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motorsep
Inspiring
November 30, 2017

Vulkan / ES 3.1 on Gear VR and GO - are we there yet ?

Is Vulkan and/or ES 3.1 in UE4 usable with Gear VR or/and Oculus Go yet ? It's been a loooong while and long overdue.

Thanks
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5 replies

Leemon89
Up and Coming
December 1, 2017
Hold on. I'm using ES 3.1 since UE 4.15 coz my explosion shader doesn't work on ES2. It works perfectly fine with no visible difference performance wise.
motorsepAuthor
Inspiring
December 1, 2017

Leemon89 said:

Hold on. I'm using ES 3.1 since UE 4.15 coz my explosion shader doesn't work on ES2. It works perfectly fine with no visible difference performance wise.


I highly doubt that. Epic themselves said ES3.1 runs as deferred and doesn't really work well on Gear VR. I tested ES 3.1 vs ES 2 and performance difference is quite noticeable. Perhaps you used it for Daydream.
firagabird
Inspiring
December 2, 2017
@motorsep 

AFAIK the current status is that Khronos still needs to implement
extensions for "front buffer rendering" and "multiple queues with
different priorities". Considering this has been the case since OC3, it
seems like something in the process has stalled.

@imperativity

Understandably, Vulkan support in Gear VR is a topic of constant interest for many developers. May I suggest opening some sort of status tracker for it that developers can be referred to? Or maybe just have a permanent section for it in the monthly updates article. It could even just be a stickied post in the Mobile Development subforum.

S7 Exynos Nougat. 2017 Gear VR. Public test channel.
BattleAxeVR
Inspiring
December 2, 2017
Please guys, lacking native Vulkan support on GearVR is impeding me from testing my game and eventually releasing my game on this platform. I'm not re-writing my engine to use OpenGL.
firagabird
Inspiring
December 3, 2017
@BattleAxeVR

Don't hold your breath for Vulkan support on Gear VR within the next year. The multiview extension in comparison was a minor update with a few GPU driver patches, and it took years to get rolled out to end users due to Samsung & carrier delays*. Vulkan isn't even in that first stage (AFAIK); there are at least 2 extensions needed for it to do what Gear VR needs from a mobile graphics API.

Release your Vulkan game in your other planned platforms first, then come back to Gear VR when Oculus announces support.

*Oculus Go might be a different story, but its install base will be so tiny at first that it won't be worth it.
S7 Exynos Nougat. 2017 Gear VR. Public test channel.
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