This new technique will improve the artifacts produced by combining the Positional Timewarp with the Asynchronous Spacewarp.
The Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW), the software technique that allowed Oculus in 2016 to lower Rift requirements, will have a new version very soon as Volga Aksoy, Oculus Graphics Coder, shared in the Rift SDK talk. ASW 2 combine Positional Timewarp (PTW) with ASW to improve the result with transitions with fewer artifacts, though the latter will depend on the contents, both from the point of view of composition as if the app actually offers the depth buffer” to perform the calculations.
Look out for ASW 2.0 soon coming to an @Oculus Rift near you where we combine PTW with ASW. For more info we’ll post our Rift PC SDK talk at # OC5 soon.
– Volga Aksoy (@volgaksoy) September 27, 2018
Basically, the ASW2 uses the Depth Buffer information sent by prepared applications to reduce the artifacts that are sometimes noticed a bit in the ASW, especially in textures that use a very small pattern that repeats itself, such as a grid for example. As Aksoy indicates, the contents will have to provide the buffer information, something that was already required by the PTW, so it will not work unless they update them.
Aksoy also sums it up as we will have a lower latency in the movements when the ASW is activated, something that by itself was not able to achieve this software technique designed to interpolate the lost frames when the frames per second fall below 90.
