Performance gain over OpenVRDesktopDisplayPortal?

[danove_b]

As the title... Are there any performance gain to expect if I buy this updated OVRDrop? I'm happy with the functionality, but could pay some money if the performance is improved. I have an 980ti, and it seems like it cost at least 5% GPU to run one instance/window.

[Jaded]

Absolutely.

OpenVRDesktopDisplayPortal was using a capture method which primarily used the CPU. It was single threaded, meaning it could only use one core at a time. As a result, the max you could clone was about 360p@24fps (depending on CPU), and this would max out one of your cores (reported as 25% CPU usage on a 4 core CPU by Task Manager).

OVRdrop is GPU accelerated, meaning it has moved almost all of the work onto the GPU. With a 1080, OVRdrop can capture 1440p at 300fps or more, and it will use very little CPU. OVRdrop lets you set the capture FPS just like OVRDDP did, and you can set limit it to 60FPS or lower of course. OVRdrop’s capture method will only capture a new frame when something has changed on the screen, and with a 60hz monitor ~300fps is just the highest I was able to update the screen buffer – this was not maxing my GPU by any means.

If you’re only concerned with GPU usage, OVRdrop probably uses about the same GPU load since most of that is rendering the Unity window. The new capture method only takes a few ms to capture the entire screen. Depending on the resolution of your display and your GPU it should take 1ms to 3ms per frame.

The main downside to OVRdrop is that it can only capture from monitors connected to the Primary GPU (which is whichever GPU the ‘Primary’ monitor is connected to), and since it captures the screen buffer it can only capture windows which are visible on the screen. Depending on your setup this may or may not be an issue for you. I am still working to support other capture methods and I’m very hopeful that I’ll have a proper GPU accelerated background window capture method working under Unity soon.

[danove_b]

Thank's for you answer. I have a I7-8700, so the CPU load is not a problem...