It says it all there in the title: Frontier, please add support for Asynchronous Space Warp (ASW) 2.0 to Elite!
Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) is a frame-rate smoothing technique that almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content.
In other words, it is part of the magic sauce (along with Asynchronous Time Warp) that allows Rift to deliver smooth visuals without judder even when the framerate drops below the target 90FPS.
This is a huge boon for players who love playing amazingly expansive, but incredibly demanding, games like Elite Dangerous in VR. The catch is that ASW can produce distorted visual artifacts when it is working, that can range from mildly annoying to deeply unsettling depending on how low performance drops.
Enter ASW 2.0:
Oculus has developed an update to ASW 1.0 that greatly reduces the artifacts produced by the technique. You can see the difference here, and it is fairly dramatic:
[video=youtube;I3LGq5TmMkw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3LGq5TmMkw&feature=youtu.be[/video]
The problem is that while ASW 1.0 basically came for free with the Oculus SDK, and did not require any extra work from developers, ASW 2.0 requires that VR games pass their depth buffers through (on every frame I believe). Support for this can to be activated at the game engine level, but while both Unity and Unreal are adding default support for this, studios with custom game engines, like Frontier's Cobra engine, will have to add in support on their own.
Hence my post!
Frontier, IMO, Elite is a VR masterpiece. You guys have done a downright mind blowing job with VR support, and you have been there from almost the very beginning (DK2 anyone?). In fact, I am quite sure that your team is already aware of ASW 2.0, but with everyone head's down on the big Q4 update, I am sure it isn't a priority, and that's very understandable.
That said, I just wanted to leave this request here, in case favorable eyes happened to fall on it when things settle down.
Thanks Frontier!
Extra info for anyone who is interested:
Oculus Connect ASW 2.0 presentation: https://youtu.be/ZbLe7b2pUq0?t=1875 (This is timestamped to the ASW 2.0 part of the talk, but earlier in the same presentation Oculus discusses working directly with Frontier to add a dithering update to Elite to heavily reduce banding. Pretty cool.)
Upload VR article on ASW 2.0: https://uploadvr.com/oculus-rifts-asw-2-0-could-greatly-reduce-artifacts-on-low-end-systems/
Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) is a frame-rate smoothing technique that almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content.
In other words, it is part of the magic sauce (along with Asynchronous Time Warp) that allows Rift to deliver smooth visuals without judder even when the framerate drops below the target 90FPS.
This is a huge boon for players who love playing amazingly expansive, but incredibly demanding, games like Elite Dangerous in VR. The catch is that ASW can produce distorted visual artifacts when it is working, that can range from mildly annoying to deeply unsettling depending on how low performance drops.
Enter ASW 2.0:
Oculus has developed an update to ASW 1.0 that greatly reduces the artifacts produced by the technique. You can see the difference here, and it is fairly dramatic:
[video=youtube;I3LGq5TmMkw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3LGq5TmMkw&feature=youtu.be[/video]
The problem is that while ASW 1.0 basically came for free with the Oculus SDK, and did not require any extra work from developers, ASW 2.0 requires that VR games pass their depth buffers through (on every frame I believe). Support for this can to be activated at the game engine level, but while both Unity and Unreal are adding default support for this, studios with custom game engines, like Frontier's Cobra engine, will have to add in support on their own.
Hence my post!
Frontier, IMO, Elite is a VR masterpiece. You guys have done a downright mind blowing job with VR support, and you have been there from almost the very beginning (DK2 anyone?). In fact, I am quite sure that your team is already aware of ASW 2.0, but with everyone head's down on the big Q4 update, I am sure it isn't a priority, and that's very understandable.
That said, I just wanted to leave this request here, in case favorable eyes happened to fall on it when things settle down.
Thanks Frontier!
Extra info for anyone who is interested:
Oculus Connect ASW 2.0 presentation: https://youtu.be/ZbLe7b2pUq0?t=1875 (This is timestamped to the ASW 2.0 part of the talk, but earlier in the same presentation Oculus discusses working directly with Frontier to add a dithering update to Elite to heavily reduce banding. Pretty cool.)
Upload VR article on ASW 2.0: https://uploadvr.com/oculus-rifts-asw-2-0-could-greatly-reduce-artifacts-on-low-end-systems/
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
