Optimizing Beautify for Oculus Quest

Oculus Quest has become one of the most popular VR devices of 2019 and we put Beautify to test.

The Oculus Quest is the perfect gift for this Christmas. It sports 6 degrees of freedom, massive OLED 1440x1600 screens per eye (Rift had 1080x1200), 72Hz refresh rate and two responsive touch controllers. If that’s not enough, it has Vader Immortal and in early 2020 we’ll be able to play the next chapter of The Room exclusively on VR.

Since Beautify was already compatible with many VR devices, we wanted to ensure it performs great on the Quest. So we ran demo scene 1 included in the asset on the device using the core image enhancement filter plus bloom.

From a reference 72 fps in a simple scene, we got 70 fps in Best Quality mode with bloom enabled and Single Pass Stereo rendering, which is outstanding. However, when enabling the Ultra option for the absolutely maximum quality, we got 40/45 fps. Disabling Ultra increased the fps to 70+ again.

The reason for this difference was the size of the internal mip buffers used by Beautify’s bloom. This effect uses a pyramid of buffers to progressively blur bright areas of the image which are blended together in a final pass. In Best Quality mode, Beautify’s bloom downscales the input image to 512 pixels (non-ultra) before computing the pyramid mip buffers. When Ultra is used, Beautify does not downscale the image. Instead, it uses the native height of the screen device (ultra). When you use a standard FHD screen (1080), the Ultra basically produces a x2 in quality. However in the Quest, it’s a jump from 512 to 1440. Almost x3. Quite a difference in terms of quality and performance.

To allow further fine-tuning, in Beautify 7.3 we added a Quality slider next to the Ultra checkbox:

When Ultra is enabled, you can adjust the quality slider (1–10) to configure the downscale from non-ultra (512) to 1440 in the case of the Oculus Quest. By default and for backward compatibility reasons, this new property is set to 10 (maximum quality) which makes Ultra behave as in previous versions.

Thanks to this new option you can achieve a finer balance between performance and quality on this new generation of VR devices as well as 4K capable graphics cards.

Finally, it’s worth to take a look at the Shader Options section. You can get a bit of extra performance by disabling some options.

Note: at the time of this writing, Beautify 7.3 is available as beta to all customers of our support forum on kronnect.com.