how about. it's showing the worse outcome. then if vive does well next week we know VR is like whoooooa so much better than that rift. then everyone buys vive. PSVR has motion controls too? everyone preorders that. then touch is finally announced in a few months, every knows from vive that motion controls are great then everyone buys that. all three do well.
holodeck 2020
Honestly? I agree with this. Personally, I think we're a little ways out from the motion controller "killer apps". Like, there's a lot of neat experiences coming out with the Vive but (and this is my opinion) nothing that really stands out as a must have. Super neat demo material, let's face it, motion controlled games ARE awesome, but a month (or even a week or two) from launch? I probably wouldn't be playing those experiences still. I have a feeling the initial Vive hype will be super high but will die out fairly quickly until the second wave of motion controller games come out. I deeply hope that there are announcements about the Touch before this second wave, I'll even concede that if Oculus fails that then they'll be making a major misstep, enough so that I'd probably regret my purchase a bit. But since Touch controllers are already in the hands of devs I imagine those future major motion controlled games will target both platforms. However, since the Vive is coming out now with motion controllers we already have devs experimenting with what works and really making games with them in mind. I think it's great they're pushing that ahead.
I mean, I'm excited for VR games coming out now, sure, but what I'm REALLY excited for are the games that we haven't even heard of yet. Thanks to the Vive, I think motion controlled games will have a much bigger part of that in the nearer future.
worst case scenario that isn't the worst case scenario. if all games fail forever, if photogrammetry gets used more, I'd probably VR visit places as they come out and thus still have a constant use for VR.
I have to say that while I understand that people are looking for a killer app and not finding it, the relatively middling selection of games that can be played in VR is pretty much irrelevant to me. Spending an hour or so in outer space, using VorpX and Arma to do some rounds over Chernarus in a helicopter, exploring Los Santos... those are the things I'm most looking forward to. To a large extent I want my binge gaming to be in front of a regular screen, where I'm not in my own little virtual world but can react to what's happening around me; what I want out of VR is something entirely different.
Obviously, if Half-Life 3 comes out for VR, I won't ignore it, but I have no wish to replace my regular gaming time with VR gaming time, because the things I'm looking for are somewhat different.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
i'll be doing a fair bit of gaming in virtual desktop, I think, unless the resolution turns out to be straight garbage. Curious how well relatively low-fidelity experiences like World of Warcraft will work.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
By the way if any of you guys wanna just chat on Steam or whatever while we wait for our Rifts, feel free to add me per sig.
Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Saw that. Vaguely concerned initially, but there must be something going on with how the FOV is actually perceived, because there's no way someone wouldn't have said something at GDC if the difference was that large, and at least a few of the Kickstarter backers would have been upgrading from DK2s and they would have also said something if the FOV was lower than the DK2.
Saw that. Vaguely concerned initially, but there must be something going on with how the FOV is actually perceived, because there's no way someone wouldn't have said something at GDC if the difference was that large, and at least a few of the Kickstarter backers would have been upgrading from DK2s and they would have also said something if the FOV was lower than the DK2.
There is. That is the measurement of the FOV of a single lens (and I'd still wait until we have a backup source, people tend to take the first thing anyone says as gospel, soo). Your perceived FOV across both lenses is going to be larger.
I mean, I think everyone already knew that the Vive FOV was larger? In practice, there's pros and cons here so bigger FOV doesn't immediately mean better all around, but yeah, prepare to have people freak out over it even though most people have said it definitely feels larger than the DK2.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
I'd really like for someone to measure a DK1 as part of those tests too.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Saw that. Vaguely concerned initially, but there must be something going on with how the FOV is actually perceived, because there's no way someone wouldn't have said something at GDC if the difference was that large, and at least a few of the Kickstarter backers would have been upgrading from DK2s and they would have also said something if the FOV was lower than the DK2.
There is. That is the measurement of the FOV of a single lens (and I'd still wait until we have a backup source, people tend to take the first thing anyone says as gospel, soo). Your perceived FOV across both lenses is going to be larger.
I mean, I think everyone already knew that the Vive FOV was larger? In practice, there's pros and cons here so bigger FOV doesn't immediately mean better all around, but yeah, prepare to have people freak out over it even though most people have said it definitely feels larger than the DK2.
I guess it depends on how that FOV feels in practise. The image makes the Vive FOV look ludicrously larger, and makes the DK2 look huge. Given that low FOV was one of the big complaints about the change from DK1 to DK2, that doesn't bode well for overall FOV on either Rift CV OR Vive.
Saw that. Vaguely concerned initially, but there must be something going on with how the FOV is actually perceived, because there's no way someone wouldn't have said something at GDC if the difference was that large, and at least a few of the Kickstarter backers would have been upgrading from DK2s and they would have also said something if the FOV was lower than the DK2.
There is. That is the measurement of the FOV of a single lens (and I'd still wait until we have a backup source, people tend to take the first thing anyone says as gospel, soo). Your perceived FOV across both lenses is going to be larger.
I mean, I think everyone already knew that the Vive FOV was larger? In practice, there's pros and cons here so bigger FOV doesn't immediately mean better all around, but yeah, prepare to have people freak out over it even though most people have said it definitely feels larger than the DK2.
I guess it depends on how that FOV feels in practise. The image makes the Vive FOV look ludicrously larger, and makes the DK2 look huge. Given that low FOV was one of the big complaints about the change from DK1 to DK2, that doesn't bode well for overall FOV on either Rift CV OR Vive.
Somehow I don't think the DK2 has a larger FOV than the CV1 (and in fact that is confirmed by specs and actual reviews), yet those images clearly suggest it is.
Some Tom foolery going on with camera angles there...
The Giantbomb crew are about as interesting as watching paint dry
Only they could make VR seem dull.
Well this highly depends on the game. I watched most of their stream yesterday and some games were awesome and some games were not. They came away generally going "yeah that was neat. Not enough to spend that much, but neat." Also they streamed for like 10 hours so depending on when you tuned in they may not have been at peak energy levels.
Also I have to agree, nothing I saw made me actually want to buy a VR headset. Everything so far looks like a neat "Well that was cool" hour long experience or something I'd get tired of wearing a headset for. Stuff like Luckey's Tale looks pretty but is only VR to be VR it seems. I want games that actually utilize the VR in ways that stuff can't currently. But that'll probably be a while.
Saw that. Vaguely concerned initially, but there must be something going on with how the FOV is actually perceived, because there's no way someone wouldn't have said something at GDC if the difference was that large, and at least a few of the Kickstarter backers would have been upgrading from DK2s and they would have also said something if the FOV was lower than the DK2.
There is. That is the measurement of the FOV of a single lens (and I'd still wait until we have a backup source, people tend to take the first thing anyone says as gospel, soo). Your perceived FOV across both lenses is going to be larger.
I mean, I think everyone already knew that the Vive FOV was larger? In practice, there's pros and cons here so bigger FOV doesn't immediately mean better all around, but yeah, prepare to have people freak out over it even though most people have said it definitely feels larger than the DK2.
I guess it depends on how that FOV feels in practise. The image makes the Vive FOV look ludicrously larger, and makes the DK2 look huge. Given that low FOV was one of the big complaints about the change from DK1 to DK2, that doesn't bode well for overall FOV on either Rift CV OR Vive.
Somehow I don't think the DK2 has a larger FOV than the CV1 (and in fact that is confirmed by specs and actual reviews), yet those images clearly suggest it is.
Some Tom foolery going on with camera angles there...
If there was this big a difference in the FOV between the Rift and the Vive, we would have heard about it from GDC. The GDC comparisons I saw seemed to consistently say that the left/right FOV was a teeny bit wider on the Rift, but that the Vive definitely had a taller up/down FOV and a more pleasing oval overall FOV shape.
The NDA breaking dev gave the same story:
Q: How does the SDE and FOV compare on Rift and Vive?
A: Less SDE on the Rift. To the point where I don't notice it at all if I'm not trying hard to stare at it. The Vive still has noticeable but improved SDE (from VDK1) with an oval FOV which I prefer over the Rift's rectangular one.
Q: FOV shape aside which one feels larger horizontally and vertically? Also did you adjust the eye relief to be as close as possible to your eyes?
A: Both feel very similar. The rift feels a little bit wider but they are both supposed to be +-110 deg. It's a very subjective thing and can't be measured perfectly accurate.
Q: So just clarifying the FOV with the Vive, are you sure you fully adjusted the eye relief so that it is closest to your eyes i.e. widest possible FOV? Even in this configuration are you saying the Rift still has a wider FOV?
A: I brought the lenses as close to my eyes as possible without touching my eyelashes. It's about the same on Vive and Rift but Rift feels a little wider horizontally to me while the Vive has my preferred FOV shape.
Saw that. Vaguely concerned initially, but there must be something going on with how the FOV is actually perceived, because there's no way someone wouldn't have said something at GDC if the difference was that large, and at least a few of the Kickstarter backers would have been upgrading from DK2s and they would have also said something if the FOV was lower than the DK2.
There is. That is the measurement of the FOV of a single lens (and I'd still wait until we have a backup source, people tend to take the first thing anyone says as gospel, soo). Your perceived FOV across both lenses is going to be larger.
I mean, I think everyone already knew that the Vive FOV was larger? In practice, there's pros and cons here so bigger FOV doesn't immediately mean better all around, but yeah, prepare to have people freak out over it even though most people have said it definitely feels larger than the DK2.
I guess it depends on how that FOV feels in practise. The image makes the Vive FOV look ludicrously larger, and makes the DK2 look huge. Given that low FOV was one of the big complaints about the change from DK1 to DK2, that doesn't bode well for overall FOV on either Rift CV OR Vive.
Somehow I don't think the DK2 has a larger FOV than the CV1 (and in fact that is confirmed by specs and actual reviews), yet those images clearly suggest it is.
Some Tom foolery going on with camera angles there...
If there was this big a difference in the FOV between the Rift and the Vive, we would have heard about it from GDC. The GDC comparisons I saw seemed to consistently say that the left/right FOV was a teeny bit wider on the Rift, but that the Vive definitely had a taller up/down FOV and a more pleasing oval overall FOV shape.
The NDA breaking dev gave the same story:
Q: How does the SDE and FOV compare on Rift and Vive?
A: Less SDE on the Rift. To the point where I don't notice it at all if I'm not trying hard to stare at it. The Vive still has noticeable but improved SDE (from VDK1) with an oval FOV which I prefer over the Rift's rectangular one.
Q: FOV shape aside which one feels larger horizontally and vertically? Also did you adjust the eye relief to be as close as possible to your eyes?
A: Both feel very similar. The rift feels a little bit wider but they are both supposed to be +-110 deg. It's a very subjective thing and can't be measured perfectly accurate.
Q: So just clarifying the FOV with the Vive, are you sure you fully adjusted the eye relief so that it is closest to your eyes i.e. widest possible FOV? Even in this configuration are you saying the Rift still has a wider FOV?
A: I brought the lenses as close to my eyes as possible without touching my eyelashes. It's about the same on Vive and Rift but Rift feels a little wider horizontally to me while the Vive has my preferred FOV shape.
Yeah, like.. assuming that comparison image is accurate, it definitely doesn't seem to tell the whole story when taken against everything else that's been said in comparisons between the Rift and the Vive.
The other interesting point from the image is the shape of the FOV. The CV1 has some subtle but definite differences from right to left, the Vive is more obvious with a large chunk taken out from one of the sides of its circular FOV.
This constant doom and gloom is so tiresome. (Not anyone here, mind you, just the stuff we keep getting out of reddit and the wider VR community.)
It's like people can't accept that just maybe the Rift and the Vive are extremely similar, each with their own pros and cons depending on personal preference. No, no, there must be some deep conspiracy going on with one or the other. This one is made out of paper mache, see?! See?! Oh, it's not? Well.... it makes your ears bleed! CONFIRMED! Oh, it doesn't? Well this one headset can't play games where you pilot a mech! You heard it here! Panic! Conspiracy!
This constant doom and gloom is so tiresome. (Not anyone here, mind you, just the stuff we keep getting out of reddit and the wider VR community.)
It's like people can't accept that just maybe the Rift and the Vive are extremely similar, each with their own pros and cons depending on personal preference. No, no, there must be some deep conspiracy going on with one or the other. This one is made out of paper mache, see?! See?! Oh, it's not? Well.... it makes your ears bleed! CONFIRMED! Oh, it doesn't? Well this one headset can't play games where you pilot a mech! You heard it here! Panic! Conspiracy!
Ben Kuchera had a great analogy for it in Polygon's writeup on the Rift, yesterday:
At some point when talking about the technology behind virtual reality, it begins to feel as if we're counting the hairs on the rabbit pulled out of the hat: What's important is that the illusion works and the audience is delighted by the entire effect. In the case of the Rift? The illusion works.
So in theory I think my Rift should be arriving in a few weeks, but I don't have a computer to go with it. I'm planning to build one, but 1) I'm in the middle of a move and everything's going to be chaotic for the next week or two, and 2) I think people said cards based on NVidia's new architecture should be out in June, which will provide better cards and push prices down on existing ones. Is that still accurate? How much of a difference are they supposed to make?
I'm not totally "money is no object", but it's not the biggest concern. If the next generation video cards provide 20%+ better performance for the same price and more shinies then I can wait. On the other hand if it's more like 10% and the price difference is only a few hundred dollars then I might as well jump now.
It's reasonable to say that the new generation of video cards are going to be a Big Deal. I don't know that their release date is known just yet, but we're at the point in video card cycles that they'll be dramatically better.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
If the rumors are true, and the X80 Ti releases side by side with the regular X80, I'll be upgrading my 980 Ti to an X80 Ti specifically for VR. Rumors are the X80 Ti is capable of 70% more performance than the 980 Ti at like 80% of the power usage, which is insane if it's true.
My Rift hasn't shipped yet, but I did get the "Your Rift is shipping soon" notice last week, so it should be Soon (tm).
Having covered VR since 2011 as executive editor at Road to VR, I've tried each of these headsets and their various prototypes and development kits on more occasions than I care to list. Folks on r/oculus seem to be worried that the CV1 FoV is drastically smaller than Vive, but in all my time actually using these headsets, I've never been able to firmly commit to which one has the highest FoV, or even which one has the lowest. Yes, it's that close. Theoretical vs. Actual FoV can be drastically different. Vision is complicated.
I suspect that PSVR will actually be perceived to have the highest FoV of the three because it has the easiest eye-lens distance adjustment which makes a massive difference in Actual FoV.
Basically, numbers are great and all but don't read into em that much. In practice the difference isn't nearly as bad as you'd think.
So in theory I think my Rift should be arriving in a few weeks, but I don't have a computer to go with it. I'm planning to build one, but 1) I'm in the middle of a move and everything's going to be chaotic for the next week or two, and 2) I think people said cards based on NVidia's new architecture should be out in June, which will provide better cards and push prices down on existing ones. Is that still accurate? How much of a difference are they supposed to make?
I'm not totally "money is no object", but it's not the biggest concern. If the next generation video cards provide 20%+ better performance for the same price and more shinies then I can wait. On the other hand if it's more like 10% and the price difference is only a few hundred dollars then I might as well jump now.
The new architecture uses a new manufacturing process (going from 22nm -> 16nm IIRC) to get higher speeds with less power use. The most extravagant claims are a 100% improvement, but I wouldn't put much stock in them. Probably going to be well over 20% though.
If the rumors are true, and the X80 Ti releases side by side with the regular X80, I'll be upgrading my 980 Ti to an X80 Ti specifically for VR. Rumors are the X80 Ti is capable of 70% more performance than the 980 Ti at like 80% of the power usage, which is insane if it's true.
On the AMD side, the cards released this summer aren't going to offer appreciable performance gains over 390 and Fury X levels, but they'll be using half the power that current cards use.
Their flagship cards unfortunately don't release until January 2017.
I'm really surprised SLI isn't amazing for VR performance already. From my layman perspective it just seems so logical and perfect to have a GPU for each eye.
I'm really surprised SLI isn't amazing for VR performance already. From my layman perspective it just seems so logical and perfect to have a GPU for each eye.
It probably works about as well as multi-monitor support is for SLI (or Crossfire)--it sounds perfect in theory, the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
VR is the same thing, with about 5% the amount of experience, testing, and development time.
SLI might be at odds with the advances around using instancing to do both eyes at once? Since they're making a single drawcall per mesh, but drawing left and right views simultaneously.
Honestly, from my own experience at the community event and Oculus not including that second facial interface, to essentially a delayed launch that puts it at me likely getting it at the same time as my Vive, I'm fairly close to just saying fuck it.
Been debating this with my coworker every day. He has an April Rift date and doesn't really want to give it up, but his glasses situation is even worse than mine (worse eyesight, bigger head, so he doesn't even meet the maximum glasses from the Oculus support page) so even if he got the Rift he won't be able to use it properly.
So who wants to talk about Asynchronous Timewarp? I'm curious for next week when we start getting some comparisons of games like Elite running in SteamVR (which doesn't have it) vs on Oculus's SDK (which does). That Tom's Hardware review of the Rift had some really interesting results; the article itself is careful to explain that they can't be 100% certain of their benchmarks, but it sounds like asynchronous timewarp may help a lot in some situations, based on their observations.
I know Valve has their own solution in SteamVR, but word on the Reddit streets these past few weeks is that it's inferior to asynchronous timewarp for dropped frames. It was all fairly theoretical though; I think the one thing right now (aside from if people start reporting massive differences in image quality, which doesn't sound likely at all) that would make me switch back to the Rift is performance. If async timewarp is as effective as the Tom's Hardware article indicates it may be on their benchmarks, and Valve's isn't really comparable, I could see it being a huge difference on vorpX games and the higher end VR games like Elite.
This is the first thing that has managed to actually make me regret my preorder: http://imgur.com/p4le5Vx
No idea how they ended up with a narrower FOV than their dev kit.
This has already been discussed and pretty much everyone agrees that photo is highly misleading for a variety of reasons; I think you can rest assured that the Rift's FOV will be nearly identical to the competition at the absolute worst.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
So who wants to talk about Asynchronous Timewarp? I'm curious for next week when we start getting some comparisons of games like Elite running in SteamVR (which doesn't have it) vs on Oculus's SDK (which does). That Tom's Hardware review of the Rift had some really interesting results; the article itself is careful to explain that they can't be 100% certain of their benchmarks, but it sounds like asynchronous timewarp may help a lot in some situations, based on their observations.
I know Valve has their own solution in SteamVR, but word on the Reddit streets these past few weeks is that it's inferior to asynchronous timewarp for dropped frames. It was all fairly theoretical though; I think the one thing right now (aside from if people start reporting massive differences in image quality, which doesn't sound likely at all) that would make me switch back to the Rift is performance. If async timewarp is as effective as the Tom's Hardware article indicates it may be on their benchmarks, and Valve's isn't really comparable, I could see it being a huge difference on vorpX games and the higher end VR games like Elite.
I'm not certain on this, but Valve says they fall back to ATW if it's supported. Since it wraps Oculus SDK maybe it'll work the same for the Rift? I know in the case of Virtual Desktop the creator said that if it's launched through Steam it'll still just use the Oculus SDK on the Rift, really hoping Elite is the same way. ATW is a pretty big deal even if it's not a perfect solution.
SteamVR uses interleaved reprojection (ATW can also be called asynchronous reprojection. Timewarp or reprojection essentially refer to the same thing). It's technically inferior to ATW, even Valve admits this, or rather they say ATW is the "better" solution. But there are reasons they don't use it, namely it requires support all the way through: GPU, OS, SDK, game. Only the current high end GPUs (afaik as long as you meet the requirements you should be fine) have good enough preemption, for example. The interleaved reprojection solution basically works on any video card, though obviously you still have to hit a minimum frame rate, there's an argument to be made that it will allow older hardware to run VR. It's a mixed bag though since you're bound to have worse reprojection artifacts if you rely on this method.
There's nothing really theoretical about it, these are both fairly well known techniques at this point even if they're still working on certain kinks. ATW works on a lower level, essentially it's always watching for dropped frames so that it can inject its own intermediate frames. According to the frame charts I've seen even frame rates of near 70 are able to be "fixed" with ATW and brought up to 90hz without any perceived judder. Obviously the less it has to make up for the less chance of artifacts or judder there is. It's also somewhat more taxing.
SteamVR's solution works a bit differently, instead of catching dropped frames it just monitors for consistent sub 90 fps. If it sees that it will drop the game down to 45fps and then use interleaved reprojection to double the frames up to 90hz. It keeps an eye on performance and if it thinks it can change back to native 90fps it will. Since this doesn't catch dropped frames themselves you may experience small amounts of judder until it knows to drop down. You will also likely notice a change from the game running at 90fps to 45fps, how jarring that is remains to be seen.
PSVR kind of works like SteamVR. It can take a game running at 60 and insert frames to get to the target 120. However, afaik it's not dynamic like SteamVR. A game either runs in this mode or doesn't.
None of these solutions beat running at the native 90 (or 120 in the case of PSVR). You WILL experience artifacts and the more positional (vs rotational) tracking involved the more likely you are to see them. All of them work hard to reduce judder at the risk of other artifacts, which might be distracting but do not cause nearly the discomfort.
I don't believe there's a technical reason either the Rift or the Vive couldn't use both methods to a degree. Both already use timewarp just naturally in order to account for the latency between when a frame is generated and when it's displayed.
tl;dr: Both techniques are meant to help with the same issues, ATW is technically better but SteamVR's solution is more compatible. Neither technique is perfect.
So who wants to talk about Asynchronous Timewarp? I'm curious for next week when we start getting some comparisons of games like Elite running in SteamVR (which doesn't have it) vs on Oculus's SDK (which does). That Tom's Hardware review of the Rift had some really interesting results; the article itself is careful to explain that they can't be 100% certain of their benchmarks, but it sounds like asynchronous timewarp may help a lot in some situations, based on their observations.
I know Valve has their own solution in SteamVR, but word on the Reddit streets these past few weeks is that it's inferior to asynchronous timewarp for dropped frames. It was all fairly theoretical though; I think the one thing right now (aside from if people start reporting massive differences in image quality, which doesn't sound likely at all) that would make me switch back to the Rift is performance. If async timewarp is as effective as the Tom's Hardware article indicates it may be on their benchmarks, and Valve's isn't really comparable, I could see it being a huge difference on vorpX games and the higher end VR games like Elite.
I'm not certain on this, but Valve says they fall back to ATW if it's supported. Since it wraps Oculus SDK maybe it'll work the same for the Rift? I know in the case of Virtual Desktop the creator said that if it's launched through Steam it'll still just use the Oculus SDK on the Rift, really hoping Elite is the same way. ATW is a pretty big deal even if it's not a perfect solution.
SteamVR uses interleaved reprojection (ATW can also be called asynchronous reprojection. Timewarp or reprojection essentially refer to the same thing). It's technically inferior to ATW, even Valve admits this, or rather they say ATW is the "better" solution. But there are reasons they don't use it, namely it requires support all the way through: GPU, OS, SDK, game. Only the current high end GPUs (afaik as long as you meet the requirements you should be fine) have good enough preemption, for example. The interleaved reprojection solution basically works on any video card, though obviously you still have to hit a minimum frame rate, there's an argument to be made that it will allow older hardware to run VR. It's a mixed bag though since you're bound to have worse reprojection artifacts if you rely on this method.
There's nothing really theoretical about it, these are both fairly well known techniques at this point even if they're still working on certain kinks. ATW works on a lower level, essentially it's always watching for dropped frames so that it can inject its own intermediate frames. According to the frame charts I've seen even frame rates of near 70 are able to be "fixed" with ATW and brought up to 90hz without any perceived judder. Obviously the less it has to make up for the less chance of artifacts or judder there is. It's also somewhat more taxing.
SteamVR's solution works a bit differently, instead of catching dropped frames it just monitors for consistent sub 90 fps. If it sees that it will drop the game down to 45fps and then use interleaved reprojection to double the frames up to 90hz. It keeps an eye on performance and if it thinks it can change back to native 90fps it will. Since this doesn't catch dropped frames themselves you may experience small amounts of judder until it knows to drop down. You will also likely notice a change from the game running at 90fps to 45fps, how jarring that is remains to be seen.
PSVR kind of works like SteamVR. It can take a game running at 60 and insert frames to get to the target 120. However, afaik it's not dynamic like SteamVR. A game either runs in this mode or doesn't.
None of these solutions beat running at the native 90 (or 120 in the case of PSVR). You WILL experience artifacts and the more positional (vs rotational) tracking involved the more likely you are to see them. All of them work hard to reduce judder at the risk of other artifacts, which might be distracting but do not cause nearly the discomfort.
I don't believe there's a technical reason either the Rift or the Vive couldn't use both methods to a degree. Both already use timewarp just naturally in order to account for the latency between when a frame is generated and when it's displayed.
tl;dr: Both techniques are meant to help with the same issues, ATW is technically better but SteamVR's solution is more compatible. Neither technique is perfect.
Cool, that meshes pretty well with what I've heard as well. So yeah, I'm still a bit concerned that there will be a jarring difference between my PC running Elite or Skyrim using a Vive compared to a Rift; the games I'm used to playing at 1080p, and with a graphics ceiling in VR that is beyond what a 980Ti can pull off. It sounds like ATW will make a big difference in games that are more likely to dip below 90 FPS, to the point that the Tom's Hardware benchmark said they had no problems whatsoever even though their benchmarking charts showed pretty drastic fluctuations throughout. As we're basically talking the difference between "Oh god I want to throw up" and "Oh man this is awesome", it's something I'll be paying close attention to when the retail Vive hits and more comparisons can be done.
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Honestly? I agree with this. Personally, I think we're a little ways out from the motion controller "killer apps". Like, there's a lot of neat experiences coming out with the Vive but (and this is my opinion) nothing that really stands out as a must have. Super neat demo material, let's face it, motion controlled games ARE awesome, but a month (or even a week or two) from launch? I probably wouldn't be playing those experiences still. I have a feeling the initial Vive hype will be super high but will die out fairly quickly until the second wave of motion controller games come out. I deeply hope that there are announcements about the Touch before this second wave, I'll even concede that if Oculus fails that then they'll be making a major misstep, enough so that I'd probably regret my purchase a bit. But since Touch controllers are already in the hands of devs I imagine those future major motion controlled games will target both platforms. However, since the Vive is coming out now with motion controllers we already have devs experimenting with what works and really making games with them in mind. I think it's great they're pushing that ahead.
I mean, I'm excited for VR games coming out now, sure, but what I'm REALLY excited for are the games that we haven't even heard of yet. Thanks to the Vive, I think motion controlled games will have a much bigger part of that in the nearer future.
Obviously, if Half-Life 3 comes out for VR, I won't ignore it, but I have no wish to replace my regular gaming time with VR gaming time, because the things I'm looking for are somewhat different.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
FOV - Field of View
There is. That is the measurement of the FOV of a single lens (and I'd still wait until we have a backup source, people tend to take the first thing anyone says as gospel, soo). Your perceived FOV across both lenses is going to be larger.
I mean, I think everyone already knew that the Vive FOV was larger? In practice, there's pros and cons here so bigger FOV doesn't immediately mean better all around, but yeah, prepare to have people freak out over it even though most people have said it definitely feels larger than the DK2.
I guess it depends on how that FOV feels in practise. The image makes the Vive FOV look ludicrously larger, and makes the DK2 look huge. Given that low FOV was one of the big complaints about the change from DK1 to DK2, that doesn't bode well for overall FOV on either Rift CV OR Vive.
Somehow I don't think the DK2 has a larger FOV than the CV1 (and in fact that is confirmed by specs and actual reviews), yet those images clearly suggest it is.
Some Tom foolery going on with camera angles there...
Well this highly depends on the game. I watched most of their stream yesterday and some games were awesome and some games were not. They came away generally going "yeah that was neat. Not enough to spend that much, but neat." Also they streamed for like 10 hours so depending on when you tuned in they may not have been at peak energy levels.
Also I have to agree, nothing I saw made me actually want to buy a VR headset. Everything so far looks like a neat "Well that was cool" hour long experience or something I'd get tired of wearing a headset for. Stuff like Luckey's Tale looks pretty but is only VR to be VR it seems. I want games that actually utilize the VR in ways that stuff can't currently. But that'll probably be a while.
It didn't take long to update my VR demo either.
Everything is going too smoothly, so I expect something will break horribly when I merge the new Oculus utilities into the project.
If there was this big a difference in the FOV between the Rift and the Vive, we would have heard about it from GDC. The GDC comparisons I saw seemed to consistently say that the left/right FOV was a teeny bit wider on the Rift, but that the Vive definitely had a taller up/down FOV and a more pleasing oval overall FOV shape.
The NDA breaking dev gave the same story:
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Yeah, like.. assuming that comparison image is accurate, it definitely doesn't seem to tell the whole story when taken against everything else that's been said in comparisons between the Rift and the Vive.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
It's like people can't accept that just maybe the Rift and the Vive are extremely similar, each with their own pros and cons depending on personal preference. No, no, there must be some deep conspiracy going on with one or the other. This one is made out of paper mache, see?! See?! Oh, it's not? Well.... it makes your ears bleed! CONFIRMED! Oh, it doesn't? Well this one headset can't play games where you pilot a mech! You heard it here! Panic! Conspiracy!
Ben Kuchera had a great analogy for it in Polygon's writeup on the Rift, yesterday:
I'm not totally "money is no object", but it's not the biggest concern. If the next generation video cards provide 20%+ better performance for the same price and more shinies then I can wait. On the other hand if it's more like 10% and the price difference is only a few hundred dollars then I might as well jump now.
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
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My Rift hasn't shipped yet, but I did get the "Your Rift is shipping soon" notice last week, so it should be Soon (tm).
Basically, numbers are great and all but don't read into em that much. In practice the difference isn't nearly as bad as you'd think.
The new architecture uses a new manufacturing process (going from 22nm -> 16nm IIRC) to get higher speeds with less power use. The most extravagant claims are a 100% improvement, but I wouldn't put much stock in them. Probably going to be well over 20% though.
On the AMD side, the cards released this summer aren't going to offer appreciable performance gains over 390 and Fury X levels, but they'll be using half the power that current cards use.
Their flagship cards unfortunately don't release until January 2017.
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
It probably works about as well as multi-monitor support is for SLI (or Crossfire)--it sounds perfect in theory, the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
VR is the same thing, with about 5% the amount of experience, testing, and development time.
Honestly, from my own experience at the community event and Oculus not including that second facial interface, to essentially a delayed launch that puts it at me likely getting it at the same time as my Vive, I'm fairly close to just saying fuck it.
Been debating this with my coworker every day. He has an April Rift date and doesn't really want to give it up, but his glasses situation is even worse than mine (worse eyesight, bigger head, so he doesn't even meet the maximum glasses from the Oculus support page) so even if he got the Rift he won't be able to use it properly.
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I know Valve has their own solution in SteamVR, but word on the Reddit streets these past few weeks is that it's inferior to asynchronous timewarp for dropped frames. It was all fairly theoretical though; I think the one thing right now (aside from if people start reporting massive differences in image quality, which doesn't sound likely at all) that would make me switch back to the Rift is performance. If async timewarp is as effective as the Tom's Hardware article indicates it may be on their benchmarks, and Valve's isn't really comparable, I could see it being a huge difference on vorpX games and the higher end VR games like Elite.
http://imgur.com/p4le5Vx
No idea how they ended up with a narrower FOV than their dev kit.
This has already been discussed and pretty much everyone agrees that photo is highly misleading for a variety of reasons; I think you can rest assured that the Rift's FOV will be nearly identical to the competition at the absolute worst.
Actually more like 0% at the moment because most apps don't support it.
I'm not certain on this, but Valve says they fall back to ATW if it's supported. Since it wraps Oculus SDK maybe it'll work the same for the Rift? I know in the case of Virtual Desktop the creator said that if it's launched through Steam it'll still just use the Oculus SDK on the Rift, really hoping Elite is the same way. ATW is a pretty big deal even if it's not a perfect solution.
SteamVR uses interleaved reprojection (ATW can also be called asynchronous reprojection. Timewarp or reprojection essentially refer to the same thing). It's technically inferior to ATW, even Valve admits this, or rather they say ATW is the "better" solution. But there are reasons they don't use it, namely it requires support all the way through: GPU, OS, SDK, game. Only the current high end GPUs (afaik as long as you meet the requirements you should be fine) have good enough preemption, for example. The interleaved reprojection solution basically works on any video card, though obviously you still have to hit a minimum frame rate, there's an argument to be made that it will allow older hardware to run VR. It's a mixed bag though since you're bound to have worse reprojection artifacts if you rely on this method.
There's nothing really theoretical about it, these are both fairly well known techniques at this point even if they're still working on certain kinks. ATW works on a lower level, essentially it's always watching for dropped frames so that it can inject its own intermediate frames. According to the frame charts I've seen even frame rates of near 70 are able to be "fixed" with ATW and brought up to 90hz without any perceived judder. Obviously the less it has to make up for the less chance of artifacts or judder there is. It's also somewhat more taxing.
SteamVR's solution works a bit differently, instead of catching dropped frames it just monitors for consistent sub 90 fps. If it sees that it will drop the game down to 45fps and then use interleaved reprojection to double the frames up to 90hz. It keeps an eye on performance and if it thinks it can change back to native 90fps it will. Since this doesn't catch dropped frames themselves you may experience small amounts of judder until it knows to drop down. You will also likely notice a change from the game running at 90fps to 45fps, how jarring that is remains to be seen.
PSVR kind of works like SteamVR. It can take a game running at 60 and insert frames to get to the target 120. However, afaik it's not dynamic like SteamVR. A game either runs in this mode or doesn't.
None of these solutions beat running at the native 90 (or 120 in the case of PSVR). You WILL experience artifacts and the more positional (vs rotational) tracking involved the more likely you are to see them. All of them work hard to reduce judder at the risk of other artifacts, which might be distracting but do not cause nearly the discomfort.
I don't believe there's a technical reason either the Rift or the Vive couldn't use both methods to a degree. Both already use timewarp just naturally in order to account for the latency between when a frame is generated and when it's displayed.
tl;dr: Both techniques are meant to help with the same issues, ATW is technically better but SteamVR's solution is more compatible. Neither technique is perfect.
Cool, that meshes pretty well with what I've heard as well. So yeah, I'm still a bit concerned that there will be a jarring difference between my PC running Elite or Skyrim using a Vive compared to a Rift; the games I'm used to playing at 1080p, and with a graphics ceiling in VR that is beyond what a 980Ti can pull off. It sounds like ATW will make a big difference in games that are more likely to dip below 90 FPS, to the point that the Tom's Hardware benchmark said they had no problems whatsoever even though their benchmarking charts showed pretty drastic fluctuations throughout. As we're basically talking the difference between "Oh god I want to throw up" and "Oh man this is awesome", it's something I'll be paying close attention to when the retail Vive hits and more comparisons can be done.
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