So I have some new info to share regarding the Varjo Aero, specifically concerning motion smoothing / motion reprojection… and it’s good news.
Up until now the motion smoothing has not been enabled in the Varjo Base software for the Aero apparently, so no one has been able to test it, but after a number of emails back and forth with Varjo support here is what I am told…
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The Aero does in fact have a motion reprojection equivalent.
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It can do the standard reprojection ratio of 1:2 of course (45 fps to 90hz in the headset), but it can also do 1:3 (30fps to 90) like WMR (this one is critical for MSFS) and several more ratios, all the way down to 1:18 (5 fps to 90!) if you really want to. The support rep said that while ratios this extreme are available, it would of course look pretty awful with such low source fps. I love that they’re leaving this up to the users. Bravo.
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The reprojection workload runs entirely on the GPU (probably one of the reasons it officially only supports Nvidia cards right now)
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The reprojection comes with off, auto, and always on modes, just like WMR.
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Visual artifacts and performance hit are hard to quantify, so I wasn’t able to get much of a useful answer on that. They said there is a performance cost for leaving it in “always on” mode, but that the cost depends on the content being reprojected. My gut feeling is that it will probably be at least as good as WMR performance hit wise and with similar artifacts around propellers etc, but with Varjo’s attention to detail I would not be surprised if theirs turns out to be noticeably superior. We won’t really know until some of you here with pre-orders get your units and fill us in on these nitty gritty details.
I know reprojection is not everyone’s cup of tea, but there are quite a few of us here that won’t fly in VR without it, and I am definitely one one of those, so I hope this info is useful to you.
Oculus is just now coming out with a much improved ASW though as well, with much fewer interpolation artifacts and better performance, so it will be interesting to see how that stacks up against the Aero’s reprojection.
Cheers.