optimized frame pacing for Oculus Quest (2) and other Android headsets

Unity Engine
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1

I just noticed a setting called optimized frame pacing in the Andoird Screen settings promising to deliver smoother gameplay. Should this help with VR on android headsets or not?

And if it should help and has no drawbacks, why isn’t it enabled by default?

2

It is on by default in 2021.2 I have noticed, any info someone?

3

Bump

4

Have you tried it out?

This question was already asked here: Android Optimized Frame Pacing for VR?
…although nobody answered since 2019 - some people reported it crashed the Quest but that was more than 2 years ago.

According to this article, yes you should enable it for Quest:

And here are the official docs for pacing: Frame Pacing Library  |  Android game development  |  Android Developers

5

btw I have had it enabled for as long as I can remember and I’ve never had any issues with Quest 2, though I’m not sure if it’s faster when it’s enabled.

6

I also don’t have any issues with it, and it certainly doesn’t crash the quest anymore, but just wanted to make sure if it helps.
I know a bit how it works (picking either the new frame or old frame to optimize the frame times), but since VR is VERY latency-sensitive I wondered if it would increase latency or something.
For android games in general it’s great to keep it on of course

7

updated to 2021.3.10f1 and started noticing horrible frame pacing for the first time. The issue never happened on 2019 or 2020, and I never enabled this Frame Pacing option.
I just tried enabling it on 2021.3.10, and it did help, but i am experiencing intermittent hitches (maybe related to a different aspect of the engine upgrade, I’m not sure yet).
The really odd thing is what happens if you change refresh rate. In our game, we change the refresh between 72hz and 90hz depending on certain scenarios, but when you do this with OptimizeFramePacing enabled, the system doesn’t understand that it’s optimizing for the new refresh, until I put the headset to sleep and wake it back up. So until that time, it’ll try to deliver frames at a 90fps pacing to the 72hz display, and vice versa, at a 72hz pacing to the 90hz display.

any way to kick the system into correcting its frame pacing target?

also, it’s a bummer to need to use this in the first place. Never had a single frame pacing issue with the previous Unity versions and Quest 1 and Quest 2

8

If you have a project you can reproduce this with I suggest making a bug report so it can be fixed. Upload both 2020 and 2021 versions