UPDATE Jan 20: Facebook states that thanks to users submitting logs, it has now been able to reproduce the issue, and can now “use this to identify, test, and verify a fix”.
The original article, published January 14, continues below.
Owners of the Oculus Rift and Rift S headsets, as well as Quest owners using Link, have been reporting stuttering and other performance issues after the v12 software update.
Reports of this issue sprang up on reddit and the Oculus forums over the past month. Whereas the forum post after the previous Rift software release had 40 comments, the v12 release has 287 comments at time of writing, many of which are about the issue.
The reports describe stuttering, judder, frame drops and other issues in a wide variety of VR games. These issues are more critical in VR than on a monitor because the positional inaccuracy they introduce makes many people feel sick. This is due to a disconnect between what the inner ear feels and what the eyes see.
The true prevalence of the problem is unclear. However, three days ago a Facebook representative on reddit made a post about the issue, asking users to submit bug reports with system information attached. This is not something Facebook commonly does for reported issues, and may suggest the issue as widespread. However, the representative said Facebook is “not seeing what we would consider to be a proportional number of support tickets or bug reports coming in related to these reports“.
The Oculus PC software does not offer the ability to roll back versions and has automatic updates. This leaves users unable to easily solve problems introduced in software updates.
Facebook released an update on December 23 to the Public Test Channel which one of its programmers seemed to suggest fixes these issues. However, users on both reddit and the Oculus forums are reporting the issue still persists.
Facebook has been accused by some of abandoning Oculus’ PC roots by investing its time and attention in the Android-based Oculus Quest instead. Moves such as releasing Hand Tracking on Quest but not on the Rift S added fuel to these accusations. If this performance issue is indeed widespread, introducing performance issues to a software update and not providing a valid fix after almost one month gives credence to these suggestions.
