The original PSVR was definitely in the bargain category, but OK for the money. Unfortunately the Quest exists now and blows the original PSVR out of the water at a similar price - before factoring in the PS4.
Hopefully Sony can be more competitive with the PSVR2.
Developer Mode means you’ve registered as a developer on the Oculus site and turned on developer mode for your Quest headset. It’s easy to do with zero downside (really).
I already have that switched on for Virtual Desktop, but maybe it means the setting for the Guardian is in the dev mode bit rather than the Guardian bit.
It’s definitely real, as it’s posted by a Microsoft developer:
We do have some feature updates in the works. One of the notable ones is a change we’re working on with Valve that’ll significantly reduce the amount of GPU memory used when running SteamVR. That one’s exciting because we’ve found it has a cascading effect - a lot of VR workloads tend to max out the GPU memory, and reducing the amount used reduces the need for memory paging, leading to a smoother overall experience.
This is probably only WMR-specific. Right now the issue is that we have to create an intermediate set of GPU buffers that we copy the SteamVR content into before we send it off to our system compositor. The change we’re working on will eliminate that set of intermediate buffers. Since each buffer is (generally) sized to match the resolution of the headset, the memory savings potential is huge.
The fix won’t affect performance that much, unless your current settings have you running out of VRAM:
It probably reduces the frame time slightly by removing that extra operation, but the copy shouldn’t be impacting performance that much. But at the same time reducing memory pressure can help a lot if stuff is getting paged out. We’ve definitely seen performance improvements in that scenario in our limited testing.
I don’t know… with engines like Unreal and Unity it would be easier, but with something bespoke like DCS I imagine it’s a bunch of extra work for the devs.
In general though I’m super impressed with the hardware. I was around for the birth of this generation of VR and worked on all the various generations of Rift hardware starting from the first dev kit, but this is just a totally different level. Untethered VR with inside-out tracking is really the Holy Grail.
The hardware is mature enough that you mostly don’t need to sideload. I’d only sideload to do:
Virtual Desktop wireless VR streaming. (Note: VD desktop streaming works without sideloading. And VR streaming from desktop works with Oculus Link. You only need sideloading to have both.)
Beat Saber mods. These are both really cool and too much trouble to be worth it. Every time BS updates, your mods will break and you’ll spend an hour figuring out how to update your library and make everything work again.
The weird, wonderful world of indie VR apps. There’s some interesting stuff out there, but you can also sample a bunch of this stuff using WebVR through Firefox Reality or Oculus’s native VR web browser.
• The ability to stream PCVR games is now part of the official app in the store, no patch needed!
• Added multi-account support in the Streamer app (Windows only for now)
• Screenshots taken on your Quest are now automatically transferred to your desktop (Windows only for now)
• Added voice-over for notifications
• Added Wi-Fi speed information, runtime used by game and GPU name to the Performance Overlay
• Changed Sliced Encoding and Microphone Passthrough to be enabled by default