VR Chat EAC Disscusion

VR Chat recent update blocked all mods by EAC.

Also,the test shows that the performance is reduced after EAC is enabled.

VRChat received a large number of negative comments on Steam after this update, and only 22% of the 15,000+ comments in the past 30 days were positive.

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VRChat could have eliminated most of the pain of implementing EAC by just slowing their roll. They sprung this suddenly on the community without notice. SUPRISE! And the big problem with that is that mods have been the solution to several critical issues. Accessibility for people with disabilities or medical conditions is just an example of this. There is much more, including fixes needed for Pimax headsets to work properly. There hasn’t been time for the community to even realize the full extent of the ramifications of blocking all mods.

These are issues which didn’t put great pressure on VRChat to resolve them because mods already solved them. But then when VRChat suddenly blocks all mods, all of these critical issues are suddenly in full force all at once.

My Pimax 8KX didn’t work properly in VRChat without using a mod. So this effectively blocks me using my VR headset in VRChat now. There’s been a Canny for this problem for years, and VRChat hasn’t fixed it. It’s a really easy fix, too. There was mod that fixed it. But now that’s blocked. So now me and other Pimax users who play VRChat are screwed.

VRChat should have advertised a date in the future when it would implement EAC, let the community work out the ramifications of that and determine how that changes priorities, and then address all of the critical needs mods were being used for before implementing EAC. According to a message from Tupper on the Discord, they had been planning this since January so they could have given the community 6 months of advanced notice, but instead they set it up as an ambush. They even fast tracked it through open beta in a single day! VRChat needed to phase this in, not just drop it on us and figure they can handle the fallout and repair the damage as quickly as they can afterwards.

Whether or not EAC in itself is a good idea or will produce any of the beneficial effects VRChat hoped for is another matter. But without a doubt the way VRChat very deliberately kept their intentions secret for several months, figured they knew best and fully understood the ramifications without community involvement, had it pointed out to them that there were critical ramifications to this that they had missed, and yet went ahead and did it as they had planned anyway was the worst way they could have done it. Most of the pain of this would have been avoidable by giving the community advanced notice and actually listening to their concerns even if they still rolled out EAC on the same actual date in this alternate reality.

As it is, there are people with disabilities and medical conditions who have now been severed from the only social life they were able to have for however long it takes VRChat devs to provide accessibility features for them. That is cruel, and there is no reason that it had to happen. VRChat could have accomplished their plans without doing this to them.

Also, losing portable mirrors isn’t critical, but ouch.

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Fantastic points. It’s honestly a real head scratcher that they done this as they did. If they worked with the community for the last 6 months, made note of the mods that were most impactful and either implemented the changes they made or included the mods baked in, in an experimental area that is very much “at your own risk” then they could have avoided the backlash altogether. Have some curated mods that are official provided and only allowed through their channel, so they have complete control and they can’t act as backdoors. Something along those lines would have made this a positive thing overall.

How they react to this will determine a lot. A lot of people hailed VRChat as what they wanted the “metaverse” (sorry to use that term lol) to be and how it felt like the older days of the internet. People pointed at VRChat as an example of how they wanted VR to be and were worried about Meta, Apple or whatever other large corporation coming in and ruining that for everyone but ironically it was the VRC devs themselves that came in and made strides towards dismantling what people held dear.

I do wonder if that HBO documentary today was part of the timing for this, like they knew this wouldn’t be taken well but were hoping that the documentary would somehow overshadow the backlash. Hilariously naive if they did.

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“The film follows Jenny, an American Sign Language (ASL) teacher, dedicated to building a welcoming community for deaf and hard of hearing VR Chat users”

Wow. The very community who are the most disproportionally affected by blocking the accessibility mods they needed in order to be able to use VRChat.

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Please upvote this Canny entry for fixing mirrors in VRChat working with Pimax headsets:

Previously a simple mod fixed this problem, but EAC blocks that now.

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That’s so ironic and sad that it’s almost funny. They are probably so proud and happy that there is a VRC documentary being released to HBO, huge achievement, yet seem to be actively sabotaging what it is showcasing. Hard to believe.

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Please upvote this Canny entry for fixing Pimax foveated rendering no longer working in VRChat due to EAC:

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what’s wrong with your 8kx on vrchat?
I have no particular problem with mine.

Edit : What’s wrong with mirrors?
Edit 2 :sweat_smile: : I don’t use foveal rendering ^^

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Even as somebody who just does not care about VRChat and never got it, this move is ridiculous and it speaks volumes about how tone deaf the moderation team is. They are also lying through their teeth about not making some kind of whitelist, because they either could do exactly that or use a less aggressive form of EAC.

Pavlov VR uses Easy Anti-Cheat, yet you can still use both FSR and FFR via the VRPerfkit, Pimax’s doesn’t work, during gameplay and not have the game flag it. Yet when I tested another game using EAC, Rec Room as it was free, it would fllag the VRPerfkit and refuse to start with it.

The fact one of the main guys directly said “If we waited to add all those QOL mods then EAC would never be added” shows how stupid and out of touch the team is. This goes beyond merely adding such aggressive and invasive anti-cheat into a social game, it’s because the devs are horrifically slow to add in any kind of QOL features, so you can bet most of those QOL things will either take forever to get added, end up being VRC+ paywalled features, or just never get added in at all again.

This is so obviously to help with monetization, especially given some of the job listings that’ve been seen for VRChat’s team, because you can’t monetize anywhere near as well when you can freely mod like this.

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VRChat has an arbitrary limit of 2048x2048 on rendering resolution for mirrors. That works fine for something like a valve Index which has a native resolution of 1440x1600. But the 8KX has both 3840x2160 and wide FOV which far exceed this limit.

You might think this would cause the view in the mirror to be reduced to “merely” roughly the quality of the Index, but it’s actually much worse. It seems like FOV plays into it as well, so it becomes heavily pixelated and more or less unusable.

Since VRChat has already deployed EAC without fixing this, I’ve done more experimentation and figured out how to at least mitigate the problem. The more you reduce FOV and rendering resolution on the 8KX, the less pronounced the problem becomes. Paradoxically, mirrors actually become less pixelated as you lower these values.

Previously I was running large FOV with 100% resolution (5044x3160). Switching to normal FOV at 50% resolution makes mirrors merely blurry rather than pixelated all to heck.

I’m going to guess that if you weren’t noticing anything with you 8KX, you were probably already running at lower resolution and FOV. However, unless you’re running these very low, I expect that mirror quality is still being degraded for you, but perhaps not bad enough that you really noticed it. Or you just thought it was normal for mirrors to be a little fuzzy, like an intentional effect.

So what FOV and rendering resolution (in pixels) are you running at?

Foveated rendering is how I was running VRChat at 5044x3160 without the frame rate tanking.

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i use my 8kx on VRchat with:
PP on
fov small
pitool 1
SS100%

i have a 2080ti and a I5 8600k

I have 35/60 fps most of the time.

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This is why you’re not experiencing such a noticeable problem with mirrors.

However, at small fov with pitool 1 and SS 100%, the rendering resolution will be 2512x2528 which still exceeds the arbitrary 2048x2048 limit in mirrors. So mirrors will be a little blurry, but you may not have noticed.

VRChat doesn’t need parallel projection enabled. This will be lowering your framerate substantially for no reason.

That’s really low frame rate. You should be able to get better than that. Turn off PP and in VRChat go to Safety → Performance Options → Adv. Graphics and turn off anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing costs a lot more in performance than it is worth at that high of a resolution. In my own tests, turning AA off increased FPS by 48% in VRChat while having only minor effect on display quality. It’s a lot more useful at lower resolution than at high resolution.

If fixed foveated rendering was still working in VRChat, you’d be able to use that to increase your frame rate by an additional 59% on top of the above improvements.

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if I remember correctly, there are quite a few bugs with the shaders of avatars and maps if we don’t use PP.
was this resolved?
I will try your settings. :wink:

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Perhaps PP was required for VRChat at some time in the past, I don’t know. But VRChat has definitely not required PP since I first got into Pimax at the end of last year.

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Being the nerd that I am, I have whole tables of performance testing data that I have produced with various configuration settings on the Pimax 8KX running VRChat which I ran at various times prior to EAC. So I decided to run a series of performance tests with the current VRChat build to compare the effect of EAC on frame rates. Here are some relevant excerpts from that testing:

  • FOV=Large, Resolution=100% (5032x3160), FFR=Balanced, MSAA=Disabled
    Pre-EAC 73FPS
    Post-EAC 46FPS (37% worse)
  • FOV=Normal, Resolution=100% (3800x3160), FFR=Balanced, MSAA=Disabled
    Pre-EAC 90FPS
    Post-EAC 55FPS (39% worse)

The above results reflect that FFR no longer functions due to EAC. This creates a large drop in frame rate.

However, supposedly EAC itself eats frame rate just by being there. So let’s compare some test results where FFR is disabled in order to isolate the effect of just EAC’s presence:

  • FOV=Large, Resolution=100% (5032x3160), FFR=None, MSAA=Disabled
    Pre-EAC 46FPS
    Post-EAC 46FPS (No change)
  • FOV=Large, Resolution=50% (3560x2232), FFR=None, MSAA=4x
    Pre-EAC 64FPS
    Post-EAC 62FPS (3% worse)
  • FOV=Normal, Resolution=100% (3800x3160), FFR=None, MSAA=4x
    Pre-EAC 38FPS
    Post-EAC 39FPS (3% better)

These results suggest that EAC’s presence on its own is not producing a measurable degradation for the Pimax 8KX on a fast PC.

These tests were conducted on a PC with a 5900X CPU and a 3080 Ti GPU. I would normally rerun the pre-EAC tests to produce back to back results, but that is not possible in this case since I can’t run a pre-EAC version of VRChat anymore. My Pitool version and GPU driver version have been updated since the previous data was generated, so the accuracy of the comparison is suspect. But it’s the best I can do.

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I usually agree with Thrillseeker’s assessments, but this time I am not convinced by his take on VRChat supposedly changing direction and “going corporate”. I think VRChat made a very boneheaded move, and I’ve been upset about it myself. But I also think there’s a lot of misinformation and hyperbole out there about this whole thing.

In regards to this video, I don’t think this actually represents any big change in direction for VRChat. Its stance on mods has been consistent throughout its existence. It has actively sought to enforce its policies on mods the entire time, and within the last year VRChat started rotating tactics in that effort. The only difference now is they hit on a tactic that finally actually worked.

Thrillseeker asks the question in the video why didn’t VRChat implement these features and fixes the community was asking for long before now? And as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I believe the answer is because the mods existed to solve those needs instead. There was already a solution, so the community wasn’t demanding those things from VRChat, and so VRChat worked on other priorities instead.

Something good that comes out of this whole nasty situation is that VRChat building these features into the stock client will now mean that everyone gets these features, not just the people on PCs who were willing to break the AUP and risk being banned.

The claim that VRChat doesn’t listen to its community anymore is hyperbole. And that arises from all the anger that still surrounds this issue. VRChat made a serious misstep in how it handled its community when it deployed EAC, but it has been making every effort to try to make up for it since then. And I think that does count.

VRChat has already implemented the QOL features that I was previously using mods for in their beta branch. It has not yet resolved the issues which affect Pimax headsets. These headsets aren’t very common on VRChat, so I don’t expect dealing with our issues to be one of VRChat’s higher priorities unless we speak up enough. So again if you haven’t yet, please click the two Canny links earlier in this thread to upvote the tickets for VRChat’s Pimax issues.

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I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news is that VRChat has added a new feature on the beta branch called Mirror Resolution Changer. This can now be set to “Unlimited” which is what it takes to handle the resolution of the 8KX without being blurry! This fixes one of the major concerns above post EAC.

The bad news is that for some reason, it doesn’t remember this setting between launches. You have to set it manually every time you startup VRChat, and it makes you click through a silly warning dialog, too. Since it remembers any other value you set it to, this might be intentional. It’s obnoxious to have to manually set it every time when you own a Pimax.

Please everyone upvote this new canny entry regarding this bug:

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VRChat so far has not picked up this canny entry even though it has gotten a significant number of votes. (Please upvote it if you haven’t yet)

I suspect the reason why is that VRChat is looking to add their own foveated rendering feature to the game itself. In some ways, that’s actually even better. This is mentioned in a recent Developer Update under the “Future Development” section toward the end:

It seems to me that this should work well for the 8KX. But what of the 12K?

There are two issues I foresee:

#1 DFR requires eye tracking data to reach VRChat somehow. It looks like VRChat intends to use OSC for this purpose, but that implies Pimax supporting OSC on its end. Will it?

#2 Even if VRChat can do FFR or DFR itself, how will this interact with foveated transport on the 12K? I imagine that foveated transport can only be used if Pimax’s software did the foveation itself. Otherwise it’s going to receive a frame from VRChat with the foveation already applied, but Pimax’s software will have to transport it as a regular frame since it has no idea about the details of the foveation or even that it was foveated at all. The upshot being that VRChat foveation will still reduce GPU load, but maximum resolution possible will be capped by the limits of the transport carrying full frames.

Or does this information actually carry through the pipeline somehow so it can still do foveated transport? I imagine this kind of situation is going to come up more and more as games start supporting foveation on their own.

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