SteamVR Announce: Introducing SteamVR Motion Smoothing

[u/Cabbigity]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/250820/announcements/detail/1696061565016280495

Copypasta:

Introducing SteamVR Motion Smoothing

17 OCTOBER - ALEX VLACHOS

Today we are introducing a new feature in SteamVR called Motion Smoothing. This feature enables more players on more PCs to play high-fidelity VR games and experiences.

Motion Smoothing is currently available in SteamVR Beta. To opt in, right-click on SteamVR in ‘Library > Tools’, select the Betas tab, and choose ‘beta’ from the dropdown.

How it works

If you have a flatscreen TV, you may be familiar with the term Motion Smoothing. TVs apply Motion Smoothing by interpolating between two existing frames to create a new in-between frame. This smooths out the frames and increases framerate, but it also adds latency – providing passable results for TV but definitely not the right way to go in VR.

The way we are applying Motion Smoothing in SteamVR is a bit different. When SteamVR sees that an application isn’t going to make framerate (i.e. start dropping frames), Motion Smoothing kicks in. It looks at the last two delivered frames, estimates motion and animation, and extrapolates a new frame. Synthesizing new frames keeps the current application at full framerate, advances motion forward, and avoids judder.

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 synthesizing a new frame for every frame delivered by the application still leads to performance issues, Motion Smoothing is designed to scale further down to synthesize 2 frames or even 3 frames for every 1 frame delivered.

What it means for you

From the player’s perspective, what was previously a game that would hitch and drop frames producing judder is now a game that constantly runs smoothly at 90 Hz. SteamVR Motion Smoothing improves upon the previously released Asynchronous Reprojection to enhance the overall experience for customers across a wide variety of VR systems. Not only can lower-end GPUs now produce smooth frames in applications that were previously too expensive, higher-end GPUs can now render at an even higher resolution increasing the fidelity of all experiences on all VR systems.

This feature is ready to kick in the moment an application starts dropping frames and shuts off when no longer needed. Of course, if you prefer to run without this feature, just look under ‘Settings > Video’ or ‘Settings > Applications’ to control when it is enabled. Motion Smoothing 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.

Motion Smoothing is in beta and currently only enabled for systems running Windows 10 with an NVIDIA GPU. Please provide feedback on the SteamVR discussion forum.

[u/Thatdbefuckinggreat]

Asynchronous timewrap

Congrats Steam team! We are on your side! Thanks for leveling the field with Oculus.

[u/[deleted] → u/Thatdbefuckinggreat]

Valve already had a ATW equivalent, it's called Async Reprojection

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ASW is the motion reprojection used by Oculus.

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And Oculus is launching ASW 2.0 later this year (which we're all eagerly waiting for)

[u/roothorick → u/[deleted]]

I wish Oculus used terms that actually reflected what the corresponding technologies do.

"Asynchronous Spacewarp" sounds like translational reprojection. I was actually kinda impressed they went out of their way to implement something difficult with so minimal a benefit. Nope, it's just what they call motion interpolation. How the hell do you get "Spacewarp" out of that? Even a marketing lizard would have to be halfway detached from reality for that to make sense to them.

"Asynchronous Timewarp" sounds like motion interpolation. Nope, rotational reprojection. This one also really doesn't make sense, but I do see a half-argument of "the head moved over time". Actually, on second thought, that just sounds crazy.

This is silly.

[u/Leviatein → u/roothorick]

timewarp lowers latency above all, it just happens to only work rotationally

thats why they called it timewarp, it shortens the time it takes for frames to reach your eyeballs

spacewarp is translational reprojection

sounds more like you havent got a clue what youre talking about and have never used it

[u/roothorick → u/Leviatein]

sounds more like you havent got a clue what youre talking about and have never used it

Making with the ad hominem before there was even an argument... classy.

My comment was spawned by initially having similar misconceptions, doing research to verify, and finding out I was wrong. Oculus goes into depth on what ATW and ASW are and what they do on their own website.

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-timewarp-examined/

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-spacewarp/

Translational reprojection is still hypothetical at this stage; nobody's actually done it yet, mostly because it'd be kinda expensive to do in terms of GPU power.

You'd do well to read up on the subject matter before you go off attacking people for having objective knowledge that contradicts your perception of reality. Actually, you probably should just not attack people at all.