Hi all, I am a Unity Pro/Android Pro user (using 4.6.3f1) and have been using occlusion culling successfully on several PC projects. Recently I have been working on two Gear VR projects using the OVRCameraRig (with Occlusion Culling enabled on both cameras) and have noticed that Occlusion Culling does not seem to work on the actual Gear VR build itself but does work in the editor.
I noticed this on one project as the draw calls did not drop after baking and that far away objects would not disappear between the small gaps in close objects (intentional test) that I was seeing in the editor, which worked as expected.
On the newer project I made a large cube with an invisible shader assigned to it and set to Occluder Static and baked the scene. In the editor the far objects do not draw behind where the invisible cube is as if the cube was there, exactly what I wanted. In Gear VR the draw calls did not drop (are 5x what is showing the editor) and the far objects behind the cube still all show.
Anyone else having issues with Occlusion Culling on Gear VR builds?
I tested it with 4.6.4 and the new SDK 0.5.0 but it wasn’t fixed.
I have contacted Oculus support (as well as submitting a bug with Unity) and I sent them a test scene to show the issue. They are currently looking into it and I also got an email from one of the heads of the Oculus support department assuring me that this and many other bugs will be fixed in an upcoming update soon.
My feeling is that this will be fixed (hopefully) in the coming weeks.
Actually we upgraded meantime to Oculus mobile SDK 0.5.0 , still on 4.6.3 unity and it seems to be working now. we are getting pretty much the same geometry rendered in editor and mobile now.
I’ve tried my game on Unity 5.1.1 and with the 0.6.0.1 Oculus plugin and occlusion culling STILL does not work on Gear VR. I have a simple test scene with a large cube in the middle of the room and smaller cubes around it. I bake the occlusion, test it in the editor (which works fine), set the large middle cube to use a transparent shader, test it again (still culls the smaller cubes behind it, but now you can see them cull as the large cube is transparent. Then run it on the Gear VR and it does not cull at all!
The bug I submitted back in April is still not closed (I also submitted this with Oculus too), can’t believe it’s taking them this long to fix this glaring issue, the performance would be SO greatly enhanced if this was fixed!
I am looking into your bug report now. Once I get it reproduced, I will pass it onto the dev team. Then they will provide a timeline for fixing the issue. Thanks for your patience, and I apologize we haven’t jumped on this sooner.
Culling should work with integrated VR on P4; however, GearVR/android are experiencing some performance drawbacks that are making culling (and other functionalities) ineffective. The team is working hard to address these performance drawbacks for the next update.
Thanks for the update Will, appreciate it. Can’t wait to see my game running at full steam with the performance updates coming down the pipe. Have been seeing everything from 0.5ms to 20ms just for the culling calculations (with optimal settings)!
@scottb9239 , the devs have found the cause of the problem but do not have a definite timeline on the fix. That might not sound so good but I know that this is a priority for us right now. I will let you know when I get an estimate on the timeline for these fixes.
Will thanks for reporting it to them. Recently the problem with 4.6.7f gave me audio problems (playing too fast) why I was forced to upgrade to Unity 5. Now I’m getting rendering performance issues with the mobile shaders again (as before the VR Jam). Annoying to say the least to upgrade and get worse performance.
Same here, have a project on hold because of this, it’s a room based game that really requires culling to keep it to per room performance for the most part, with the occlusion culling performance as it is the frame rate is really bad in a lot of areas.
Hi vicator, the occlusion culling works on the latest Unity with native VR, but it is very slow, almost unusable, as in it doesn’t save much draw time because the calculation is slow. They are looking into it.
