Experience Matching and Quality Settings

Tool Validation – Experience Matching

Though matching the software capture data to the hardware capture data is a significant and crucial piece of the validation process for FCAT VR as a tool we can depend on, matching what the interval plots say and what the actual in-headset gaming experience FEELS like is just as important. In the above example, I can state that it does. In cases where the data is exceptionally poor in appearance, we see a dramatic degradation in gameplay experience.

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In Obduction on the Fury X, frametimes are erratic and result in consistent and persistent jumps between a 90 FPS and 45 FPS state. I can assure you that play the game at this quality setting was a very bad experience and the choppiness of the graph well represents what we saw in the headset while gaming.

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In cases like this the interval plot is even more important as it shows the frequency and severity of any frame drops and animation issues. An interesting data point we get from this specific run is that Oculus was not engaging the ASW (asynchronous space warp) functionality on the Fury X. That could be because the Fury X doesn’t support it or because the delivered frametimes were too inconsistent to enter that state.

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Zooming in on the data that looks compressed and difficult to read allows us to see the oscillation effect more clearly.

In-Game Quality Settings Impact

One of the major benefits to having a tool like FCAT VR is that we can now compare in-game settings and GPU-to-GPU as it were any other game or ecosystem. Let’s look at the GeForce GTX 1060 running at two different quality presets in Chronos.

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This very busy graph shows the hardware and software capture data for Chronos on the GTX 1060 running at the Epic quality preset and the High preset. Pay attention to those legends – they become more important here. Two things stand out. First, the hardware captures (dark green for Epic and tan for High) show that we run consistently at 90 FPS on the less stressful settings but ratchetting that up to Epic brings us to a 45 FPS steady state (nearly). While that might seem obvious to us now, having a reliable metrics system allows us to SHOW it to people that don’t have the ability to try it themselves. This allows us to now make statements like “owners of the GTX 1060 should run Chronos at the High preset for the best balance of image quality and performance.”

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Removing the Vsync-locked hardware capture simplifies the data. By just looking at frame times, we see a significant delta between the two runs.

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Finally, when we add in the interval plots, the information becomes even more straight forward. At the Epic preset we are running Chronos at 45 FPS of “real” frames and 45 FPS of “synthesized” frames for the clear majority of the time. Dropping settings to High results in a very consistent 90 FPS experience without requiring Oculus to fake any images for us.

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