SteamVR Motion Smoothing

Looks like SteamVR is getting some action in the ‘Async Space Warp’ (ASW) direction. Took a while, but good to see. For things like flight sims it is pretty hard to hit 90 fps reliably, especially if running a super-high resolution for super sampling… :slight_smile:

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I have a question about VR in general since I really lost track.
All those new features look cool, but…
Do they work with all VR goggles?
I mean: I would hate to get a Vive (because of the controllers or better resolution or something) or Rift (cheaper) and then discover that I cannot play half of the games I like or use features like the one above, because they won’t work with one VR device or the other.

Can anyone shed some light on that for me?

The games work on all VR headset makes, as in if you buy a Vive or an Oculus then you can generally play anything you buy on any headset.

This sort of ‘smoothing’ feature in the OP is something in the driver (sort of like a video card driver but for the headset) for SteamVR. SteamVR (the driver is called ‘OpenVR’) works with Vive, Oculus, the Windows Reality headsets, in that it is ‘manufacturer independent’.

Sometimes games will also add a version (usually via a run-time flag etc) that is especially built just for a certain vendor, like with Oculus Rift. The use of the Oculus SDK version can be a bit more efficient on an Oculus Rift headset, so it’s a nice additional option. The Oculus driver already had this nice ‘smoothing’ feature.

Example: When you start DCS and you have an Oculus Rift, it detects it and uses the Oculus SDK version, when you have a HTC Vive or a Samsung Odysessy then it uses the OpenVR version instead - sort of like it works with both AMD and Nvidia cards.

Sometimes the Oculus store will pay a dev studio for an ‘exclusive’ as well, meaning that they prohibit the title being sold outside of the Oculus store. You can still actually play it not on the Oculus Rift using a workaround called ‘Revive’ which effectively just tells the software it is a different headset than it is. Thankfully these Oculus ‘exclusives’ (sort of like console exclusives) are pretty rare. Oculus is just trying to establish some market share from the big Steam gorilla, so paying for exclusives is just a way to do that, with the added up-side that we get some bigger VR games sponsored that might not have got made.

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Thanks, man, much appreciated! :slight_smile:

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To add to what fearless explained so well, I use a Samsung Odyssey with Revive every now and then and cannot distinguish between it an native Oculus mode.

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