Asynchronous Spacewarp

See also: Timewarp

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Asynchronous Spacewarp or ASW applies animation detection, camera translation, and head translation to previous frames in order to predict the next frame. As a result, motion is smoothed and applications can run on lower performance hardware.

The Rift operates at 90Hz. When an application fails to submit frames at 90Hz, the Rift runtime drops the application down to 45Hz with ASW providing each intermediate frame.

Once officially released, ASW will be enabled for all supported Rifts.

ASW tends to predict linear motion better than non-linear motion. If your application is dropping frames, you can either adjust the resolution or simply allow ASW to take over.

Asynchronous SpaceWarp (ASW) enables users to run the Oculus Rift on lower specification hardware than our current recommended specification.

Requirements

ASW requires the following:

• Oculus Runtime 1.9 or later
• Windows 8 or later
• For Nvidia, driver 373.06 or later
• For AMD, driver 16.40.2311 or later

Until the minimum specification is released, we recommend the following GPUs for ASW testing:

Manufacturer	Series	Minimum RAM	Minimum Model
NVIDIA	Pascal	3GB	1060
	Maxwell	4GB	960
AMD	Polaris	4GB	470

Testing ASW

To enable ASW testing:

1. Open your registry editor.
2. Navigate to HKLM\Software\Oculus VR, LLC\LibOVR.
3. Create the DWORD AswEnabled key and set it to 1.

While testing your application with ASW, you can switch between rendering modes:

• Control-Numpad1: Disables ASW and returns to the standard rendering mode.
• Control-Numpad2: Forces apps to 45Hz with ASW disabled. Depending on the application, you are likely to experience judder.
• Control-Numpad3: Forces apps to 45Hz with ASW enabled. Enabling and disabling ASW will help you see the effects of ASW.
• Control-Numpad4: Enables ASW. ASW automatically turns on and off, depending on whether the app maintains a 90Hz frame rate. This is the default runtime rendering mode.