Vulkan for Oculus Quest

Is there any news on a planned release date? As mentioned here and elsewhere it was thought to be coming soon.

Thanks!

 

I also would like to know, did you have any update?

 

I'm also hoping for more official information from Unity!

 

The latest Unity 2020 alpha or Oculus Integration for android (through package manager) seemed to mention Vulkan somewhere, I can't find it now but it sounded like they were doing a check before build time to make sure it definitely errors out if Vulkan is added... soo definitely not ready!

 

On Unite 2019's Unity Roadmap PDF page 61 it says that Quest Vulkan support is planned for 2019.3! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h4u_vHmm6ISxwn6-NAlcwOsuvVqb4iyK/view

 

Hey folks, honestly I'm a newbie when it comes to VR-development.
But from time to time I check out the latest capabilities in Unity.

So do i assume rightly that creating VR in Unity for Oculus Quest should become much more efficient with...
a) Vulkan API Support for VR (2019.3 or 2019.4?)
b) Oculus Link - Instant project preview without the whole workaround creating *.apk and so on?

Thank you guys.

 

Yes. Vulkan should improve runtime performance (but we shall have to see and of course it will be extremely project-specific - you should be able to do some things to your project to take advantage of it in the worst case either way).

Building an APK is really a small impediment. You need to implement good editor tooling to "simulate" the VR experience in the editor in order to quickly iterate anyway (such as being able to "look around" with mouse or keyboard by transforming the camera like the headset would, etc.) Since you need this tooling for the best possible iteration in the first place, a half-step like Instant Preview isn't as important as it might seem for many of us. (You still have to go to the effort of putting on and taking off the headset - when you're quickly iterating on something, even that is too much time to waste.) But of course it's a welcome benefit that will make some scenarios more streamlined!

 

Watch this space

 

The surprising thing to me on that slide is "Fixed foveated rendering not yet supported" - I am using it right now in 2019.2 with LWRP. Is this only referring to the new, actually-renamed "Universal" render pipeline in 2019.3?

 

See here, this thread goes into detail of all the issues we found. It does work on URP just you need to edit ForwardRenderer.cs and then it works with MSAA on the device. However, MSAA is broken in the editor and all other platforms apart from Oculus Quest/Go basically

https://forum.unity.com/threads/fix...oculus-quest-not-working.686662/#post-4694618

 

Thank you for your explanations. The easier the development will be, we will get more applications und hopefully VR will be established.

 

Weird seeing Unreal / Epic ahead in mobile space but that's swings and roundabouts. Interested in foveated myself.

 

Hoping for a fix and a means of activating it without loads of imported Oculus integration stuff.

 

Even oculus do not want you using oculus' stuff, but the unified XR stuff instead. This is because according to them, we'd be best off developing our games not porting them I agree!

 

yes I was pleasently surprised recently having an OvrManager (used only for Quest FFR) in an OpenVR build without running into issues

 

There must be a way to activate FFR without having the OVR Plugin or Oculus Integration Assets in your project though surely, as Unity has a built-in copy of the OVR Plugin for the Oculus Android Support/Oculus Loader within the XR Subsystems package. They even advise not to use the Oculus Integration assets within a project using XR Subsystems as it causes incompatibility issues due to having a duplicate of the OVR Plugin.

 

ah I tried to take a look at XR subsystems and URP mobile VR at the same time, it was a disaster ^^. I'll wait until both are out of preview / production ready, too much headhache and not enough time. I'm really looking forward for Vulkan and stable new UT features

 

I'm just going to keep posting everywhere and ask people how to set FFR without importing a load of Oculus example assets, we are being encouraged to (and also Unity is supporting) cross-platform VR development but not being able to activate FFR through the Unity integrations of the Oculus plugin is baffling.

 

@ROBYER1 I agree but it will come eventually.

 

This Oculus Connect talk mentions how Vulkan allows for cross-platform Fixed Foveated Rendering (FFR) due to the extension no longer being Qualcomm only. This means that once Vulkan is working for Quest/Go, we may well see FFR cross-platform between Vulkan on Windows platform headsets as well as Mobile VR. This could also extend to other Vulkan features, hopefully meaning that Vulkan becomes more of a cross-platform standard for VR rendering.

 

@hippocoder We must wait patiently in this forum to find out if Klingons indeed did blow up the Vulkan support

 

Hahah I admire the persistence

 

Each day I grow more impatient some news or an update would be brilliant

 

I notice you beating them with a stick on github, thanks but I also see they're being really crap at XR support...

Do you use multiview? that's the option to pick if using ES3 like me.

 

I use the Single Pass rendering mode for Oculus Quest at the moment until the implementation of XR Management behaves with the Oculus Plugin or if we can active FFR alongside using XR Management.

Elsewhere issues reported with Shader graph/Universal RP are being chased up here
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/pull/4948#issuecomment-552442867

 

So, when will Vulkan Support Be Added For Quest?? CAN UNITY GIVE A CLEAR ANSWER?..

 

When Unity said "later this year" they probably meant 31.12.2019

 

https://medium.com/@jlwu.will/vulka...-rendering-part-3-implementation-2ae532d31fb9

Might just start implementing it myself lol

 

Your answer is here, 2019.3 official release, should be an exciting one. Let's hope it has been tested fully before its release too

https://forum.unity.com/threads/cannot-build-vr-vulkan-support.652027/

 

Has anyone tried the 2019.3 RC1? https://unity3d.com/unity/beta/2019.3.0f1

There are is a mention of XR / Vulkan, but nothing Quest-specific:

Code (CSharp):

1. XR: Fixed an issue that caused Vulkan standalone player with single-pass instancing to show black screen in HMD. (1130342)

 

Standalone player refers to Windows and mac standalone platforms, Vulkan has been there for a little while, however Vulkan for Android (and Android VR on Oculus Quest/Go) is still in the works until an official announcement.

At this point I am lost on whether to use 2019.3 Release versions or move to 2020 alpha/beta

 

I'm sitting on 2020.1 onward cos my stuff is stable on it (if I don't use shadergraph). If there is no announcement for it or news in notes it means they'll either blog it or it's not ready yet.

 

Moved everything to 2020 alpha latest release today with no issues, seems I'm always going to be in Alpha/Beta!

 

I'll stop when the basics are available:

• vulkan
• vr priority
• no bugs

 

... mmmm'kay

 

Yep since some things aren't going to get back ported (anything that qualifies as feature, and vulkan is a feature) :/

 

Someone at Unity confirmed that Vulkan support for VR is coming in 2019.3 but that it's been delayed yet again (was supposed to release tomorrow). Is MSAA working on 2020.1? I am using 2019.2 and it's still broken but may move to 2020.1 if some more of the SRP stuff is working.

 

Does anyone have any news on Vulkan for Oculus Quest for 2019.3 yet?

 

Looks like is coming sometime shortly after new year now.

 

OK - where did you find that out?

 

I asked someone at Unity and that's what they told me, gave no specific date other than that though. https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/12/12/2019-3-is-now-in-the-final-stages-of-beta-testing/ should be the one with it in as far a I have been told.

 

Doubt it will be in 2019.3 otherwise it would have been in a beta already

 

"XR: Enable multi-pass rendering using Vulkan for XR (built-in rendering pipeline - SRP support coming in other fixes)" is in the beta patch notes so looks like support is coming in a later fix for this release? Hopefully is supports Multiview and not just Multipass.

 

Still not able to build with Vulkan and the latest 2019.3.0f3. Not sure what that changelog message means.

 

Looks like you can only build with the bultin renderer and not the SRP renderers (URP/HDRP).

 

I got Vulkan to work with the Quest on 2020.1.0a16.

Here is what I did:
- In Assets\Oculus\VR\Editor\OVRGradleGeneration.cs, comment the check for Vulkan API (should be 94-101)
- Make sure to use Legacy XR (Player => XR Settings should be Oculus like in previous versions of Unity) and not the new XR packages system

 

Not Universal Pipeline though?

 

URP with multipass only renders left eye. With Single Pass and Vulkan, only skybox is rendered, no objects.

I did a few small meaningless tests and for now I don't see a performance gain by using Vulkan. This will probably change when it is finally released.

 

Did you see a measurable increase in performance? I think I remember some people claiming a 10% performance boost from OpenGL to Vulkan.

 

We made it to 2020, and still no official word on this topic. It's so painful knowing that free performance upgrades on Quest are just around the corner...