Thursday, April 14, 2016

Dev update #6 - Win 7, 8, 8.1 support for NVIDIA users


Update for NVIDIA users:

Windows 7 & 8 is still having some issues (infinite awaiting VR stream/crash) due to missing .DLL. Windows 8.1/10 should work. Possible workaround here.


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The numbers in the title aligned quite nicely. This week we focused on NVIDIA support for Windows 7+. Next focus is solving artifacts @ Android's video decoder.

NVENC / Windows 7+ support for NVIDIAs


Note: If this update causes more artifacts for you, go to stream quality settings and disable NVENC. It's still highly experimental feature but it's enabled by default for all NVIDIA users.




We implemented NVENC. Until now we used Media Foundation to handle video encoding but unfortunately it requires Windows 8.1+ for AMD or Windows 10 for NVIDIA. It also has some undefined issues ("Not Enough Storage" errors and some other crashes) with AMD video cards, especially after WIndows 8.1->Windows 10 upgrade instead of clean installation.

NVENC is alternative encoding layer supported by NVIDIA driver. It has some extra features for low-latency streaming and anti-lag measures (error concealment). They are not all enabled yet because they amplify Android decoder problems (read about it later in this post) but we already tested some techniques and you can expect less artifacts and even lower latency in the future thanks to NVENC capabilities.

AMD users might wonder "Can we get something like this too?" The answer is yes (via direct VCE implementation) but we don't have any ETAs yet. This might solve some crashes for AMD users, especially those with mobile Radeons.

The ongoing battle with artifacts


We can finally reproduce one major problem reported by many users -  frame loss @ video decoder. 

For some people it starts very shortly after start of the stream (basically preventing VRidge usage because it artifacts all the time). Other people experience it after several mintues (the higher quality settings, the sooner it happens). 

Now that we can finally reproduce it - it shouldn't take too long to finally solve this problem.

When can I play new VR games (like Elite: Dangerous, ETS, ATS, Virtual Desktop, etc.) with Riftcat? 


This is the question asked the most. One of our devs has been working for several weeks to get them working with VRidge. Expect more news on this matter next week.

13 comments:

  1. it wont let me disable this feature. it says "you can only disable this feature on windows 10" help please!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What is your video card and OS? If it's NVIDIA with Windows other than 10 you cannot disable NVENC because alternative works only on Win10.

      If you have high artifacting please see this:
      https://riftcat.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207602839

      Delete
  2. What's the advantage to NVENC? I'm currently running without it, but I'd enable it and play around with it if I knew what it was supposed to improve.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No adventage currently. It's an alternative for people having trouble with regular encoder.

      Delete
  3. i have problem when i start a game a message appears on the phone "awaiting VR game Stream" and i wait alot but nothing happens .. can you help me please

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Send me logs (team@riftcat.com) located in {RiftCat folder}/logs and I'll look into it.

      Delete
  4. "awaiting VR game Stream"

    i have windows 10 64bits 970GTX, Moto G2

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Send log files from Riftcat/logs folder to team@riftcat.com and copy-paste:
      "awaiting VR game Stream
      i have windows 10 64bits 970GTX, Moto G2"

      Delete
  5. I dont can login appear unkown error

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Please install following update for Win 7:
      https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36805

      Delete
  6. Hello, I recently bought a Nexus 6P(not just for riftcat :D ).
    Unfortunately I am having trouble. I'm not sure if I am losing frames or just have a low fps. Network says I have lost 1 frame and decoding says 5. My PC has an r9 285 and 8gb RAM
    A8-5600k CPU with Windows 10.
    Any help would be great. :)

    ReplyDelete