HTC Vive gets Oculus Rift ASW-like motion smoothing

One of the Oculus Rift’s most helpful features is Asynchronous SpaceWarp (ASW), first introduced in late 2016. HTC Vive owners have been asking Valve, which makes the software for the HTC Vive, for an equivalent. A new feature delivered with the SteamVR Beta called “Motion Smoothing” looks like it could be the answer.Motion Smoothing works very much like ASW. When you’re not meeting (or near) 90FPS in VR, Motion Smoothing will kick in automatically. Motion Smoothing will force the running game/app to render at 45FPS, then generate a synthetic frame in between each real frame, extrapolating from image and the headset tracking data for a total of 90FPS. Half the frames will be “real” and half “synthetic”. Whenever your graphics card has enough free resources to achieve 90FPS normally, Motion Smoothing will automatically disengage and you will return to true 90FPS.While Motion Smoothing appears to be a direct equivalent to Oculus’ ASW 1.0, Oculus recently announced ASW 2.0, which promises to reduce the kind of artifacts that can be seen by only using the color buffer by also using the depth buffer, which apps can send to the Oculus software. Valve have not indicated whether they are going to add this extra layer in Motion Smoothing.