As you may know HISMCs and foliage tool suck so badly on Gear VR that it defeats whole purpose of having instanced meshes in mobile VR (instead of decreasing drawcalls, they are ramping up with every new instance; culling per instance inside HISMC isn’t working; no proper way to disable LOD switch dithering; etc.). It’s impossible to build modular levels because of that, thus it really limits what can be done with UE4 for Gear VR (an I am sure for Daydream too).
Someone was concerned about Galaxy S6 and up hardware not supporting hardware instancing. OpenGL ES 2.0 and newer support hardware instancing and Galaxy S6 and newer GPUs are fully compliant with ES 2.0 and newer.
Dear Epic devs, do you happen to know when those things will be working properly on Gear VR and if you do, is there an ETA?
P.S. foliage tool can be used to scatter objects (rocks, props, etc) and not necessarily to be used for actual foliage, which isn’t going to perform well on Gear VR anyway.
Thanks beforehand