I'd like to report a bug in the current version (including latest beta, and all previous versions of the past few months) of SteamVR related to timing incompatibilities with AMD 7000 series GPUs (7900 XTX w/ Vive Pro 1 in my case). This appears to be similar to a bug that was fixed for NVIDIA 4000 series cards as well, specifically in this update: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/250820/view/3666530992740504707 (Beta 1.25.4).
Please leave a comment on this community post if it is impacting you, to let Valve know this is an important issue.
Why is this something valve needs to fix? For ordinary gaming gpu manufacturers already have latency lowering solutions that don’t overshoot or require hard-coded values. What makes vr different?
VR has much more stringent latency requirements than normal gaming, because moving your head needs to be in perfect sync with the world “staying still”. The manual calibration needed for this is around 8ms, which is compensating for the render/presentation time of a single frame at 120fps.
It sounds like a nitpick, but I can tell you from experience that it makes a very significant difference.
If you can just add a 7ms delay without noticing it as the solution suggests, latency doesn’t sound that stringent. What the problem sounds to me like is that the headset doesn’t support vrr so frames have to wait a whole frame time if they miss their window, and steamvr doesn’t realise that’s happening. Which wouldn’t be a problem if this was managed by the driver instead
Why is this something valve needs to fix? For ordinary gaming gpu manufacturers already have latency lowering solutions that don’t overshoot or require hard-coded values. What makes vr different?
VR has much more stringent latency requirements than normal gaming, because moving your head needs to be in perfect sync with the world “staying still”. The manual calibration needed for this is around 8ms, which is compensating for the render/presentation time of a single frame at 120fps.
It sounds like a nitpick, but I can tell you from experience that it makes a very significant difference.
If you can just add a 7ms delay without noticing it as the solution suggests, latency doesn’t sound that stringent. What the problem sounds to me like is that the headset doesn’t support vrr so frames have to wait a whole frame time if they miss their window, and steamvr doesn’t realise that’s happening. Which wouldn’t be a problem if this was managed by the driver instead
Yes headsets don’t support VRR which is why it’s so crucial to get the timing right