AMD VR Performance

[0h_no_not_again]

Hi All,

I'm trying to figure out how and why AMD cards are showing such sporadic VR performance, ranging from OK to shocking. I'm basing this on personal experience with an R9 290X and HardOCP's benchmarks: http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vr/

There are two major game engines running 99% of VR content: Unity and UE4

As a huge generalisation, it appears that Unity is getting OK performance on AMD cards, where UE4 is pretty terrible. By OK performance I mean close to but behind NVidia at all price points. Obviously we can live with the Unity performance, but UE4 is unplayable.

Now as far as I can figure, there are two reasons for this happening:
1. AMD haven't worked with UE4 (at all) to get their hardware playing nice.
2. UE4 has adopted vendor specific toolsets that are gimping AMD hardware

Does anyone have some insight on the cause(s)?
Is AMD doing anything to rectify the situation?
I'm quite positive about DX12 integration into these engines, as it might give AMD hardware a decent boost, but when is it coming?

Anyway, any insight is appreciated. Googling didn't turn up much except for the repetition of "LiquidVR" as a buzzword...

 

[0h_no_not_again]

Ah man, this is the worst thing I've read today. I was so close to pulling the trigger of a Rift, but it looks like the price just went up significantly

Ah sorry. I was hoping it wouldn't put anyone off...

At least there are people doing VR Benchmarks now so you don't go in blind. I'm not a huge Kyle from HardOCP fan, but his approach and data looks pretty solid.

 

[0h_no_not_again]

I've heard rumours that LiquidVR enables Split Frame Rendering for Crossfire (one GPU per eye?). Significant googling turned up terrible anecdotal evidence to back it up...