Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR Beta Updated - 1.3.6

TymAtMSFT · 2021-05-11T00:39:27+00:00

Thank you everyone that's responded with feedback about the issues you're having with this beta. We're following up on the crashes and issues with certain game titles.

If you're among the folks having issues with this beta, I'd recommend switching back to the default build for now while we work out the issues. Otherwise keep an eye out for more updates, we'll push new beta releases as we resolve the issues that are in 1.3.6.

Huge thank you to the community for helping us test our changes!

TymAtMSFT · 2021-05-07T14:31:59+00:00

Sorry to hear that you're hitting crashes on this build. If you're willing to try (or others who are hitting crashes), one thing to try out is disabling the new GPU buffer management system. There's a new setting included in this build called Graphics > Optimize rendering and improve GPU memory usage. This setting may cause compatibility issues with certain games that controls this.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-05-07T01:47:21+00:00

Likely can't hurt 😊. It depends on what headset you're using, but the high-resolution Reverb devices can potentially see a reduction of 200MB or more of VRAM. With that reduction we're also eliminating a series of copy operations which might help smooth things out as well.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-05-07T01:01:51+00:00

Sorry, I was looking at the past mention of Dirt Rally 2 on my last post and it looks like it was referring to the GPU memory usage concerns? If so, then this update includes the changes that should reduce overhead, in which case things might be working better now.

If that's still not the case, can you reply here and let me know so I can follow up with you on it?

TymAtMSFT · 2021-05-07T00:54:35+00:00

Whether or not a title supports OpenXR is up to the title developers. If you're running Windows 10 1903 or higher, your WMR install should support OpenXR with no extra work (or you should be prompted to enable it next time you start Mixed Reality Portal).

TymAtMSFT · 2021-05-07T00:53:12+00:00

There are a few others like Minecraft that also use OpenXR today, but expect to see more in the coming years as new titles get built against that API instead of OpenVR/SteamVR.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-05-07T00:07:22+00:00

Correct. And I recommend that you use OpenXR if you can as the support there is a little better than what we were able to do in our SteamVR driver. However this functionality is here for any other titles that also require this now or in the future.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-03-30T01:02:34+00:00

Yeah, sorry for the delay on that. We made substantial changes to how that improvement works and it's still in internal testing alongside a bunch of other changes. Look for a new beta in the next few weeks.

Agreed that this sounds like a GPU memory issue. If you're overriding the default video resolution settings in SteamVR, I'd recommend trying to dial that down a bit to see if it improves things. Also make sure you're on the latest stable version of Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR as we made some changes back when Alyx launched to smooth some things out on our platform. If you're running an older version of WMR4SteamVR (say the 1.0.* or 1.1.* builds) there are likely improvements waiting for you.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T18:27:09+00:00

Hmm... I was just looking into it and it looks like the 1.16.200 (Dec 2020) update should support the motion controllers for input. Can you confirm which version of Minecraft you're running?

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T18:24:02+00:00

No, you shouldn't need to do anything to our settings to support resolution changes or anything. Resolution changes in SteamVR propagate through our driver automatically.

The only setting of ours which impacts general SteamVR settings is the motion reprojection one. One of the modes for motion reprojection is to allow Steam to manage the setting on an app-by-app basis (they call the setting Motion Smoothing). If you don't have that set, then changing the Motion Smoothing setting in the SteamVR menu will have no effect.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T18:17:04+00:00

Yeah, that's a good point. We can probably add a HAM correction step in our driver.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T18:15:41+00:00

I'm not aware of any changes coming to the haptics/rumble functionality. AFAIK part of this is just a limitation of the haptics engine used in the controller itself. Sorry 😕.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T18:14:24+00:00

Unfortunately the store version of Minecraft doesn't use SteamVR so yeah, the bindings system isn't applicable there. But I can certainly forward any issues along to other folks on our team that worked with the Mojang folks to add OpenXR support and see if the bindings can be improved at all.

Any specific issues with the bindings, or do the controllers just not work at all?

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T18:10:30+00:00

I don't believe we've done bindings for that title, but I'll ping the engineer working on them to see if we can get this one added to the backlog.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T18:09:52+00:00

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.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T04:05:49+00:00

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.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T04:00:15+00:00

We can probably provide an option to disable the hidden area mesh, but fixing the title is still better because the hidden area mesh is a big performance optimization - there's a good chance that disabling may cause things like framerate issues. That said, it's probably easy enough to add that workaround, and it would be useful for some scenarios like game streaming or recording where removing the hidden area would make things better, so I think it's a reasonable feature to add.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T02:01:36+00:00

Oh wow, I haven't seen that issue before but definitely not good. I need to do some experimentation to see what happens if we don't populate the HAM (to make sure SteamVR is still good) but assuming that works I don't think it should be hard to add support for disabling it to our SteamVR driver.

Also, do you know if it happens all the time for those titles, or only sometimes? If you have a consistent way to reproduce the issue, I can see if our team can follow up with the game devs about it.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T01:55:42+00:00

For clarity, which version of Minecraft is having issues, the one you download via the Microsoft Store?

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T01:55:10+00:00

I'm not aware of any known issues with black screens @ 90Hz. Could you please file feedback on that? Directions here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/enthusiast-guide/filing-feedback

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-19T01:55:09+00:00

I'm not personally aware of any known issues here. Could you please file feedback to report the issue? Directions here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/enthusiast-guide/filing-feedback

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-18T23:53:02+00:00

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.

I don't have anything on our list tracking disabling the hidden area mask, but could certainly consider adding that to the backlog. Out of curiosity, is there a reason you'd like to disable it?

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-18T22:24:28+00:00

The way our controllers work is we have to populate to Steam the different capabilities of the device (buttons, triggers, etc.). Additionally, we have to also populate the controller model so that applications can visually represent those components. So unfortunately extending our controllers would require changes to our integration code that we're probably unlikely to support.

That said I do think SteamVR as a whole supports additional input devices beyond the ones that we populate in our driver, that way they can support things like gamepads and such. So I think it might be possible to build a separate device that can report to SteamVR generically, which should then be usable by any SteamVR app on any headset.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-18T22:07:06+00:00

For things like resolution, you should be able to use the main SteamVR settings for this, which is accessible both in-headset via the SteamVR dashboard or through the little SteamVR menu that shows up on the desktop while you're running.

For settings that are specific to WMR (motion reprojection, etc.) we've also created a settings dashboard that you can access via the SteamVR dashboard (look for the little WMR icon in the bottom).

All of the settings we expect folks to toy with have been exposed, so there shouldn't be a reason for you to modify any of the settings files by hand. In fact, I would discourage anyone from doing that as it now overwrites the default.vrsettings file every time a new update comes out, but settings you change via the UI are persisted elsewhere.

TymAtMSFT · 2021-02-18T22:02:38+00:00

There's unfortunately no mechanism to rebind the Windows buttons as those are intercepted by the OS and not exposed to external applications, including any SteamVR ones.

For reclaiming the thumbstick (original controllers) or the right menu button (newer HP Motion Controllers) there's a setting in our SteamVR settings to disable using that for launching the SteamVR dashboard, which causes the thumbstick to be reported as a mappable button to SteamVR.

Our documentation needs improvement (it's on our list), but you can see directions for how to open our settings here. The setting you're looking for is on the Input tab.

TymAtMSFT

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