What's new in Venture 0.2.0

less video memory

39%

less memory overall

25%

less startup hitching

44%

less stalling in play

45%

Customize your controls

The new Controls page shows the controller you actually own, with a line from each Quest button to the button it uses. It opens on the controller you have connected, you can search for any other, and you can drag a controller to turn it around.

Every Quest button can go anywhere: a single button, a held button or two buttons pressed together. One set of defaults works the same on SteamVR, Meta Link, Virtual Desktop, Monado and WiVRn, or you can choose your own setup that works for you.

Resolution and frame rate

Games still run at the resolution and refresh rate your runtime picks. If you want something else, you can now set both in Settings for every game, or for one game on its new Settings tab:

• Resolution can be your runtime's size, a percentage of it (it works like SteamVR's slider), a custom size, or the size a Quest 3, Quest 2, etc. renders at.
• Frame rate can be anything from 60 to 240 Hz, or a custom number.

See and hear the game on your PC

Games now show what you see in a normal window on your desktop, so friends can watch or you can record. It's one cheap copy on the GPU's lowest-priority queue, so it doesn't cost the headset frames. Pick the left or right eye and a cropped or whole view, or turn it off.

You can also enable audio from games to play over your PC speakers for recording and streaming.

Mixed reality

Venture now supports Mixed Reality in many headsets for games that need it! This change comes courtesy of McFredward's Venture PR. It's on by default. If your setup can't show your room, games simply play in VR. The wiki has a setup guide for each.

Smoother

A Quest game's code is built for ARM processors, and its shaders for a phone GPU. Venture translates both for your PC as you play. In 0.1.0, each time a game reached something new, that translation could show up as a hitch, and it happened again every time.

0.2.0 does a lot of work to fix that:

• Everything Venture translates is compressed and stored on disk, and the next launch loads it instead of translating again.
• Spare CPU threads translate code the game is likely to reach soon at low priority so they stay out of the game's way, preventing hitches before they happen.
• Pipelines are built and textures are decoded off the main thread instead of stalling the frame that needs them, and every game's pipelines are cached on disk.

A game's first seconds in a new area are where translation hurts most, because everything is new. Across all seven games on 0.2.0, startup hitching drops 44%.

Once a game is going, 0.2.0 stalls less in every game we measured. Batman's first area used to open with a 2.2 second freeze; now it's 0.7 seconds. AC Nexus's worst hitch went from 222 to 35 ms. Across the six games that had stalls on 0.1.0 at all, time stalled drops 45%.

Memory

Every game we measured needs at least a third less video memory, up to 48% less. Most of that comes from keeping textures in compact GPU formats whenever that loses nothing. It leaves room on 8 and 12 GB cards, and because Windows counts a game's video memory against the memory it can hand out, it makes out-of-memory crashes much less likely too.

Everything else

• A game's install dialog can install any build Meta published, beside the ones you already have.
• The launcher follows your system's language, or pick one in Settings. French is the first translation, and more are welcome.
• If the built-in sign-in window doesn't work for you, Venture hands the sign-in to your own browser.
• Texture compression can be set to Always, Automatic or Off for one game or for all of them.
• A game's ⋯ menu has Show save data, which opens the folder its saves live in.
• Library search ignores case, accents, punctuation and word order.
• Games play and record on the audio device your VR runtime names, even when your PC's default output is something else.
• Games that use the microphone, like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, now record.
• In-game videos play in more games, including Syberia and Attack on Titan VR, and AC Nexus's menu backdrops show on Virtual Desktop.
• On Linux, text is sharp at fractional scaling, icons show everywhere, and the window buttons no longer cover the library toolbar.
• Lots of fixes from your reports. Thank you for sending them.

Found a problem? Press Debug report in Settings and open an issue, or come say hi on Discord.