, 2013
    Messages:
    613
    Likes Received:
    282
  10. Andregee

    Andregee Registered

    Joined:
    Jun 23, 2012
    Messages:
    927
    Likes Received:
    390
  11. elbo

    elbo Registered

    Joined:
    Feb 19, 2012
    Messages:
    625
    Likes Received:
    182
  12. Depco

    Depco Registered

    Joined:
    Jun 16, 2014
    Messages:
    854
    Likes Received:
    523
  13. tiffarno

    tiffarno Registered

    Joined:
    Jan 19, 2016
    Messages:
    17
    Likes Received:
    25
  14. Bernardo

    Bernardo Registered

    Joined:
    May 17, 2017
    Messages:
    53
    Likes Received:
    73
  15. RNelson

    RNelson Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 7, 2011
    Messages:
    145
    Likes Received:
    59
    I wish I could tbh. I have SteamVR installed but I don't have to activate it (or turn it off for that matter when finished) when I want to run rF2. Same for AC. Maybe it is running in the background but I don't think so.
     
  16. MarcG

    MarcG Registered

    Joined:
    Oct 4, 2010
    Messages:
    6,854
    Likes Received:
    2,234
    It loads and runs for RF2 you may just not notice it, AC has OpenVR support so if you have that selected it won't load SteamVR.
     
  17. Bruce0440

    Bruce0440 Registered

    Joined:
    Apr 26, 2017
    Messages:
    77
    Likes Received:
    19
  18. Paul Jeffrey

    Paul Jeffrey

    Joined:
    May 21, 2016
    Messages:
    660
    Likes Received:
    4,336
    I don't know what any of this means, but if it gives better VR performance then I'm in!

    +1!
     
    Ernie and MarcG like this.
  19. Mark Fuller

    Mark Fuller Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 10, 2016
    Messages:
    343
    Likes Received:
    99
  20. Jego

    Jego Registered

    Joined:
    Feb 18, 2016
    Messages:
    147
    Likes Received:
    55

Share This Page