Ballparking Vive performance in Unity 5

AlecMoody

Hi all,
Last night I did some testing to try and determine how to build content for VR/ the vive. Since I don't actually have one to test with I mocked up what I thought was a good approximation. Hopefully other people find this helpful.

Rough overview of my scene:

This is Unity 5 running deferred rendering with enlighten providing dynamic GI and baked reflection probes + box mapping. The cameras are set to HDR and I am using a tone mapping script. I also disabled all batching to keep things simple.

In order to approximate a Vive I made two 110 degree FOV cameras and then place + rendered them side by side. I set my game resolution to the Vive render target size I found in a Valve slide (3024x1680). My system is i7 4770 + a gtx 970.

To keep things above 90 FPS I was able to use:

~6 million triangles
~1100 set pass calls (draw calls)

I as also able to use SSAO but had to keep the samples low. This is super expensive at this resolution (5 megapixels).

monster

Does Vive require a screen warping image effect and/or chromatic aberration for correction, like the Oculus? Those get to be expensive since they run 90+ times a second.

AlecMoody

I would assume yes to both. I don't have a way to simulate that but it ought to be cheaper than something like SSAO.

Aside from finding some some specific limits I was looking to confirm that the right way to build art content for VR is to throw a lot of triangles at it.