Rift 1.9.9

Performance

Hardware acceleration is back on. Rift had been compositing the entire
interface on the CPU - scrolling, animation, video, all of it - because the UI
toolkit shipped with GPU compositing switched off by default. It is now enabled
properly: the interface composites on the GPU, WebGL runs on hardware, and video
decodes and encodes on hardware instead of the processor. The app feels smoother
and leaves far more CPU for whatever else you are doing.
Lower idle CPU and one less background process. Chromium was keeping a spare
renderer process permanently warm to speed up page navigations that Rift, being a
single page, never makes. That is roughly 50 MB handed back, and Rift now sits at
a fraction of a percent of CPU when you are not touching it.

Automatic crash reporting. Rift now ships a small companion process,
Rift_Crashpad.exe, that runs alongside the app. If Rift crashes it survives the
crash, captures what happened and sends the report in. Previously a crash left
nothing behind at all, so problems that only happened on your machine were
invisible to us.

Closing the window no longer quits Rift. The close button was supposed to
minimise to the tray, but it was killing the app instead - so voice calls dropped
and notifications stopped. It now goes to the tray and keeps running, as intended.

The in-game overlay is now opt-in and needs a restart. Keeping it permanently
available forced the off-screen rendering mode that was costing the whole app its
hardware acceleration. It is off unless you turn it on, and switching it on takes
effect after a restart.

With the in-game overlay enabled, hardware acceleration is reduced for that
session - that rendering mode and GPU compositing cannot both be active. Leave the
overlay off for the fastest experience.
The experimental see-through window is still unavailable and its toggle does
nothing. The current rendering mode cannot do per-pixel transparency.