News Valve launches SteamVR Motion Smoothing beta

So 2 years to replicate ASW (beta on OVR was available in Oct '16), and a little over 2 years to implement ATW (SteamVR beta was also in Oct '16, with reprojection available in OVR in mid 2014 with the DK2). It took Oculus ~3 months to get ASW on AMD working, so hopefully Valve will be able to do the same rather than another 2 year delay.

As to why it's tricky on AMD: ASW works by handing a completed frame the the GPU's on-board video encoder, then passing it through the pipeline until it hits the Motion Vector Estimation stage and produces the MVev field. Once this is reached, that MVec vield is extracted from the encoder and handed back to the GPU, which adds the position and rotation offsets measured from inter-frame head movement to the vector field to produce a final MVec field used to offset the last-frame pixels to produce the extrapolated frame for display in the event of a render miss. All that is key on being able to pull data out of the video encoding pipeline at the MVE stage. This turned out to be easier to do on Nvidia GPUs while AMD needed to perform some weird hackyness (basically have the video encoding pipeline complete, but with all the later encoding operations either perform a zero-transform or a reversible transform that could alter be undone to extract the MVec field).

 

I knew when I pre-ordered Vive that Valve was actually the weakest part of the equation. They SHOULD have launched with a full VR Portal or Half Life 3. What they actually released was a collection of cute kiddy mini games and experiences.

At least the new performance features are here now and should continue to improve. You can forget 3 VR games. There is only one person at Valve working on all 3 and he hasn't appeared at the office over the past 4 months.

Oh and that mod team bringing Half Life 2 VR? They disappeared round about the time they headed over to Valve HQ. No one has seen or heard from them since that time.

 

Unless Wormslayer et al quietly quit their jobs and moved to Valve without mentioning it to me, they are still working on it in their free time. No public updates (because they inevitably get picked up and distributed leading to a million "is it done yet?!" messages spamming them) but it is definitely still in development. Main barriers are: Source being DX9 and no VR API even vaguely pretending to support a DX version that old (plus DX9 not having any of the API functions needed for modern VR, like Direct Mode or any of the late latching API calls for TimeWarp); and models and environments not designed for VR navigation. The latter was pretty obvious with the old DK2-era HLVR implementation (things like weapon hero models being hollow if you looked at them in the wrong angle) and all the completely broken reflection effects. Getting VR on DX9 is coming along well, but the asset polishing is just a man-hour slog.