Forum Discussion
How does the Oculus display driver / runtime work?
Hi there,
regardless of the current issues, I think it's great news that thanks to the SDK 0.4+ / Oculus Runtime all that multi monitoring terror will be finally gone. That's the only right way as a VR device is no simple secondary display, it's a new kind of device.
So I wonder how this actually works and reduces latency?
Ok, there is a background service process which streamlines all access to the hardware and provides an interface for multiple applications, got it. But how does this display driver work and how does it communicate with the GPU? How is it guaranteed that the Rift is the primary display device for the GPU, regardless which HDMI Port is used? Does it in fact virtualize the dedicated GPU like Virtu MVP/Hyperformance does? Does it simulate a display with a infinite/very high frequency for better internal frametiming or something like that?
Can I find some information about that somewhere?
spyro
regardless of the current issues, I think it's great news that thanks to the SDK 0.4+ / Oculus Runtime all that multi monitoring terror will be finally gone. That's the only right way as a VR device is no simple secondary display, it's a new kind of device.
So I wonder how this actually works and reduces latency?
Ok, there is a background service process which streamlines all access to the hardware and provides an interface for multiple applications, got it. But how does this display driver work and how does it communicate with the GPU? How is it guaranteed that the Rift is the primary display device for the GPU, regardless which HDMI Port is used? Does it in fact virtualize the dedicated GPU like Virtu MVP/Hyperformance does? Does it simulate a display with a infinite/very high frequency for better internal frametiming or something like that?
Can I find some information about that somewhere?
spyro
3 Replies
- Turtles, all the way down.
- So, besides this joke, is there any chance for a serious answer? Maybe I just had to ask this on Reddit and not in the official Oculus forum for developers... My bad, I guess. Sorry. :roll:
"spyro" wrote:
So, besides this joke, is there any chance for a serious answer? Maybe I just had to ask this on Reddit and not in the official Oculus forum for developers... My bad, I guess. Sorry. :roll:
Well, I don't really know any of the details of the OpenGL / Direct3D framebuffer interception. However, the sensor data is now fetched using a lockless mechanism involving shared memory and sentinel counters.
