Drawing Inconsistencies in DirectMode / Render Manager

[RedIronLabs]

Problem:
Lighting is inconsistent, fails, or drawing fails in Direct Mode

Package - Replicated in both Unity 5.3.5f1 and Unity 5.3.4f1, using the sample packges
OS Name - Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Processor - AMD FX(tm)-9370 Eight-Core Processor, 4400 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Video Card - AMD Radeon (TM) R9 380 Series

Steps to Reproduce:
Create a scene. Add a skybox, some primitives, some lighting.

Problem 1
Lighting is inconsistent in all scenes

• In extended view, your HDK will see exactly what you see on the screen.
• In direct mode, your HDK sees a very different image in terms of lighting, artifacts, shadows, reflections and where lighting comes in from the scene.

Problem 2
In some cases (the same project) the shadows and darks fail to render properly in Direct Mode, and are created using what seems to be 256 colours instead of the full spectrum. This problem is not reproducible in Extended Mode.

Notes
I've split the HDM rendering black issue to #165

Happy to test anything, anytime.

Thank you

[RedIronLabs]

I see two issues now that I've looked closer! Going to split the second one off to a new issue and upload a sample project :)

[DuFF14]

Can you share what lighting/quality settings you use? I'm not seeing differences in a basic scene or palace with varying quality/lighting settings, but I may be missing something. @russell-taylor any idea on color differences between extended and direct mode?

[russell-taylor]

Could be sRGB vs. not in the two rendering paths.

[DuFF14]

Tried again to reproduce but no luck. @RedIronLabs the difference between our setup is that I am on an NVIDIA card and Intel i-7. Not sure if that could be the issue here. Do you have a rig with NVIDIA? I don't have access to an AMD machine with direct mode support.

[RedIronLabs]

We only have the one machine that is compatible with direct mode. Our Razer rep reported the same issue back when this was opened during their testing for E3 though (and he would have been using nvidia I imagine).

I was able to replicate the issues using just the demo scenes.

We have to stop actively building with OSVR due to the lighting issues (the black screen issue, and this issue) and at the recommendation on gitter not to use OSVR for Vive, Rift or Leap Motion. We will be building with it again (to see if it's stabilized) when we are ready for release.

I'll take a look at this again prior to release (just not sure when). Thank you for trying and looking at it.

[DuFF14]

@RedIronLabs which HDK were you seeing this with? Did Razer see both of these problems? I see problem#2 with dark colors on the HDK2, which could be what Razer was seeing during E3 testing. This issue is not present on HDK 1.x.

Also, can you clarify what you mean by "extended mode"? This could mean using RenderManager with directModeEnabled=false, or not using RenderManager at all.

Still not able to reproduce Problem#1 in either case, thinking it may be an AMD thing and that Razer was only seeing Problem#2 on HDK2.