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Valve have released a big new 1.7 version of SteamVR

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Bringing together a ton of updates from all the recent Beta releases, a big new release of SteamVR is out for everyone further refining the VR experience overall.

This time around SteamVR gained a simplified user experience, Valve said their aim here is to "more clearly and consistently communicate general VR and specific device status" along with an improved VR display view, with a new docked preview and full-screen mode. A bunch of icons were updated, with support for high-DPI displays and more.

For Valve's own Index HMD, there's now a Brightness Control setting for you to set in-headset. They also enabled column correction to help with vertical "screendoor", both of which need a firmware update.

Apart from that, there's a huge amount of bugs that were fixed across SteamVR, SteamVR Home, SteamVR Input, Lighthouse and so on. The Linux experience should also be better too, these changes were just for us:

  • Fixed various performance issues.
  • Fixed IVRCompositor::GetFrameTiming() reporting bad data when async mode was enabled, correcting the reporting of impossibly long frame times in the frame timing window.
  • Fixed a system hang when async compute is enabled.
  • Reduce CPU utilization when async reprojection is disabled.
  • SteamVR Home: Fixed Linux crash

See the full release notes here.

With this big new release a question to our readers who have a VR unit: how is the experience now? Has the 1.7 release been a decent improvement? What issues does it still face on Linux? Let everyone know in the comments.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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4 comments

Ehvis Sep 11, 2019
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Unfortunately with the changes to the VR display window, they seem to have broken the ability to turn off reprojection, which is turn is the cause of quite a few issues for me.
blue5alamander Sep 11, 2019
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What equipment do you need to get VR working on Linux, and how do you get it (if you're not in the US or Europe -- for example you're in SE Asia)?
Julius Sep 11, 2019
Is Valve's version of time-warp now available for Linux or is it still Windows and Nvidia only?

Ugh, apparently not:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/214

A pity really, as that would probably lessen the impact of using Proton for most games.


Last edited by Julius on 11 September 2019 at 5:02 pm UTC
stud68 Sep 13, 2019
Anyone have SteamVR working on rx5700xt?
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