Oculus recently published a new guide on how to optimize VR experiences along with some of the common pitfalls for devs to watch out for when tracking down and solving VR performance issues.
VR developers are obsessed with keeping their Rift experiences performing above 90 frames per second (fps), and there’s a few good reasons why. While it’s largely considered the minimum for comfortable viewing (anything drastically lower could cause nausea), if developers can’t get their content to hit a consistent 90 fps or above (60 fps for Gear VR), their apps simply won’t make it on the Oculus Store.
The company has already implemented a few band-aids to help ‘smooth over’ underperforming apps during gameplay including Asynchronous Timewarp and it’s more recent cousin, Asynchronous Spacewarp, both of which are essentially designed to fill in the gaps where frames should be when they’re inevitably dropped due to insufficient compute power. These aren’t really solid legs to stand on though and won’t solve underlying optimization issues, so Oculus says developers will inevitably need to spend a fair amount of time making sure their apps are up to snuff in the first place.
The guide, which specifically targets app and game engine developers, can be found here.
Here’s a quick look at the table of contents:
Guidelines for VR Performance Optimization:This section covers the general principles that you should follow in order to effectively optimize your VR applications.
Workflows: The process flows you should follow: This section covers the workflows that you should use when tracking down performance problems.
Performance Optimization Tools:This section covers the tools that you should use when tracking down performance problems.
Tutorial: Optimizing a Sample Application: This section is a tutorial that provides a detailed hands-on guide to VRperformance optimization.
Additional Resources: This section provides links to additional resources that you can consult for more information about VR application optimization issues.
Oculus offers a bevy of resources through its developer portal, such as documentation on how to develop VR experience for PC-based VR, mobile VR, Web VR, and both Unity and Unreal Engine. The company has also published an extensive Best Practices Guide that contains some of the most important, hard-won information on how to create a comfortable VR experience. Because developers are taking what Oculus calls “unprecedented control over the user’s visual reality,” simply adding VR support to a traditional game just won’t cut it, and neither will lack-luster frame rate apparently.