It’s a little-known indisputable fact that when Justin Timberlake informed Mark Zuckerberg “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars,” he was speaking about how costly VR PC must be. Just jokes, there, some laugharoonies. But for plain ol’ millionaires whose VR experiences are bumpy, a bit of extra assistance is coming. Valve have launched a ‘Motion Smoothing’ beta characteristic to SteamVR, which ought to let slower PCs jack in with much less bother. Similar to Oculus’s Asynchronous Spacewarp tech and SteamVR’s personal Asynchronous Reprojection, it really works by generally estimating new frames relatively than correctly rendering them. Estimates aren’t as fairly, however are smoother than the choice.
“When SteamVR sees that an application isn’t going to make framerate (i.e. start dropping frames), Motion Smoothing kicks in,” Valve defined in a blog post final week. “It looks at the last two delivered frames, estimates motion and animation, and extrapolates a new frame. Synthesising new frames keeps the current application at full framerate, advances motion forward, and avoids judder.”
Here comes the science half, focus.
“This means that the player is still experiencing full framerate (90 Hz for the Vive and Vive Pro), but the application only needs to render 1 out of every 2 frames, dramatically lowering the performance requirements. Even better, if synthesising a new frame for every frame delivered by the application still leads to performance issues, Motion Smoothing is designed to scale further down to synthesise 2 frames or even 3 frames for every 1 frame delivered.”
So the issue of cybergoggles wonking your eyes out with dodgy framerates is lessened. Valve say their new Motion Smoothing “improves upon” their outdated Asynchronous Reprojection (which was itself an enchancment upon Interleaved Reprojection), although are a bit of obscure about how and the way a lot. Those synthesised frames nonetheless gained’t look pretty much as good as the actual deal, however smoothness might be extra necessary than constancy if you’re jacking your face into our on-line world.
There are some limitations. Right now, the characteristic is just in beta and can solely work with Nvidia graphics playing cards on Windows 10. And, Valve say, it “is not enabled when using Oculus Rift or Windows Mixed Reality headsets with SteamVR, because their underlying display drivers use different techniques when applications miss framerate.” A characteristic for Vive and different such goggs, then.
