SteamVR update for 16 March 2023

Update Highlights

Today’s update includes a few minor feature additions and a variety of bug fixes, particularly in OpenXR. We continue to focus on OpenXR as our preferred API for new games and applications. These improvements will help stabilize SteamVR and ease the release of some of our upcoming changes and new features.

SteamVR’s official OpenXR subforum is here and we’d love to hear your feedback, as well as suggestions for new features. To report a bug, please use our Bug Reports subforum, here. Guidelines for how to provide an effective bug report are pinned at the top of that subforum.

Full Update Notes

SteamVR:

• Fix for crash where GPU would hang due to excessive bus usage.
• Added a setting in the video tab to turn GPU bus monitoring on/off. Enabling bus monitoring may cause hitches on some systems. When enabled, the mini-performance graph will show bus percent usage when above 3% (currently Nvidia only). Bus usage measures memory transfer between the GPU and the rest of the system. The highest usage is usually during loading. If the GPU runs out of video memory and the OS starts paging critical resources to system memory, then there can be catastrophic performance loss. The easiest fix is typically to reduce your recommended render target resolution in SteamVR settings, or reduce max texture resolutions in the application’s settings.
• Fixed missing font for many dashboard elements.
• Fixed hitching issue for 40-series Nvidia cards.

OpenXR:

• Fixed an issue for DX12 apps that use multiple swap chains per frame.
• Fixed an issue with xrStopHapticFeedback having no effect on HTC Vive controllers.
• Updated OpenGL supported depth format. Removed GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32 and added GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32F for wider driver compatibility.
• Fixed an issue where multi-session applications would get old time information on the first frame of sessions after the first session.
• Implemented XR_EXT_active_action_set_priority.
• Fixed some issues with automapping Oculus Touch bindings to other controllers when no other bindings were suggested.
• Enabled Visibility Mask for Oculus/Meta devices.
• Fixed a bug with visibility mask vertex direction and related two-call idiom behavior.
• Fixed some haptic issues, including pre-set minimum duration, to resolve issue with Vive Wands not responding to xrStopHapticFeedback.
• Allow an OpenXR instance to be created even if there's no headset connected and the headless extension isn't enabled. This allows applications and tools to probe the SteamVR runtime for system information.
• Provide better logging of errors when multiple application connections are attempted (e.g. multiple OpenXR instances, combination of an OpenVR scene app instance and an OpenXR instance).