I am at the Unreal Summit 2016 in Seoul and Nick Whiting just announced that coming in the fall* will be the forward renderer option that they have been working with Oculus on.
He also mentioned that they are implementing some hooks to allow us to scale quality and MSAA based on performance. Roadmap is exciting.
Thanks.
Good news considering the Oculus version is not going to be maintained. Need a solution that works for games that take full advantage of VR but are not exclusively for VR.
Thanks for letting us know 
Fall is still quite a while considering the Oculus Renderer seems to be pretty much working good enough to ship games with it, but maybe they add more nice stuff.
Just making sure I got this right. UE4 already uses forward rendering for the mobile rendering path, correct ?
So for people devving for GearVR , this is not big news and will not mean a leap forward in quality / rendering power.
From a mobile rendering talk I attending they are using forward rendering with vulkan now on mobile. From what I can understand is that the forward renderer will be for desktop/console so I would expect gearvr devs to not see any change with this update in the fall. But I am not super well versed on this sort of stuff (why I attended it).
I can tell you for a fact that Vulkan is not supported on the GearVR (cause it’s not supported by the Oculus SDK) it’s not even in the roadmap (cause there is no roadmap :/)
Vulkan + GearVR would be a huge step forward tho, but Oculus is not letting itself being pushed around, it seems, not even by truckloads of Korean money
And there are **** loads of Korean money too. These guys here make console quality games on mobile. Blows my mind.
Thanks for the info Osok, that’s very good news indeed for desktop VR.
Regarding GearVR performance, i think most of the efforts being made on Daydream right now (including Vulkan support for Android) should directly benefit GearVR as well, i’m sure things will improve “soon”.
A forward renderer will probably not support SSAO, right? Is there other cheap AO that’s possible with a forward renderer? I really need SSAO in my project, apart from that I don’t need most rendering features.