In addition to this system that optimizes the occlusion calls of stereoscopic frames, the engine now has native Windows MR support.
Epic Games has launched the version 4.21 of your engine Unreal Engine which adds new features that affect virtual reality, the most notable being the inclusion of a new flag (vr.RoundRobinOcclusion) that allows you to activate the round Robin Technique optimizes the number of calls to the occlusion in the rendering, thus achieving a significant improvement in some situations, as long as the applications check the option.
“With this option enabled, stereoscopic frames will start occlusion queries for each eye using an alternative scheme: odd frames only start queries for the left eye, and even frames only for the right. This approach halves the number of occlusion draw calls per frame. In some situations, this significantly improves performance, ” they explain.
As they point out, the new system when making occlusion calculations only does it for the camera corresponding to each eye in an alternative way, instead of the complete calculation that the default method performs. Therefore, it is not an improvement of the occlusion algorithm, but of the calls made to that process. However, as explained in the documentation, producing a latency frame in the occlusion data could result in an incorrect rendering of the periphery.
Unreal Engine 4.21 also introduces native platform support and Windows Mixed Reality viewers, that is, without using SteamVR, and adds support for the Oculus avatar SDK and all the features of the Magic Leap Qualified Developer Release.
