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.