Valve will Optimize SteamVR for Low-End Graphics

The company will use a motion softening technique for this.

Valve wants to get “more users can play VR titles on more computers” by adding a new feature, called ” Motion Smoothing “, to his SteamVR. It is a technique similar to that found in many televisions, but Valve says that it has managed to alleviate the problem of latency caused by these techniques: “Televisions apply smoothing by interpolating frames to create an intermediate frame, which softens movement and increases the frame rate, but it also worsens the latency – something tolerable on a TV, but not on the VR. “

In the case of SteamVR the thing is different. When the platform detects that a game or an application is going to suffer a frame fall, it activates the smoothing of movement examining the last two frames shown correctly, estimates the movement and the animation and extrapolates it to create a new frame. In this way, Valve ensures that it can maintain the frame rate of 90 Hz without causing jerks. This is not something new, because Oculus itself uses a similar technique called ” Asynchronous Reprojection ” in its Rift. In the absence of these solutions, the virtual reality viewers can get caught in a frame and that causes jerks.