It’s no secret that Valve has been going deep on virtual reality. The company created SteamVR, the virtual reality platform that brought the HTC Vive to life. And earlier this year, Valve released a benchmark tool (SteamVR Performance test) that evaluates your PC’s ability to deliver an acceptable VR experience. This test is unique in that it dynamically scales the graphic fidelity of the scene (from The Lab) to ensure the GPU can keep the frame rate at 90fps and latency at 11ms or less.
Now Valve is making this same adaptive scaling technology available to Unity developers in what it calls The Lab Renderer. Valve released the technology to the Unity asset store, and it includes the scripts and shaders that were used to render The Lab. “The Lab Renderer” and all of its source code is available free of charge.
Unity developers can now implement Valve’s Adaptive Quality system into their own creations, and the upshot here is that low-powered graphics systems have a better chance of VR support for third-party VR games that make use of this technology.
The Lab Renderer package is available now. You will need Unity 5.4.b15 or newer to use it.
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