Opinions: VR - Are We There Yet?

Solitaire

Kinda interested in people's views on this thorny subject given how more and more VR builds are (prematurely) popping up here. Get discussing!

TL;DR version to save you scrolling: My current opinion based on what I've seen and heard is that VR is an emerging tech, like 4k, that needs emerging tech to really run it in an optimal fashion. We're very close to having that... but we're not entirely there yet, and if Vega and Pascal+ are delayed past Black Friday/December, we're unlikely to see any major change to the situation until sometime next year. So if you want even moderately okayish VR, go very big or go home until then. Or be prepared for not-so-okayish VR... and there's lots of issues with that.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, mainstream VR units - primarily the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift for now - are about to launch. They have very different requirements for stable viewing than conventional monitors, which is causing a bit of an issue with existing technology and which has forced coders to change the way that VR-capable games are rendered.

Conventional monitors include common resolutions of 1920*1080, 2560*1440 or the new and demanding 3840*2160, with a new "widerscreen" format also starting to crop up. They all prefer a framerate equal to or higher than 60fps on average with minimum fps staying north of 30-40 depending on user to maintain a smooth image. Frame time variance is an issue and often an annoyance especially with multi-GPU systems. Most monitors have several refresh rate settings with 60, 70 and 72Hz being popular as well as boosted high-end monitors supporting 120 and 144Hz, and to prevent issues with tearing and monitor-side variance the framerate should try to match the refresh rate or a fraction thereof (e.g. 72/36/18/9fps for a 72Hz setting). VSync can be used to force video output to match the refresh this way. Variable-sync technologies that vary monitor refresh dynamically to suit the framerate have also been developed.

Now we have a completely new type of display medium, VR headset. Current VR sets have relatively modest total resolution of 2160*1200 - not much more than 1080p, and a shade under one-third of "4k" - but the difficulty lies elsewhere. Refresh is fixed at a pretty steep 90Hz. The catch is that matching graphics output to this isn't optional - framerate MUST match this, and frame variance must be pretty much zero. Or you catch a train called the Vomit Comet to Nauseaville. And yes, actual vomiting is a possibility. When playing around with completely replacing the human body's visual feed with something artificial and convincing your brain that it is real you run the risk of inducing extreme motion sickness if the feed doesn't closely match both the kind of smoothness Mother Nature expects and what your balance centres are relaying. So 90fps (or possibly greater in the future, depending on the headset's refresh rate which in turn is based on what doesn't make the average human hurl) is the framerate for anything you'll be viewing on a Vive/Rift. Period.

Now a key display factor - framerate - has been taken hostage and converted from a variable to a known, expected, anticipated constant. This means that the only factors devs can really play with is what is actually being rendered and how much its being processed and tweaked - the product of which can be termed "image fidelity". They have to limit either the total complexity of stuff being drawn and/or how pretty they make it look by tweaking it, and they have to do it on the fly constantly no matter what is going on or how much the user is moving the viewpoint around (I've noticed most games, especially "triple-A" titles, have gotten very sloppy with this bit lately!) because current VR needs a new image to display precisely every ninetieth of a second. Precisely. On the dot. Always. Or Bucket Time.

So if we assume that the minimum acceptable framerate you would ever accept from even the most demanding game on your shiny new 4k monitor is 30fps then given the disparity in resolution and target minimum framerate you need to push 93.75% of the pixels per second needed to run a 4k monitor in order to run current VR. That is before you factor in frame time variance, which is generally bad anyway but for VR, where perceived jerkiness can easily cause physical illness, it really is a deal-breaker. And it is one of the first signs of distress that a system is not managing to balance graphical load well enough to ensure each frame takes exactly 0.011 seconds to render and display.

Of course, this becomes a lot worse when the load is being balanced across multiple discrete GPUs. Frame variance scandals have forced the industry to improve greatly and huge steps have been made since the days of vendors maximising the scaling of CF/SLI to the severe detriment of frame variance, but it is still an issue large enough to cause issues in some cases with VR. And at this point multi-GPU VR is rather unstable to say the least, with different benchmarks causing wild swings in its effectiveness with every different driver used - sometimes you'll have Crossfired Fury Nanos literally maxing out the Steam test tool and on other days any form of CF will cause cards to abruptly tank in ratings for no apparent reason, pulling 50-80% of the rating that a single card of its type would yield. Given how vendor-vulnerable multicard is at the best of times, and how going below minimum spec just really doesn't work for VR unless you drop all settings to Minimum and pray (and take travel-sickness pills) throwing more chained GTX970s at the problem just isn't going to cut it.

So yeah... leaving multicard aside for now, its looking more and more like you'll need a single card capable of running 4k without breaking too much of a sweat in order to run VR smoothly at medium to high settings - bear in mind that more VR-oriented titles will eventually be switching to changing fidelity settings beyond merely the usual geometry and texture level-of-detail constantly on-the-fly to keep things silky-smooth, and will just tend run far less pretty in the interim, with some far less pretty VR-based titles than what we're used to for a while. Problem is, there's no "perfect" 4k card at the moment - Fury+ and 980Ti are great most of the time, but they will run into stumbling blocks here and there. And while AMD's architectures are more parallel and more DX12 and VR-ready they're also generally weaker at lower resolutions compared to Maxwell. So while top-tier cards will do well at VR, they won't be perfect and if you're looking for such then, just like 4k monitors, you're looking at emerging tech to power your shiny new emerging tech, current-gen will only server as a lower-fidelity stopgap no matter how high you go.

Of course, lower-fidelity is not low fidelity; top-tier cards should be more than acceptable for VR... except the kind of people who usually buy such cards generally suffer an aneurysm at the very concept of "acceptable performance" They will work, but they won't max out tougher titles. And there's the rub: currently you're looking for beefy systems with CPUs and then chucking €500-800 worth of GPU on top of a similar sum for the headset itself at it for decent(-ish) VR. Just like 4k. Emerging tech is not cheap. You could try a GTX970 or equivalent... just like you could try to run a 4k monitor off one. But you'll be looking at bigger problems, more often. Except this time the problems can cause some games to make you sick, others to run with bad graphics and some tougher titles to just take a look at your PC hardware and go "Yeah... I'd rather not" and just refused to run in VR Mode. And yes, that seems to be a thing now, if all the hinting being made by the Steam VR tool is anything to go by.



So... we have a gauge with the pointer in the middle for a R9 380-based system! Yay! R9 380 is enough for decent VR! Well... no. Dig a bit deeper and you see the GPU is bottlenecking the system and the tool is weighting its result thanks to OS and CPU, bringing up the GPU's rather awful 3.5/11 (yes, the test tool actually goes up to 11 ) result. So that's still a "VR Capable" rating, right? Yes, but is that even worth anything? You see, VR is an ecosystem where minimum spec is pretty much the same as recommended spec. You see the little green bit at the very end of the scale? That's the Recommended bit. You need a pretty serious GPU to get a "VR Ready" result, and that's the kind of system specification that HTC, Valve and Oculus are telling developers to target, even in wee little indie titles. Results will vary if you use any kind of "VR Capable" system, and said "results" include getting violently sick Or just feeling dizzy, nauseous and miserable, which are sensations we generally play games in order to avoid

The thing is... if you read the smallprint Valve seem to state that in order to avoid such unpleasantness developers will have the power to reduce graphics or even disable VR Mode entirely if your little magic pointer isn't firmly up in the green. Forget mild nausea - many titles will simply not run at all on most current GPUs and/or weaker CPUs. And I'm not even sure if stock-clocked GTX970 or R9 390s even quite reach the green myself.

So if not current tech, then maybe the GPUs of Christmas Yet To Come will save us? Well, eventually yes... but the GPU situation is a bit of a mess. There are rumours that AMD's Polaris is delayed, and nVidia's Pascal is both more severely delayed and may be a paper launch as well, with few actual units available until mid-autumn at the earliest. And here's the rub: these are not even the new high-end cards, but rather mid- and upper-mid-range units that will provide little increase over the current heavy hitters. Those are Vega and Pascal+, and while the original timeline implied a late 2016 release - most likely targeting Christmas or even Black Friday - whether we'll see them launch then or sometime in 2017 is a big unknown.

The next issue is the price and capability of Polaris. P11 may or may not be VR-Ready, depending on where it falls relative to the current 390 and 390X and whether its new and massively DX12-oriented architecture can leverage more performance in VR workloads compared to the outgoing GPUs. But it is the larger Polaris-10 that will be the big question. P10 seems to run off a small and very efficient 14nm-based die and is expected to be a lot cheaper to make than Pascal or indeed the current Fury. However the small die might not contain as many memory controllers as expected, which begs the awful question: Have AMD tried to cut back on memory controllers to save silicon, or are they going to surprise everyone and make the bigger Polaris chip HBM1-based? There's big issues with either plan. Using a 256bit or smaller memory bus may make for a cheap yet crippled GPU starved of memory bandwidth. HBM1 is great but... well one thing it isn't, is cheap. Its also capped at 4GB of memory, and as the largest regular Pascal may well bet on this and feature 6GB of memory to turn yet more sheeple against AMD it may put them off doing this for marketing as well as cost reasons. But without HBM P10 can have all the memory controllers under the sun and have little chance of causing an upset by beating the GTX980Ti. And as the largest of the "small" Pascal dies are expected to beat that by a modest margin and be thin on the ground to boot... we'll only see small drops in price for old cards and Pascal's largest incarnation will sit at €800+ until Vega or the big Pascal chips show up. P10 will still be a good and likely cheaper candidate for VR than the current top-tier, but not to the extent that a lot of people are hoping for.

Of course, we might luck out and P10 will stomp everything without feeling the need to connect a mid-range card to a €600+ price tag and maybe at that point Rift/Vive prices will drop and pigs will fly through the azure skies. I just doubt it will come out exactly as the hype predicts, is all. And that will slow down both price drops and VR adoption. Then we have Vega and its HBM2 and Pascal+ and what are suspected to be almost comically enormous 16nm dies changing everything up again. Just not until 2017. Maybe. Perhaps. Isn't conjecture great?

So, at this point, from what I can see of the landscape, VR is new and edgy and will stay new and edgy until at least late summer and possibly even until the next generation of heavy hitters finally come out to play.

If you want really awesome VR? Go away, or get a time machine. Its not likely to happen until Vega. Even then its going to be seriously pricey but it should net you great performance and hopefully some decent futureproofing. Hopefully.
If you really can't wait and have cash for days then get yourself a Fury or 980Ti (and also a 6600k and the relevant bits if your CPU/system is badly outdated) right now and dump it for Vega/Pascal+ as soon as they surface.
If you want decent enough VR you have two choices: spend the big bucks now on Fury X/980Ti systems, or wait a little and spend hopefully slightly fewer bucks on hopefully slightly faster and more efficient Polaris/Pascal rigs/cards. Mmm, conjecture! Either way you'll have reasonable VR with good compatibility for this gen. But staying power could be an issue depending on how VR develops.
If you like feeling seasick, you could in theory take the plunge right now if you have beefy enough hardware including a GTX970 or better. But you could end up with lots of compatibility issues not long into the future with more demanding titles not running at all. Plus mating a sub-€1000 system with a €300-400 GPU to €600+ of VR headgear is about as sensible as getting a top-of-the-range gaming system a €50 graphics card. And we all know how many people have been lambasted by this forum for trying that on. Trying to run VR on anything less than a GTX970 will almost certainly be a nightmare - for the few games that would run at all on such limited hardware
And CF/SLI is also risky as hell - even the Steam tool isn't fully compatible and both vendors are still trying to perfect the rather different art of VR-CF and VR-SLI - an odd amalgam of multi-GPU and multi-monitor with very little room for error - so while this may be an option in the future you'd still likely want to have a fallback position of being able to run your headset well off of just one of the cards. A few GTX970s or worse strung together might stumble badly or be banned from running certain titles, especially biased titles. And nowadays only independent games running off custom engines tend to be vendor-agnostic so that could be half of all the triple-A VR titles down the sink :eek:

Serephucus

Currently reading. Initial thoughts: "Fuuuuuuu..... "

That's a hell of a wall. I'm impressed.

Longer thoughts:

That's a very impressive write-up. Nicely done!

I'm cautiously optimistic with VR, if only because it might just give the PC hardware - and indeed - software, developers the kick up the ass they've needed for quite a long time now. If/when VR titles start getting made - and I'm not talking titles with VR support tacked on as an after-thought, let's be quite clear. I'm talking made from the ground up experiences designed to take full advantage of VR. This doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be VR-first, though obviously that would be best, but simply that VR would be as good as a traditional monitor. When these do arrive, they'll have to run well, or they just won't sell. Never mind lot of people saying "Bah, I get horrible framerates with this game, I wasn't bothered finishing it" there'll now be "Bah, I threw up all over my keyboard after half an hour playing this. Never again." You can be guaranteed that'll put a dent in your sales pretty quick. So, this means that both hardware designers and software engineers are going to have to really pull out the stops for the next generation or two to get us where we need to be.

Now, this all assumes people will actually adopt VR. That's the million dollar question at the moment. Sure, there's interest. HTC and (less publicly) Oculus love to tell everyone just how many people are buying what they're selling, but how many of these sales will actually end up in the hands of long-term end-users? With prices the way they are, only the very enthusiastic. At least for the moment. We've known for a long time though that high-end PC gamers make up the minority, but they're a very vocal bunch, and everyone involved knows this. They also know that usually this people are subtly influencing the masses as well. Everyone has "that guy who's got with computers" and they'll usually pay heed to their advice.

Ultimately I think that's what Oculus were planning when they agreed to be bought by Facebook. Sure they needed the money, but they were also playing a longer game: Get VR of some sort into the hands of as many people as possible, let them see just what it can do, and then when everything is good and ready, show them "Well, if that's what you get with a €100 headset, just look and see what magic we can do if you get our high-end offering". It also means they can build and ecosystem up early.

At the end of the day, it is still an emerging tech. I'm pretty sure I'm going to pick one of the two up - I play lots of Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, and Minecraft - but I want to wait a it out a little and see how things play out for a couple of months first. Oh, and FYI, a 4790 / 970 rig will get you smack in the middle of the green bar on Steam's VR bench.

MarkAnthony

I have to admit I didn't read that. I'll go back and do so but for now:

VR is less render intensive than 4K monitors. VR will see a render path introduced that renders the centre of the image in higher quality than what's in peripheral vision. VR also has a massive novelty factor that will allow graphics to take a step back for a couple of years in favour of Gameplay.

I think it's ill advised to build a system now as Pascal and Polaris will no doubt have a lot of VR features built into them. I expect we'll have to wait for a new iteration of DirectX and/or Vulkan to see properly implemented mainstream VR APIs. I'm so glad to see Sony trying to bring this product to the upper-end main stream. I just hope they don't produce a product that fails to impress and possibly setsa the industry back.

SterlingArcher

When you get a proper vr type battlefield /gta/red dead/ you know that game that makes 500 million + guaranteed and is worth it. Then for vr It'll be like mad max hit the nitro switch for all things and tech involved.

MarkAnthony

SterlingArcher wrote: »

When you get a proper vr type battlefield /gta/red dead/ you know that game that makes 500 million + guaranteed and is worth it. Then for vr It'll be like mad max hit the nitro switch for all things and tech involved.

Star Citizen has made over $100million and isn't even out yet. One of the massive driving forces on that game IMHO was the promise of VR.

Eoinmc97

IMO VR will go like this for the next year or two;
PSVR will suck, and many people will think that VR sucks. Whilst that's not true, look at how hard it is to justify a powerful PC and VR headset to a console player, who enjoys 'simplicity' and 'value'. I hate to say it, but we need PSVR to take off, but at the same time, be a limit that will cause people to dabble in PC VR.
Currently, we have not seen any games for VR with visual fidelity in mind, rather we just have some testers. So, I feel that currently we can run them. But what if a developer comes around and actually pushes the boat out with amazing graphical features such as HBAO+, Hair physics (not HairWorks)etc. I believe the current gen will stutter to oblivion, save for some Dual GPU set-ups. (AMD's Dual-Eye-GPU renders each eye with one GPU, or a pair if you have more)

I don't believe in the hype, surrounding VR anyways. I honestly don't believe we are there, just like 4K is ways off for many. Call me back in 6 years, as node shrinking is getting harder now.

ED E

MarkAnthony wrote: »

Star Citizen has made over $100million and isn't even out yet. One of the massive driving forces on that game IMHO was the promise of VR.

If Chris R gets it right, which all signals suggest he is, then the VR experience in SC will be really mind blowing.

That said, its still in the Eve space and isnt a game that will attract anybody but the most serious gamers so it doesnt do much for popularization.


Right now the fragmentation may hurt the space IMO. Vive is the better tech but devs are already working with OR.

BloodBath

I don't think it's going to be that hard to run. It's quite a bit less demanding than a 100hz+ 1440p monitor which a decent 970/390 can run most games at 90+ fps in. We're going to see 970/390 performance cards at the €200 price point with the next gen of cards.

Not that a cheap GPU is going to help since most people are not going to spend €700-900 on the headset and the ones that are will have titan's 980ti's or fury x's and a good monitor already. It's going to take several years and price cuts for this to gain popularity.

The likes of Star Citizen is not going to run on max settings at that framerate and res on possibly even the highest end next gen card but that's 1 game that wasn't designed for VR from the ground up. They need to optimise the crap out of that game if it's going to work well in VR anytime soon.

And apart from all of that the most important thing is the software. There's virtually nothing outside of basic tech demos at the moment and that is not going to change anytime soon. I doubt many devs will be attracted to it at the moment either. Granted the initial software will probably sell to most owners no matter how limited or bad it is. You're still looking at an audience of say 1 million at best in the next year instead of a potential audience of 200 million. (Steam + PS4 + XB1 users.)

For anyone thinking about this to be honest you shouldn't bother for at least another year unless you have plenty of disposable income and don't mind splurging a few grand on a toy that won't get much use anytime soon. Unless you are big into your racers and you know the racing games you love are adding VR support or you can see yourself playing a lot of Star Citizen or Elite dangerous in VR then there's very little to get excited about on the game front.

Skatedude

I've been using VR for well over a year and It is incredible. The tech is here and will only get better. The rift officially comes out this monday and there will be 30 games available on launch, so i wouldn't say there is a lack of software support as most consoles would not have 30 games on launch day.

And with playstation vr coming out, there will be a lot of incentive to release more games that support VR.

BloodBath

Skatedude wrote: »

I've been using VR for well over a year and It is incredible. The tech is here and will only get better. The rift officially comes out this monday and there will be 30 games available on launch, so i wouldn't say there is a lack of software support as most consoles would not have 30 games on launch day.

And with playstation vr coming out, there will be a lot of incentive to release more games that support VR.

The majority of these "games" are nothing more than glorified tech demos or older games with VR support added.

4068ac1elhodqr

VR will be larger than a large sized slice of large with largeness.
Perhaps though in 2017/18, and it will become very cheap also.

Gaming won't have ownership of it entirely, perhaps just 15-20% market share, still billions & billions of $$$ all the same.

Education, real estate, travel, tourism, automation, remote medical, fly-by-wire transport, security, commerce, comms, events etc...
You'll even be able to attend your Sunday Mass in glorious Dolby 7.1 VR if the weather's bad out.

Digital Solitude

Robert ninja wrote: »

http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO98760930T20C16A3000000/ [Archive] [Translation]

From another thread, PSVR will be coming to PC. Given it's pricing it will definitely give VR in general a massive push. The two screens on it are also exactly half the resolution of 1080p, so that should make it a lot easier to run. Even with a 290 I can run most games at med-90fps so this could give a huge boost in the right direction.

It's entirely possible I have no idea what I'm talking about, but this should also make PSVR the bench for porting software from PS4 to PC and vice versa.

ED E

Digital Solitude wrote: »

From another thread, PSVR will be coming to PC. Given it's pricing it will definitely give VR in general a massive push. The two screens on it are also exactly half the resolution of 1080p, so that should make it a lot easier to run. Even with a 290 I can run most games at med-90fps so this could give a huge boost in the right direction.

Sounds like corner cutting tbh. Its argued that even CV1 needs to up the res one more time to get a PPI thats great enough to fool the eye completely and its 2160×1200.

BloodBath

ED E wrote: »

Sounds like corner cutting tbh. Its argued that even CV1 needs to up the res one more time to get a PPI thats great enough to fool the eye completely and its 2160×1200.

Exactly, 1080p on VR is awful and you still need the playstation camera and 2 move controllers pushing the price closer to €600 in total for inferior hardware.

2160x1200 is only 2,592,000 pixels. 2560x1440 is 3,686,400. That's quite a bit less. Since the field of view on Vive and OR is 110 degrees I'm sure the in game field of view will have to match so it might be a bit more demanding than normal but probably still less than a 90Hz 2560x1440 monitor.

If you can't run that you shouldn't really be buying VR in the first place considering a current gen €300-350 graphics card will do it in most cases.

Robert ninja

I've heard that the PSVR has the worst tracking. I don't plan on getting one unless I hear otherwise but it's always good for it to eventually get support on PC if for nothing else than competition and experimenting. Who knows it might be really good for certain activities like just movie-watching or simple things... and having it as an option is better for the consumer.

Skatedude

This is first generation, think how much consoles pc's and tv's have progressed in just a few years.
No reason not to think vr is going to get better, cheaper and simpler.
I can easily see glasses or eventually contacts paired with phones etc within half a dozen years or so.

Gehad_JoyRider

Maybe next year? When DX 12 is released for me I feel like I'm I'm in GPU no mans land I can upgrade or wait it out. Till i see the next collection on booth cards.

Vr I haven't really thought about it much it just doesn't attract me all that much. I get the idea of immersion but its a bit early and seems very new so I'm happy to wait it out. Il

I think if anything, my next investment will be a new rig late 2016 to early 2017 but I would like a ultra wide 1440p monitor.

Solitaire

I made an oopsie. I forgot that physical resolution is not the output resolution - the GPU actually renders a larger image that gets scaled down to the hardware's resolution to compensate for spatial distortion

So yeah... we're not dealing with dual 1200p screens. We're dealing with two 1680p signals driving said screens. So the output is actually 5.1 megapixels @90Hz, not 2.6 :eek: Murmurs from Valve seems to imply that they're playing around with using fancy algorithms to cut down the output resolution needed to drive the Vive but the Rift requires more horsepower to render a frame than a 1440p or even an old 1600p monitor. And you can't really to afford to drop below 90fps too often. Eep.

So yeah... no wonder the absolute minimum is a GTX970/R9 390. And even then, while Oculus claims that this will be a baseline figure for the Rift's entire hardware lifetime we already have titles that are starting to auto-nerf settings or disable VR unless they detect something shinier in your rig - Elite seems to be demanding a GTX980 as its minimum

ED E

Gehad_JoyRider wrote: »

Maybe next year? When DX 12 is released for me I feel like I'm I'm in GPU no mans land I can upgrade or wait it out. Till i see the next collection on booth cards.

DX12 = AMD Catchup. GCN benefits from it but NVidia cards don't see much to any of a boost (outside CPU limited systems). NVidia won't have a new architecture out for another year so don't expect any magic for a while. AMD may just claw back some sales.

Solitaire wrote: »

So yeah... we're not dealing with dual 1200p screens. We're dealing with two 1680p signals driving said screens. So the output is actually 5.1 megapixels @90Hz, not 2.6 :eek:

Wonder if the "normal" gaming world starts to transition to >1080 would that help by expanding the market for high end card sales for big Red and Green?

Solitaire

ED E wrote: »

Wonder if the "normal" gaming world starts to transition to >1080 would that help by expanding the market for high end card sales for big Red and Green?

At that point high-end will be mid-range and the problem will start to self-resolve. Eventually. But its going to take a while. And if anything VR headsets might put a bit of a dent in big monitor sales - and until both come down in price a few notches its just not going to be cheap enough to be mainstream. The vast majority of gamers can't even afford a GTX970, let alone a headset/monitor to go with it

BloodBath

Solitaire wrote: »

I made an oopsie. I forgot that physical resolution is not the output resolution - the GPU actually renders a larger image that gets scaled down to the hardware's resolution to compensate for spatial distortion

So yeah... we're not dealing with dual 1200p screens. We're dealing with two 1680p signals driving said screens. So the output is actually 5.1 megapixels @90Hz, not 2.6 :eek: Murmurs from Valve seems to imply that they're playing around with using fancy algorithms to cut down the output resolution needed to drive the Vive but the Rift requires more horsepower to render a frame than a 1440p or even an old 1600p monitor. And you can't really to afford to drop below 90fps too often. Eep.

So yeah... no wonder the absolute minimum is a GTX970/R9 390. And even then, while Oculus claims that this will be a baseline figure for the Rift's entire hardware lifetime we already have titles that are starting to auto-nerf settings or disable VR unless they detect something shinier in your rig - Elite seems to be demanding a GTX980 as its minimum

Ah I never saw this info. Maybe that explains why the majority of games for it look terrible graphically. A 970 or 390 is not going to cut it for that then.

I'd say even a 980 wouldn't cut it for that in a decent looking game. Looking at 980ti, fury or next gen cards really.

Solitaire

Its still balanced by the fact that the frameskip tech being used in the Rift at least is really good and will happily accommodate occasional FPS dips with artificial re-rendered frames. Of course the faster the head movement the more of the game environment needs to be rendered per frame to allow for a full re-render in the new head position so that's more overhead as well starting right at engine level and going the whole pipeline

Gehad_JoyRider

ED E wrote: »

DX12 = AMD Catchup. GCN benefits from it but NVidia cards don't see much to any of a boost (outside CPU limited systems). NVidia won't have a new architecture out for another year so don't expect any magic for a while. AMD may just claw back some sales.

Nvidia are still trying to cop off games works as a viable option for dx 12 :pac:

Two kinds of company's, ones afraid of change and holding on to their baby blanket for deer life in this case DX11

AMD sees change goes for it. Creates something that can benefit every one, Nvidia sees it and feels threatened, why?


because not only do they have to much to loose they have everything to loose they've been caught with there pants down there drivers are steadily getting worse, people are loosing their patients with them. How many games this year have had appalling performance reviews that have been tied to Nvidia.

The only thing Nvidia do well is give lots of freebes to you tubers to talk about there products.

So if i was a costumer of Nvidia I be pretty pissed if my 500+ euro gpu was tanking frames on a new release.

what about blue screens black screens over the past month?
Your telling me costumers will continue to support that?

Calibos

Solitaire wrote: »

At that point high-end will be mid-range and the problem will start to self-resolve. Eventually. But its going to take a while. And if anything VR headsets might put a bit of a dent in big monitor sales - and until both come down in price a few notches its just not going to be cheap enough to be mainstream. The vast majority of gamers can't even afford a GTX970, let alone a headset/monitor to go with it

If eye tracking and Foveated Rendering makes it into Gen 2 HMD's then VR becomes the device with the least performance requirements instead of the device with the most. 4K+ Game on a monitor?? You have to render every single pixel at full quality. 4K+ Game on a Gen 2 HMD with Foveated rendering? You only have to render a small portion of the pixels at full quality.

Solitaire

Yup! ....but that's second-gen hardware which will likely have higher-resolution 100-150Hz panels to over-render to. Still, things will improve.... eventually. There's still a way to go until then.

ED E

Vale says now is VR time:

http://store.steampowered.com/steamvr

Solitaire

Valve is so far in bed with HTC now it has no choice

Robert ninja

I suppose it'll be a few years off before affordable VR/AR combos are around. The possibilities of AR are just as interesting as VR so I still feel like I don't want to invest just yet. Combining the 2 would be no small technical feat and then there's the issue of waiting for it to be affordable. Just freeze me and wake me up when it's all ready.

Skatedude

AR is in progress, but microsoft are charging something in the region of 10k for developer kits AFAIK.

VR is here now and while expensive, It is a whole new way of playing, People say think they know what it could be like, then they actually try it and realize they hadn't a clue.

A good monitor and gpu upgrade would cost the same as vr, but you do need hte good gpu to start with unfortunatly.

Robert ninja

AR costs that much because it's more expensive to R&D and because its applications are for business first, not games. Which is actually why I'm more interested in it than VR. I'll never be buying Microsoft's products, though... so I'll be waiting for a AR headset that's free from the cloud, windows, directX or whatever other malarkey that MC locks it to.

TerrorFirmer

Have you guys tried mobile VR? Obviously, it's nothing compared to the Rift and the Vive, but I was surprised by how good it is considering it only costs $15 for a half decent headset. Very good fun, and a lot better than I expected being used to the Oculus Rift.

ED E

Google Cardboard + 1440P handset is really quite something. Tried it about 9 months ago and it was a bit of a mindf-ck at times.

jme2010

Virtual Desktop single-handedly won me over on VR. If you just think about 'made for vr' games, then you're missing a great opportunity.

I now don't have to upgrade my monitor or buy that HD projector is all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjE6qXd6Itw

Slutmonkey57b

VR has been "imminent" for about 30 years now and it's never taken off. There have always been two questions about it: graphical fidelity, and the physicality of using it. They've spent 30 years on the former, and have now got pretty close, but nothing has or ever will change about the latter.

Ultimately, are you happy to sit around with a box on your head, waggling your arms and/or legs around like a plonker? It'll always be no for me. :-)

Calibos

jme2010 wrote: »

Virtual Desktop single-handedly won me over on VR. If you just think about 'made for vr' games, then you're missing a great opportunity.

I now don't have to upgrade my monitor or buy that HD projector is all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjE6qXd6Itw

Will be picking this up when I get my Rift CV1 but am thinking of it more in terms of 'Proof of Concept'. Never mind its potential as a real desktop replacement, it has huge potential for VR Cinema. While at the moment the available virtual cinemas are not as good as those in Oculus Video/Cinema, its become apparent that Oculus Cinema will be effectively stillborn and functionally hobbled for a lot of people. Licensing issues will mean poor support for video and audio formats and even themed virtual environments. Theres not going to be Virtual Cinemas inside a Star Destroyer Hanger Bay for your Star Wars Movie night because either Disney won't allow it or will but at a large cost etc. Oculus will have to play ball with their content partners. Virtual Desktop on the other hand is much more free to allow 'user' created and downloaded themed copyright infringing auditoriums. It will likely allow the use of Kodi for example so we can leverage the Kodi UI and our media servers full of content to be displayed in on the Virtual screens. The likes of Kodi supporting nearly every codec you could imagine etc.


The issue right now isn't the potential of the program or those like it. Its that CV1 simply doesn't have the resolution yet to make most people give up their real monitors or projectors just yet. If we have dual 4K panels in CV2 we might be almost there. I did read that it takes 8-16k to replicate the res of a 1080p monitor on a virtual monitor viewed in the HMD. CV2 it might be viable but CV3 definitely.

Rezident

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

VR has been "imminent" for about 30 years now and it's never taken off. There have always been two questions about it: graphical fidelity, and the physicality of using it. They've spent 30 years on the former, and have now got pretty close, but nothing has or ever will change about the latter.

Ultimately, are you happy to sit around with a box on your head, waggling your arms and/or legs around like a plonker? It'll always be no for me. :-)

Happy? Yes. Very happy? Yep. Occasionally ecstatic like a child on Christmas morning and mind-blown? Yep that too.

The Gaming experience - on the Vive anyway - is actually mindblowing at times. But this isn't just better graphics, it's a whole new dimension.

And gaming is just one aspect. Wait til you realise you can watch every movie, every TV show in your own personal theatre (with like a 100 foot screen, I don't even know how big my virtual screen is!). This changes everything.

But you have to try it, no video can give you the sense of perspective - the other night in Universe Sandbox, I was playing with our solar system (as you do), just adding in a few moons and some extra planets - all to scale and moving and orbiting convincingly - when I found Betelgeuse in the menu. Now, I know Betelgeuse is big (it's a red supergiant) and is one of the largest observable stars in the universe. But to actually see it, to stand beside it and watch it's almost-impossible size flying into our solar system and immolating most or it, was breathtaking. You see I wasn't standing there with a box on my head, I was in space watching the birth and death of a solar system, and it was beautiful. It was stunning. Astonishing. And this is only the beginning.

TerrorFirmer

'Titans of Space' blew me away on the Rift. The jaw-dropping sense of scale and vastness that simply cannot be captured by photo, books, or video - it is there in VR.

MarkAnthony

Forgotten about this thread! Got my Rift, very happy camper. Are we there yet though - no, not in my opinion. My God though it is going to be awesome when it is ready for the general consumer market in a couple of years.

Video - already being shot in ridiculously high res, so that's going to be ready.

Film industry - already showing some imagination in the shorts that are out there.

Educational software and educational toys like Universe Sandbox - this could be as big a game changer for education as the internet was for Generation X. Some of the concepts out there are mind blowing. I was doing that Cell tour thing the other day - the sheer amount of information that can potentially be imparted in such an interactive way. It's staggering.

Games - Here's where the GPU power and screen quality just aren't quite there yet. It's going to get there (especially on the GPU side) very quickly though. I can seriously see in 2-3 generations of console the HMD being just something you buy. It'll be like an extra controller. If you want 2 or 3 or 44 player you'll just pick up that many HMDs, the majority of games will shift to VR or AR - that is one area I think is also going to be massive.

This is the most exciting revolution in video gaming since the technology began IMO.

Fakman87

Lads I got a bit of motion sickness after using the Gear VR with my S6. Does the Rift and Vive give you motion sickness at all?

TerrorFirmer

It does for some people - there's no universal reaction. I never had motion sickness with the DK1 or DK2, don't with the Gear VR either.

jme2010

Just tried the HTC Vive over the weekend at a demo.

My dear god. I can't get over how good it is. I've been a hardcore PC gamer for years and the vive has nearly ruined regular gaming for me :pac:

I was in a space hanger while robots were shooting at me, as the lasers got close a 'bullet time' effect kicked in and i was able to take a step (physically step sideways and dodge them!!!!!) My fiance said I was smiling the whole time haha.

I tried google tilt brush where I made a 3D cube with fire and smoke in it. Then the demo chap reminded me to 'take a walk around it', so I did a full 360 view by walking, leaning over and peeking inside whatever I drew.

Its so immersive and intuitive you can't imagine without trying it. I am 100% sold and will be buying it the second they have it in stock.

Also the chap told me about an oculus rift fanboy who rocked up to the demo like 'this is **** and the rift is way better'. Apparently half way through the demo, he was converted and wanted to buy the tech demo model right there and then :D:D

jme2010

Fakman87 wrote: »

Lads I got a bit of motion sickness after using the Gear VR with my S6. Does the Rift and Vive give you motion sickness at all?

I've tried the VR with a friends Samsung and I felt sick too. But the vive was built from day one with this in mind and I had a very enjoyable experience

MarkAnthony

jme2010 wrote: »

Just tried the HTC Vive over the weekend at a demo.

My dear god. I can't get over how good it is. I've been a hardcore PC gamer for years and the vive has nearly ruined regular gaming for me :pac:

I was in a space hanger while robots were shooting at me, as the lasers got close a 'bullet time' effect kicked in and i was able to take a step (physically step sideways and dodge them!!!!!) My fiance said I was smiling the whole time haha.

I tried google tilt brush where I made a 3D cube with fire and smoke in it. Then the demo chap reminded me to 'take a walk around it', so I did a full 360 view by walking, leaning over and peeking inside whatever I drew.

Its so immersive and intuitive you can't imagine without trying it. I am 100% sold and will be buying it the second they have it in stock.

Also the chap told me about an oculus rift fanboy who rocked up to the demo like 'this is **** and the rift is way better'. Apparently half way through the demo, he was converted and wanted to buy the tech demo model right there and then :D:D

They're in stock.

jme2010

MarkAnthony wrote: »

They're in stock.

Where?

I was waiting for PC World as the staff told me about a 0% interest payment option. Don't really have €900 to drop this month lol.

MarkAnthony

jme2010 wrote: »

Where?

I was waiting for PC World as the staff told me about a 0% interest payment option. Don't really have €900 to drop this month lol.

Through Steam.

Xenoronin

Or through Overclockers.co.uk, I think they have them in stock there too.

Solitaire

Given a relative lack of recent activity I'm de-sticky-ing this thread for now.

MarkAnthony

No sticky no forum, did we all jump too early? :pac:

Icyseanfitz

been thinking of a vive myself but dont know whether to wait for vive 2 or not

Calibos

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

been thinking of a vive myself but dont know whether to wait for vive 2 or not

If you're not particularily impatient then it could make sense to wait for Gen 2 where hopefully we'll have 4K+ resolution, larger FOV, maybe even eyetracking and foveated rendering. Gen 2 is looking like 2018 at the earliest.

Are you not considering the Oculus Rift? Its the better HMD in most ways. The one thing Vive had over it was the tracked hand controllers but Rift will have the 'Touch' controllers in about 6 weeks. 30 launch games.

Icyseanfitz

Calibos wrote: »

If you're not particularily impatient then it could make sense to wait for Gen 2 where hopefully we'll have 4K+ resolution, larger FOV, maybe even eyetracking and foveated rendering. Gen 2 is looking like 2018 at the earliest.

Are you not considering the Oculus Rift? Its the better HMD in most ways. The one thing Vive had over it was the tracked hand controllers but Rift will have the 'Touch' controllers in about 6 weeks. 30 launch games.

Ive heard a lot more positive opinions on the vive over the rift tbh, im waiting for the next gen of ultra wide monitors, next gen of VR :pac::pac::pac: il never buy anything haha