Steam VR Introduces 'Motion Smoothing' So Low-End PCs Can Run Games More Smoothly (engadget.com)

Steam VR is introducing a new feature called "Motion Smoothing" that will give PCs with low-end hardware the power to deliver VR experiences more smoothly. "It functions like Motion Smoothing for TV and Asynchronous Spacewarp for Oculus devices, which are frame-rate smoothing techniques that generate synthetic frames between two real ones in order to avoid a stuttery experience," notes Engadget. From the report: When Steam VR determines that an experience is lagging or dropping frames, Motion Smoothing automatically kicks in. It drops an app's framerate from 90FPS to 45FPS and generates a synthetic frame for every real one to mimic real 90FPS. If things get especially bad, it can generate two to three frames for every real one instead. Steam explains that the feature "dramatically [lowers] the performance requirements," allowing PCs with lower end hardware to "produce smooth frames." Take note, however, that the feature will not work with the Oculus Rift or with Windows Mixed Reality headsets. You can only take advantage of it if you have an HTC Vive or a Vive Pro, and if you're running Windows 10 -- all you need to do is right-click on Steam VR and select beta under Tools in Library.

Comments

"Motion Sickness" replaced with "Laggy Responses"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're trying to run VR on low-end HW, you deserve the headache you fuckwit.

TVs have been doing it for decades

[Anonymous Coward]

Bye bye contrast and sharpness, hello blurriness.

Re: TVs have been doing it for decades

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, gay sex

Re:TVs have been doing it for decades

[Anonymous Coward]

CRT televisions were blurry because they used electron beams crudely scanned across a mesh and relied upon persistence of vision.

If this "motion smoothing works like SVP, then it might be kind of nice. I was skeptical before I tried it, but it actually does a great job converting low framerate video to 60 FPS. Try it with your favourite films and be amazed.

Re:TVs have been doing it for decades

[Carewolf]

Bye bye contrast and sharpness, hello blurriness.

The new methods doesn't look blurry. They look sharp and smooth, but super weird and motion sickness inducing. And everybody moves like some kind of alien creature.

It had better NOT function like that

[wonkey_monkey]

It functions like Motion Smoothing for TV

I hope not, because that will introduce additional lag. TV smoothing needs to know what the next frame is before it can smoothly transition to it. So sure, do it that way if you want make people even more motion sick...

Hopefully what it will do instead is generate the first frame and immediately display it, and instead of rendering the next frame completely, it'll warp the first frame to approximate the geometry of the skipped frame. Pretty sure this was touted as a thing a while ago though.

Re:It had better NOT function like that

[Guspaz]

VR motion smoothing and asynchronous spacewarp don't really work like that. What they do is they take the last known frame produced by the graphics card and then warp it to match the user's current position in space. This actually reduces latency because it means the user's view is being updated by their position more often than if it was just using the less frequent frames from the graphics card. They aren't interpolating between two frames (well, maybe Valve's new thing does that, Oculus asynchronous spacewarp doesn't), they're warping the image to reflect more recent positional data.

In fact, one strategy to reduce latency even when the GPU is putting out the full HMD framerate is to sample the positional data after the frame is rendered but right before the frame is sent to the HMD and use asynchronous spacewarp to update the rendered frame. This means the position displayed to the user is more recent than when the game engine sampled the position in its gameplay loop (and before anything was rendered), which can potentially remove most of the rendering latency.

Re: It had better NOT function like that

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a very straight forward technology trick. Thereâ(TM)s absolutely nothing strange about this. Decoders have been chaining frames together since the first mpeg spec. Itâ(TM)s only inefficient if the first frame and the second frame arenâ(TM)t similar enough to compress into a single frame plus diff

Re:It had better NOT function like that

[Immerman]

Quite so. Obviously it does create artifacts - warping can't reveal whatever was just exposed beyond that column for example, so the edges of things may have a tendency to shimmer with interpolated "noise" when you're in motion. Whether that's noticeable or not? No idea.

There's also going to be a performance penalty - unless using dedicated hardware for that part. Warping an HD image may be computationally cheaper than rendering it in the first place, but every ns spent doing so is a ns not available for rendering better graphics.

Probably both prices well worth paying though, if it lets your eyes see something much closer to what your inner ears are saying they should.

Re:It had better NOT function like that

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone in this thread is wrong. Since nobody can be bothered to read the actual Valve announcement:

"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."

Re: It had better NOT function like that

[Anonymous Coward]

phew, and i thought my intel stocks were going down the drain.
but it seems another way to fix sloppy code was found.
if the news would have announced a radical VR code overhaul to get it to perform better on "low end" gear i would have had to consider throwing away intel and nvidia stocks :P

Lag

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a nice feature, but what about increased lag since multiple frames are required to render a missing frame for motion compensation?

Re:Lag

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that your eyes/brain only discern up to at most 50 fps and 25 fps is perfectly adequate for aircraft simulators, while cartoons used to run at less than 10 fps.

The eternal pursuit of high frame rates in games just told me that they are doing something wrong.

Re:Lag

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that your eyes/brain only discern up to at most 50 fps

*facepalm*

  No, just no. Go read a book or something. The wind whistling through that empty space between your ears is distracting.

LOL, why not run the game locally

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight.
You can run the game remotely and just stream the screen. But that means having to lose your nice and crisp 2440x1080 resolution and suffer all sorts of issues. So the solution they propose is to interpolate and smooth it all on the client end, using all sorts of computing power.
*face palm*

Re: LOL, why not run the game locally

[Anonymous Coward]

This article isn't about "remote" vs "local". Read it again, slowly, so your brain doesn't drop any frames.

Only on HTC Vive

[PhrostyMcByte]

Because Oculus has had the same thing -- called asynchronous time-warp and then a new version asynchronous space-warp -- for two or three years.

Welcome to the future!

In seriousness --- even high-end PCs can often not maintain a perfect 90fps in all scenes of many games. This is useful for them too, because changes in framerate are very easy to see and can be disorienting. This allows full motion, rendering rotation etc. while it lerps between frames. It works great.

Re: Got something for you nerds to smooth

[Type44Q]

How smooth do they need to be... and is it okay if they get perforated? (I run tungsten-studded snowtires... there may be a slight sensation.)

Re:"Motion Sickness" replaced with "Laggy Response

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're trying to run VR, you deserve the headache you fuckwit.

FTFY

Ugh.

[antdude]

No, I hate that feature. Please make it an option.

Re: Ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

"right-click on Steam VR and select beta under Tools in Library"

Reading TFS. Ugh, right?

Lowers performance requirements?

[ayesnymous]

Now you have software that needs to detect dropped frames and generate fake frames. Then it needs to display the same number of frames as before, regardless of whether they're real or fake frames. So it's doing the same thing as before, but with the addition of needing to detect dropped frames and generate fake frames. And there's less of a performance requirement for all that?

Re: "Motion Sickness" replaced with "Laggy Respons

[Anonymous Coward]

Your high-end hardware is going to be low-end hardware soon enough

Thank You

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for your post. Your tips are very useful. I'm a writer and use a computer every day, sometimes I have a problem with this but after reading your article I know what to do. If you need my help feel free to visit https://essays-service.com/buy-argumentative-essay.html.