Forward rendering in UE4 - great job guys!

Is Epic going to integrate it into UE4 by version 4.25 at least?

Epic has seen the code and they're excited about some of the changes, especially the idea of a desktop forward renderer. Unfortunately, we can't promise how much (if any) will ship inside a UE4 binary release or when.

would forward rendering boost performance on Gear VR or is it for PC mostly ?

The approach in our OFR branch is using compute shaders and assumptions about desktop GPUs, but something similar could eventually be developed for Android. It would probably have to be tweaked a little to work well with the tiler. As it stands, the OFR branch doesn't even compile for Android.

Thanks for replying @vrdaveb !

It's unfortunate to read that it's a desktop only implementation. Kinda reinforces the notion of Gear VR platform being abandon little by little by both Oculus and Epic :(

We are working with Epic to improve the feature set and developer experience on Gear VR, but unfortunately it's a chicken-and-egg problem where the limited number of users currently on that toolset reduces the impact of investing there. It isn't abandoned, but you can expect features such as OVRLipSync to land first on Unity, where we can get feedback from more devs. But we hear you and we are pushing on UE4 + Gear VR support.

Someone mentioned that UE4 already uses forward rendering for Gear VR. So I am guessing if that's the case than nothing more can be done to improve performance in Gear VR using UE4 ?

Yes, UE4 uses forward rendering on mobile, but our PC forward renderer goes further and optimizes lighting with a clustering approach that uses compute shaders. To name a few other opportunities, visibility culling, static batching, multi-view, and (sometimes) hybrid mono-stereo rendering could also help.

Can any of that be ported to Android and boost performance in Gear VR ? (UE4 has precomputed visibility culling and instancing for static meshes working on Android, but I don't know how that translates into Gear VR)

If it works on Android, it should work for Gear VR. All of the above (except compute shaders) could eventually show up. But there it will take time.

Hopefully it won't take too long :) Daydream VR can become an issue for Gear VR and sadly it seems that Epic putting more effort into Daydream support than into Gear VR :(

All of the above would benefit Gear VR and Daydream equally.

Is there a trick to get dynamic shadows working?