Oculus CTO John Carmack has posted the latest Public VR Critique: Daedalus, running on the Gear VR. Daedalus is a platformer and exploration game set in a surrealist world.
Carmack appears to really enjoy this game, mentioning that at "OC4, one of the VR apps presented for my review session was Daedalus...I played through the first couple training segments on stage, giving some of my common feedback, but what was noteworthy was that I didn't want to quit - I had to make myself stop to get on to the rest of the slate lined up."
In the critique, Carmack covers Daedalus' gameplay, artistic feel, and the pros/cons of the art style in mobile VR. He also reviews performance on Gear VR:
QuoteThe frame rate doesn’t hold 60 fps reliably, there are a number of areas where you can clearly drop it depending on which direction you are looking. It still plays ok, but the controller model stutters and the smooth boost-glide movement that is the core of the game gets choppy.
I took a look with Snapdragon Profiler. The vast majority of VR apps have obvious things wrong – doing multi-pass rendering, not invalidating buffers correctly, using uncompressed textures, etc. Disappointingly from an optimization standpoint, Daedalus (on UE4) is basically doing everything right. The path to performance improvements is in the shaders. Unlike most apps, it is ALU bound instead of memory bound, and some optimizing can probably make a significant difference. The rather lengthy fragment shaders are all in high precision, figuring out what can go to low precision and what other approximations may be appropriate is where I would start.
Check out the full critique here.
