Valve this week released an update to SteamVR which finally brings Motion Smoothing to AMD graphics cards, a feature which aims to maintain comfortable visuals even during performance bumps. SteamVR Motion Smoothing launched first for NVIDIA graphics cards in November 2018.

The public branch of SteamVR was updated to version 1.4.14 this week, which incorporates all prior beta updates since the last public branch update.

Among a heap of other improvements and fixes, 1.4.14 finally brings the SteamVR Motion Smoothing feature to AMD RX and Vega graphics cards. R9 and older cards are not supported. Valve also says that while the newer Radeon VII is technically supported, there’s a bug in its graphics driver which can cause Motion Smoothing to stop working, that hasn’t offered a timeline for when this might be fixed.

Motion Smoothing hit the public branch of SteamVR back in November 2018 with support for NVIDIA GPUs. The feature is a more advanced version of prior VR rendering tech which aims to keep the view inside the headset smooth and comfortable, even if the computer occasionally drops frames due to performance issues. It’s similar to Oculus’ ASW technology.

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Motion Smoothing in SteamVR synthesizes entirely new frames to use in the place of dropped frames. It does so by looking at the last two frames, estimating what the next frame should look like, then sending the synthesized frame to the display instead of an entirely new frame. Motion Smoothing is only available on systems running Windows 10, and only works with the Vive, Vive Pro, and other native OpenVR headsets as other headsets (like the Rift and Windows VR) have their own approach to dealing with dropped frames.

Motion Smoothing is likely to be an important feature for those using Valve’s upcoming Index headset which has a higher resolution than the original Vive, and supports 90Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz refresh rates. Rendering at higher resolution and higher frame rates requires greater performance, and will therefore be more sensitive to dips in performance, leading to more cases where Motion Smoothing may be needed.

Image courtesy Valve

Speaking of Index, SteamVR 1.4.14 also officially adds support for Index, which replaces the external drivers that developers needed to use up to this point. A handful of new features have also come to support Index’s upcoming launch, like support for headsets offering multiple framerates and a new controller pairing UI which now includes the Index controllers and Vive Tracker.

See the full update notes for a complete list of changes in SteamVR 1.4.14.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Firestorm185

    only available systems running Windows 10,
    “on”
    you guys an delete this once you spell check

    • Caven

      The omission of a word is not a spelling error and would not have been caught by a spell-checker. Ironically, your critique does in fact contain a spelling error, which it turns out also would not have been caught by a spell-checker. You’re also missing some capitalization and punctuation. But hey, I’m sure making at least six errors that I can see in a couple of sentences isn’t nearly as bad as a single overlooked word in an article spanning several paragraphs.

      Just to be clear, I think it’s perfectly fine to call out errors in an article. My problem is with accusing the author of not doing something that they probably actually did. It might make sense to criticize the author if the article had contained several glaring errors, but for a single error that doesn’t really change the message of the article, I think the author deserves the benefit of the doubt.

      • kuhpunkt

        Call the fire department. That was a sick burn!

      • Raphael

        I agree! :)

    • benz145

      Thanks for the heads up, will fix it.

      @disqus_3tORKxDdLb:disqus I appreciate the defense and your voice of reason. I didn’t feel Firestorm was being abrasive on purpose though, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have suggested deleting their comment once the error was fixed.

  • oompah

    Especially good for ray traced games