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kideternal's avatar
kideternal
Protege
10 years ago

Performance Improvements ETA?

The performance I'm seeing with native Oculus integration in Unity 5.1 has been poor since it was released compared to the old script-based solution. On my Nvidia GTX 970, I'm seeing ~185FPS reduced ...
vrdaveb's avatar
vrdaveb
Oculus Staff
10 years ago
"kideternal" wrote:
I currently will need to achieve 200+ FPS with the Rift off to ensure that when I turn it on I'm at a stable 75 FPS.

This could be a number of things in addition to vsync.
1) Compared to a 60Hz 1080P non-VR monitor, you have to render around twice as many fragments per second to the eye buffers of a DK2. If you set VRSettings.renderScale to 0.7, you can bring that back down to the original rate.
2) Normally, Unity tries to maximize the amount of overlap between CPU and GPU work, increasing throughput. When VR is enabled on PC, we sacrifice some of this for better latency by blocking the CPU from sampling one frame's render pose until the GPU is done rendering the previous frame. You can get back some of this parallelism without giving up too much latency by setting OVRManager.instance.queueAhead = true (see https://developer.oculus.com/doc/0.1.0.0-unity/class_o_v_r_manager.html#a02190cc4c5efa87e9542cfc58fc83c10).
3) Unity does a little extra work (0.1-0.5ms) to display the main monitor preview. You can disable that by setting VRSettings.showDeviceView = false.
4) When the 0.7 runtime is active and queue-ahead is disabled, power-saving features like Intel SpeedStep can kick in, reducing the available performance. You can disable that by setting "High Performance" mode in the Windows Power Options.

"kideternal" wrote:
Is there a performance benefit to using them beyond what plain-old Unity 5.1.3p2 gives you?

Not necessarily. I generally see about the same performance with or without the Utilities. However, you need to use them to toggle settings like queue-ahead on PC and the CPU/GPU levels on Android.

"MikeF" wrote:
I miss working with my dk1, plug & play and it always worked.

Performance and your experience are very important to us. DK1 was a bit special because it didn't require any special drivers. It was a standard monitor and HID device. One of our goals for CV1 is to make it "just work".

"drash" wrote:
there is a significant performance hit when using Unity 5 + native VR functionality for the last few patch releases

When did you start to see the slowdown? We are working on a few near-term optimizations that should improve texture bandwidth and pixel fill.