"Assassin's Creed" Nexus VR uses AppSW to achieve stunning visual effects

Image: Ubisoft

exist Meta In Meta Quest 3, Assassin's Creed Nexus VR renders the city at very high resolution. The rendering technology Meta was developed to make this possible.

The VR game launched exclusively for Meta Quest yesterday, with media praising Ubisoft's first VR game in the series. Ben was excited too. In his review of Assassin's Creed Nexus VR, he wrote

“I didn’t expect to see such a believable, detailed, beautiful, and massive game world in Meta Quest 3. Most importantly, the outstanding gameplay not only translates the essence of Assassin’s Creed to VR, but ultimately This series has been taken to the next level. In my opinion, this game starts a technological paradigm shift: VR games on standalone VR headsets no longer need to be hidden behind PC or PS5 games.”

Resolution exceeded Quest 3 monitors

Assassin's Creed Nexus VR features a large, freely explorable city with impressive draw distances. This is unusual for a standalone VR headset. Even more surprising is the resolution at which they are rendered.

Team Beef, known for their VR ports of classic first-person shooters, determined the rendering resolution using Meta's proprietary benchmarking tool OVR Metrics. The rendering speed of VR games is 2,163 x 2,288 pixels per eye. That's a higher resolution than the Quest 3's display, which has 2,064 x 2,208 pixels per eye. Therefore, Ubisoft still has some performance headroom when it comes to supersampling.

The game looks truly stunning in the headset, and not just for an indie game.

You have to benchmark it to see what's going on behind the scenes:
AC: Nexus runs at 45fps (AppSW to 90hz) @ up to 2163 x 2288!

There is some slight jitter in the frame rate, possibly related to the use of AppSW.

– Team Beef VR port – JK:Academy, Quake4 now available on EA! (@TeamBeefVR) November 16, 2023

The default resolution for VR games Meta Quest 3, also known as the default eye buffer, is 1,680 x 1,760 pixels per eye. This means Assassin's Creed Nexus VR Rendering pixels increased by 50% or above Quest 3 games better than most.

Unfortunately, the rendering resolution for Quest Team Beef 2 version of the game has not yet been determined.

Meta's rendering technology doubles frame rate

Nexus VR's stunning visuals and high resolution are achieved in part through a rendering technology called Application Space Warp, or AppSW, can be squeezed CPU and GPU performance improved up to 70% For the Quest 2 and 3 chipsets.

Performance gains are achieved by rendering the VR game at half frame rate instead of full frame rate and using AppSW to artificially generate each missing second frame.

Benchmark testing tools show that Assassin's Creed Nexus VR is actually rendering at just 45 frames per second, which significantly reduces the load on the Quest 3's chipset. AppSW then ensures that the frame rate is artificially doubled to a smooth 90 frames per second.

This technique is rarely used in VR games because it needs to be well implemented and has some disadvantages: Can cause artifacts in some cases. However, for most people, the negative effects are difficult to detect.

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