Luke Ross, the dude behind REAL VR mod for a lot of games seems to went to 11 on power level:
Sorry, this is going to be an extra-long post, even for my standards, because there's so much new stuff to talk about!
FOV optimizations (a.k.a. Turbo Boost, Baby!)
OK, you might be asking: what the
bleep is a FOV optimization, and why do I want it?
In simple terms: the videogames I mod were not designed from the ground up for Virtual Reality, so the camera has a symmetric field of view, in both vertical and horizontal directions. That means the game camera always points straight at the center of the screen (where the crosshair usually is), and the field of view extends for as many degrees to the left as it does to the right; similarly in the vertical direction (with very few exceptions), the angle being drawn above the crosshair is the same as the angle being drawn below it.
VR headsets are almost never like that though. Most of the time the field of view extends much further downwards than it does upwards, for both eyes; and to make matters even worse, the left eye FOV sees much more to the left than it does to the right, while the right eye FOV reaches out in the opposite direction, towards the right side.
So not only the headset FOV is asymmetric; it is also skewed in different directions for the two eyes. Note that this is not a peculiarity of specific headsets using canted displays, like the Pimax models; all headsets available on the market have some sort of asymmetry, in varying amounts.
What that boils down to is, even with great attention to cutting the perfect aspect ratio for the game, a
lot of the pixels being drawn by the GPU end up being wasted, simply because the game wants to draw a symmetric and constant field of view while the headset needs an asymmetric, variable FOV.
In the latest versions of the R.E.A.L. VR mod, I finally came up with a way to work around this problem, and you will find two "magic" checkboxes on the main tab of the mod overlay: "Optimize VFOV" and "Optimize HFOV". As you can guess, the former will remedy the asymmetry in the vertical direction, and the latter will take care of the more complicated situation in the horizontal direction. You can refer to
this post to see them in action with Cyberpunk 2077.
The two boxes won't always be available, however. Some headsets already expose a symmetric field of view in the vertical direction, so the "Optimize VFOV" box will be grayed out for them (that's good news, because it means you don't need the workaround). But unfortunately, some runtimes do not implement correctly the functionality required for the trick, or do not support it at all, so the boxes will also be grayed out for them (and that's bad news because you'll miss the performance gains).
See the "Compatibility matrix for FOV optimizations" section at the end of the post for a detailed list of what works and what doesn't; but in a nutshell, stay clear of Virtual Desktop and Steam Link, and do not use OpenVR. I'm sure that Guy Godin will find a way to update Virtual Desktop so that it will allow the FOV optimizations, but for now using it will lead to warped and possibly doubled images.
A final, very important note: the VFOV optimization is pretty safe, and it should work its magic without any visible artifacts or image quality deterioration across all games in our collection. For this reason it is turned on by default whenever the combo API/runtime/link/headset allows for it. The only slight issue you might notice with VFOV opti on is that the black bars at the sides of your view when you turn around quickly will be a little larger (you can mitigate that by dragging the "Reduce shaking" slider a bit to the left). But on the contrary, the HFOV optimization is
unsafe, in the sense that it will most likely cause artifacts and image doubling unless I put special patches in the game in order to support it.
For now I have only done so with Cyberpunk 2077 (since it's the game that everybody wants to play) and with Watch Dogs 2. More games will follow, but I can already tell you that not all of the games in the list will end up supporting HFOV optimization. For instance Star Wars Outlaws at the moment does not implement it correctly, and most of the HUD elements are doubled (i.e., they appear in different positions for the two eyes). Thus, I recommend always leaving "Optimize VFOV" on, for all games, but only turning on "Optimize HFOV" for CP2077, WD2 and other games where it doesn't show artifacts, or where you find the defects tolerable in exchange for the big performance boost.
Cyberpunk 2077
This release of the R.E.A.L. mod extends support to the latest official patch, i.e., game version 2.13. Everything should be working properly, even with VFOV and HFOV optimization turned on, and the few things that had been broken recently like scanning and quick hacking should all behave as expected now.
I apologize for taking longer than usual to fix the mod for the new CP2077 update, but there was a huge performance drop after the update that I spent several days investigating. Basically with ray tracing turned off (which is what we usually want to play smoothly in VR) the GPU usage was cut in half, hovering around 50% instead of the usual 95-100%.
I'm not entirely sure why that happened. It was probably due to some interaction with the mod, but on the Steam and Red forums several people reported the same issue while playing in 2D. Anyway, I fixed it now, and performance is fully restored, so you can safely update and enjoy the incredible resolutions you can now hit with VFOV and HFOV optimizations turned on!!