Sony VR Headset/Project Morpheus/PlayStation VR

[eastmen]

I only used the explanations from Crytek.

Imagine the cut backs on the ps4 to make it run at 1080p 60fps if a 980ti can only run it at 1080p 75fps.

I'm sure ps4 users will be happy with VR when it turns out to be a slide show experience that looks worse than a two year old dev kit on the pc.

You can solve the problem on pc by adding a second 980 ti or in the fall run new graphics cards. The problem on the ps4 wont ever be solved and will get worse as we go further.

 

[hughJ]

Oculus store would need to become quite a dominant force over steam to make a difference.

Oculus already is the dominant force in VR publishing on the PC by far and that's not going to suddenly change because HTC releases some retail hardware. Compare the quantity of content that's on Oculus Share to what's available on Steam for VR. Compare the revision history and documentation of the SDKs. Oculus has an almost two year head start when it comes to developing an SDK, building relationships with developers, seeding their own content, and probably have more employees devoted to VR than Valve's whole company. Users will go where the content is and devs will go to where the users are. The fact that Steam is a juggernaut in PC publishing/distribution means nothing if Oculus owners are able to be delivered higher quality content with a more predictable and consistent user experience from the Oculus store than anywhere else on PC. There's huge value to the proposition of being able to login to a store and know that every piece of software available there will work on your system, and that's not something you'll get on Steam for VR because it's going to be a hodgepodge of differing supported VR APIs, HMD hardware, and system hardware. Valve can do their best to streamline that and be as forthcoming as possible with their customers, but ultimately you're still talking about a company trying to support a peripheral that will represent probably less than 1% of their business for the foreseeable future - there will be some real limits for what we can expect of Valve here.

Imagine the cut backs on the ps4 to make it run at 1080p 60fps if a 980ti can only run it at 1080p 75fps.

In this case we're talking a 980, not a 980ti. A well-binned 970 with a high boost clock puts you in striking distance of that performance, and VR perf tuning right now is all about leaving yourself frame time breathing room at the end of your draws prior to them being sent to the compositor in order to avoid hiccups because none of the SDKs have async timewarp integrated yet.

Even if most games adhere to the low-ish minimum specs, I suspect that a big chunk of the VR community that overlaps with the PC enthusiast community will throw their money at much higher spec cards in order to buy the extra much needed super-sampling. That's definitely a road that the PS4 isn't going to be able to follow and will be the most striking difference in quality between the two platforms in the coming couple years. When you're talking about below standard definition pixel/deg densities, being able to throw 4x supersampling or more at an image becomes a very worth while use of your pixel throughput budget.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm sure ps4 users will be happy with VR when it turns out to be a slide show...

Stop trolling. No VR game will be a slideshow on PS4 because Sony QA will mandate a solid 60 fps to be shunted up to 120 Hz. Complain about cutback visuals all you like (a console struggling to match dual 980 TIs? How shite is that $300 console!) but the VR experience is guaranteed.

VR is just going to be like the introduction of 3D. PS1 3D was crap, but we loved it because it was new and opened up new worlds and games. Compared to VR in 15 years, PS4VR is crap. Future us will look back at PS4VR and wonder how we could ever have stomached it. But here and now it's new and exactly good enough to be something people will be thrilled to experience (regardless if the novelty wears off quickly or not).

 

[MrFox]

I'm sure ps4 users will be happy with VR when it turns out to be a slide show experience that looks worse than a two year old dev kit on the pc.

All demos shown at trade shows on PS4 were perfectly smooth. I have no idea what your illusion is based on.

You can solve the problem on pc by adding a second 980 ti or in the fall run new graphics cards. The problem on the ps4 wont ever be solved and will get worse as we go further.

Hence my comment about the smaller market size if they make the target too high, how many have money for a second 980ti, let alone a single one?

The PS4 IQ will be improved with the PS5, but in the mean time it will be improved with optimisations and new techniques, just like Uncharted 1 looks bad in retrospective compared to U3. When do you predict the PS5 is coming out again?

The Oculus low resolution will be solved with a new model, and will require a new $1500 PC in addition to the new headset.

 

[hughJ]

The Oculus low resolution will be solved with a new model, and will require a new $1500 PC.

Not to turn this into a tit-for-tat but what's going to be required of a new PC HMD is not even worth speculating right now because a sizable resolution increase from what we have will necessitate foveated rendering and that's very much embryonic research right now. A well engineered and implemented foveated rendering scheme could buy more than an order of magnitude of performance back which would turn our expectations of hardware requirements completely upside down.

Considering that I'm going to still be running the same mainboard/platform for 2016 VR that I purchased back in 2008, I do think it's a bit of a stretch to say that people are going to need to buy a whole new computer every couple years to keep up with PC VR. A graphics card and HMD sure, but that's really about it.

 

[temesgen]

Imagine the cut backs on the ps4 to make it run at 1080p 60fps if a 980ti can only run it at 1080p 75fps.

I'm sure ps4 users will be happy with VR when it turns out to be a slide show experience that looks worse than a two year old dev kit on the pc.

You can solve the problem on pc by adding a second 980 ti or in the fall run new graphics cards. The problem on the ps4 wont ever be solved and will get worse as we go further.

PS4 doesn't have any good games so why would anyone care if the VR is slide show experience?

Edit:

In all seriousness, nobody buying the PSVR should be expecting the premier experience, that will be reserved for PCs. I see no reason to assume that we won't see same sort of power/performance curve we see now with PCs costing a lot more and having much better visuals and console having lower performance but good enough for the consumers who are comfortable spending less but also having less visual fidelity. It is true that some consumers would be confused at retail but that is already the case so it doesn't change anything in a material way. All that said if I am a developer I'm probably inclined to develop titles that hit the greatest percentage of the market which for many will likely mean developing with PSVR in mind and upping the visuals for PC, nothing new here.

 

[eastmen]

Stop trolling. No VR game will be a slideshow on PS4 because Sony QA will mandate a solid 60 fps to be shunted up to 120 Hz. Complain about cutback visuals all you like (a console struggling to match dual 980 TIs? How shite is that $300 console!) but the VR experience is guaranteed.

VR is just going to be like the introduction of 3D. PS1 3D was crap, but we loved it because it was new and opened up new worlds and games. Compared to VR in 15 years, PS4VR is crap. Future us will look back at PS4VR and wonder how we could ever have stomached it. But here and now it's new and exactly good enough to be something people will be thrilled to experience (regardless if the novelty wears off quickly or not).

You would think so. But that hasn't stop sony from releasing games on their console that are slide shows.

Look at Fallout 4 on the ps4 http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-11102015/1600-1410/

They talk about the game becoming a single digit frame rate. This is one of the biggest games of 2015.

Compare that to the $350 computer in another beyond3d thread that plays fallout 4 at 1080p with higher quality settings and a much better frame rate.

 

[eastmen]

All demos shown at trade shows on PS4 were perfectly smooth. I have no idea what your illusion is based on.

Hence my comment about the smaller market size if they make the target too high, how many have money for a second 980ti, let alone a single one?

The PS4 IQ will be improved with the PS5, but in the mean time it will be improved with optimisations and new techniques, just like Uncharted 1 looks bad in retrospective compared to U3. When do you predict the PS5 is coming out again?

The Oculus low resolution will be solved with a new model, and will require a new $1500 PC in addition to the new headset.

Yes tech demos , not full games. I've already posted an example of a major release this year becoming a slide show on the ps4 while a $350 computer can run it with higher settings and not have those problems.

I gave using a second 980 ti as an example but the truth is we don't know how their multi card vr solutions will work. So you may not need two 980s you may be able to use two lower cards.

We also don't know the prices of graphics cards in 2016 and we don't know what performance you will get in the fall of 2016 when HBM 2 and 16nm cards release.

As for the ps5 who knows , the last time sony had such a successful console as the ps4 they waited for their competition to beat them to market then released a sub par ps3.

Not to turn this into a tit-for-tat but what's going to be required of a new PC HMD is not even worth speculating right now because a sizable resolution increase from what we have will necessitate foveated rendering and that's very much embryonic research right now. A well engineered and implemented foveated rendering scheme could buy more than an order of magnitude of performance back which would turn our expectations of hardware requirements completely upside down.

Considering that I'm going to still be running the same mainboard/platform for 2016 VR that I purchased back in 2008, I do think it's a bit of a stretch to say that people are going to need to buy a whole new computer every couple years to keep up with PC VR. A graphics card and HMD sure, but that's really about it.

Exactly they recommend a i5 4590 but as you can see with many modern games and with past dev kits any modern i5 or i7 will do the trick. Its going to be the video card side of things that will need more power and they are getting cheaper by the day

 

[hughJ]

...but the truth is we don't know how their multi card vr solutions will work...

I think at this point we know about as much as we really need to in order to make some good predictions of what we'll see in the near future. Nvidia's VR SLI documentation and sample code has been available since the summer and is relatively straight forward. There's still some latency overhead by virtue of the Oculus compositor currently requiring both raw eye buffers to be completed and passed in at the same time on a single card forcing you to wait for the second card to copy its eye buffer across. This also scales particularly poorly when your supersampling goes up due to the fact that that eye buffer is copied as-is in its oversized, undistorted state, and even losing an extra millisecond from that transfer time over PCIE is hardly negligible in a world where your total frame time is only ~11ms.

From the benchmarks some folks did on reddit you could actually see a significant copy time speedup when comparing 8x/8x and 16x/16x setups for 4x SSAA'ed images, enough for me to consider the more costly Intel platforms that support the full 16x/16x PCIE 3.0 lanes. This could also end up being a serious bottleneck in the more distant future when we move to bigger res displays as the inter-slot communication simply isn't going to keep up with the resolution demands - foveated rendering or not. Having some sort of dual GPU card with shared memory or uber fast proprietary interconnect though might be able to address that. Aside from the transfer time and compositor time though you're basically looking at perfect performance scaling, so pairing a set of older cards should become quite attractive and might keep upgrade costs down if people can buy a second used card on ebay.

I think VR SLI is scheduled to get integrated into UE4 sometime soon so we should have some more real world assessments of its performance coming. Now that Epic has hired dedicated engineer for VR rendering/optimization they seem to be banging out a lot more things than they were earlier in the year.

 

[goonergaz]

You would think so. But that hasn't stop sony from releasing games on their console that are slide shows.

Look at Fallout 4 on the ps4 http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-11102015/1600-1410/

They talk about the game becoming a single digit frame rate. This is one of the biggest games of 2015.

Compare that to the $350 computer in another beyond3d thread that plays fallout 4 at 1080p with higher quality settings and a much better frame rate.

Enough of the cherry picking please PSVR will be fine, by the time it's looking 'long in the tooth' PS5 will be coming out and we'll have a better understanding of the longevity of VR.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You would think so. But that hasn't stop sony from releasing games on their console that are slide shows.

Because there's no requirement for 60 Hz minimum to stop people puking, unlike VR. Sony have gone on record saying they don't want to release a sub-par VR experience and are waiting for the software.

They talk about the game becoming a single digit frame rate. This is one of the biggest games of 2015.

On one of the oldest, crappiest (regards performance) engines from a PC dev with a track record of weak console ports.

Compare that to the $350 computer in another beyond3d thread that plays fallout 4 at 1080p with higher quality settings and a much better frame rate.

I'm starting to think that your comments are going beyond discussion and into pure trolling. The '$350 PC' is using second hand parts, and FO4 is a weak console port. It's a perfect combination of cherry picked data points to found a silly argument. We have real examples of people playing PSVR games, and yet you're painting it as doomed as underpowered and overpriced by referencing ridiculous outliers. We might be getting to the point where this thread is better off without your contributions.

 

[London Geezer]

There's a fine line between trolling and constant trolling. Got old a long time ago.

 

[orangpelupa]

Wait wait. So in ps4 is 1080p for both eyes instead of per eye? The other brands resolution are per eye right?

How the heck they make it still look good enough (from the eyes on I read), wow.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

PSVR is a 1920x1080 panel split between two eyes. OVR and VIVE are 2160x1200 panel split across both eyes. Sony sounds like they've done something clever with the display to mitigate some of its shortcoming going by user reviews from people who have used these devices. For one, screen door seems minimal, suggestive of larger subpixels in PSVR.

At the end of the day, the numbers don't really paint the whole picture, as is pretty typical of numbers. The devil is in the detail and specifics of execution.

 

[London Geezer]

They state clearly it's 960x1080 per eye

 

[jlippo]

Wait wait. So in ps4 is 1080p for both eyes instead of per eye? The other brands resolution are per eye right?

How the heck they make it still look good enough (from the eyes on I read), wow.

HTC Vive and Rift are both 2160x1200 or 1080x1200 per eye. (vs 960x1080 on PsVR)

 

[eastmen]

I think at this point we know about as much as we really need to in order to make some good predictions of what we'll see in the near future. Nvidia's VR SLI documentation and sample code has been available since the summer and is relatively straight forward. There's still some latency overhead by virtue of the Oculus compositor currently requiring both raw eye buffers to be completed and passed in at the same time on a single card forcing you to wait for the second card to copy its eye buffer across. This also scales particularly poorly when your supersampling goes up due to the fact that that eye buffer is copied as-is in its oversized, undistorted state, and even losing an extra millisecond from that transfer time over PCIE is hardly negligible in a world where your total frame time is only ~11ms.

From the benchmarks some folks did on reddit you could actually see a significant copy time speedup when comparing 8x/8x and 16x/16x setups for 4x SSAA'ed images, enough for me to consider the more costly Intel platforms that support the full 16x/16x PCIE 3.0 lanes. This could also end up being a serious bottleneck in the more distant future when we move to bigger res displays as the inter-slot communication simply isn't going to keep up with the resolution demands - foveated rendering or not. Having some sort of dual GPU card with shared memory or uber fast proprietary interconnect though might be able to address that. Aside from the transfer time and compositor time though you're basically looking at perfect performance scaling, so pairing a set of older cards should become quite attractive and might keep upgrade costs down if people can buy a second used card on ebay.

I think VR SLI is scheduled to get integrated into UE4 sometime soon so we should have some more real world assessments of its performance coming. Now that Epic has hired dedicated engineer for VR rendering/optimization they seem to be banging out a lot more things than they were earlier in the year.

Thanks for the information .

Enough of the cherry picking please PSVR will be fine, by the time it's looking 'long in the tooth' PS5 will be coming out and we'll have a better understanding of the longevity of VR.

Its not cherry picking. You can look across all games and see that the ps4 struggles to keep up at 1080p 60fps.

MOD: Off topic discussion "Price of PC that'll run FO4 better than PS4" removed

PSVR is a 1920x1080 panel split between two eyes. OVR and VIVE are 2160x1200 panel split across both eyes. Sony sounds like they've done something clever with the display to mitigate some of its shortcoming going by user reviews from people who have used these devices. For one, screen door seems minimal, suggestive of larger subpixels in PSVR.

At the end of the day, the numbers don't really paint the whole picture, as is pretty typical of numbers. The devil is in the detail and specifics of execution.

The problem with the head sets is no one has used them together. All information we have is based on people using them hours or days later and the content is different. It will be interesting to see how it all holds up when we get final hardware at home .

 

[goonergaz]

Its not cherry picking. You can look across all games and see that the ps4 struggles to keep up at 1080p 60fps.

So you're changing your arguement because you were stating about slide-shows and pointing to the one and only example of a game that hits single figures (and rarely from what I understand). And the PS4 wouldn't struggle if it wasn't pushing graphics so much so it's generally accepted the effects/details won't be as high on PSVR so they can maintain the required framerate.

 

[chris1515]

You would think so. But that hasn't stop sony from releasing games on their console that are slide shows.

Look at Fallout 4 on the ps4 http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-11102015/1600-1410/

They talk about the game becoming a single digit frame rate. This is one of the biggest games of 2015.

Compare that to the $350 computer in another beyond3d thread that plays fallout 4 at 1080p with higher quality settings and a much better frame rate.

Fallout 4 is not a SCEWWS games. Until Dawn or Bloodborne are better example. In VR the Framerate and resolution are king. They will sacrifice effect in PS4 VR Games...

 

[chris1515]

1080p 60 fps or 90 fps or 120 fps is not difficult on PS4...

The graphics will have less rendering effect than non VR games...