Current tools for FFR?

aXeL

A
Hey All,

On my old G2 I was using OpenXR Toolkit with OpenComposite in order to have FFR. Since I bought the Pico 4U and rebuilt the PC I thought I'd give SteamVR another chance. It still doesn't support FFR natively ( AFAIK ). So, what are people using, if anything, for this, VR Perf Toolkit maybe?
 

jojon

J
PerfToolkit would be the "original" and should presumably still work, but I have never stuck with it myself, on account of not having a graphics card with VRS -- doing it with a shader mask instead (which is an option) saves no performance. :p
 

aXeL

A
Well the upscaling works ok and dropped my frame times by ~15%, maybe a bit more but the FFR doesn't work at all, no matter how much I faff with the settings.

I might try playing with OpenXR TK again but all it usually does it stop the Pico from working at all.
 

jojon

J
That's too bad.

Worse that hobbyists have to burn themselves out doing these sort of things (mbuccia dropped OpenXR Toolkit ages ago), instead of the industry being a bit proactive -- closing in on a year after foveation by quad views rendering was moved into to the OpenXR core specs, I am yet so see anything that actually uses it (maybe MSFS?).
 

aXeL

A
I saw in his notes that he couldn't see why VR devs in general can't be bothered to incorporate these features considering that the OpenXR API has, literally, been handed to them on a plate.
 

jojon

J
Not to disparage anybody, but I kind of suspect a lot of developers in the VR space are more enthusiastic "game engine editor users" than professional developers -- not unlike how back during the dotcom bubble you had people calling themselves coders, because they owned a copy of Dreamweaver and used it to compose webpages for a living. -Not so much writing software as following Youtube tutorials and cutting and pasting public domain scripts, passingly understanding what they all do; And managing to cross the finish line thanks to a plucky attitude and a lot of elbow grease... Sometimes just one lone first-project guy, with very limited time and money to spend and extra impetus to ration them.

This does not excuse those who do know what they are doing, of course. -I can understand not wanting to get into having to support a ton of different custom solutions when it's API extensions, but for core functionality I am going to need an explanation in order to understand the decision (...assuming if it can be explained in terms my perfect layman can comprahend).

Oh well, it takes a lot longer to make a game than has elapsed since API 1.1 was published, so maybe I'm just impatient. :7
 

aXeL

A
Totally agree.

On the plus side, after I used adb with a reverse tether mod to use my USB-C cable with Virtual Desktop, I set the OpenXR runtime to VDXR. OpenComposite started to play nice again and, voila, FFR started working again using the OpenXR toolkit. Strangely, OpenComposite never worked for me when Virtual Desktop was running wirelessly, even with VDXR set, hence trying vrperf initially and having the exact same experience as you.

Anyhoo, some quick fettling got the frame times down ~9% give or take. Plenty more fettling there but I doubt it will get any faster via FFR. ( Not exactly empirical analysis though but the variance was low for the scene ). With some further fettling in Virtual Desktop settings I got my frame times down about 13%.

Strictly speaking I could've done the latter regardless but the only reason I went through the faff of tethering VD in the first place was to see if I could get OpenComposite working for FFR otherwise I would've carried on with the Pico Connect stream and swallowed my lumps.

Still, my 3090 just became 13% more keepable.
 
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