Be Excellent To Each Other

Yes, sorry. He's wrong twice.

I spoke to a friend of mine earlier who has had both of the OR devkits and he basically told me the following.

OR runs a resolution similar to three times that of 1080p.

That's quite a hefty resolution for both the 970 and 980. That apparently isn't the main cause of concern, though. The 'screens' are 90hz. He says that with anything less than 70 FPS it starts to become less than ideal. Or rather, it becomes less than smooth and starts to make you feel quite ill.

You're right that the 970 isn't that much slower than the 980 but the 980 isn't exactly ideal either. 3x1080p @ a minimum of 70 FPS is an awful lot to ask of either card, thus you're better off with something like the 980ti or next gen Pascal (which is rumoured to be more of a 'full fat' solution than mid range Maxwell)

So basically Nvidia now have to go back to making heftier silicon.

AMD have taken a gamble with GCN which until now has not paid off. It's hot, large in die size and needs lots of power. They also took a huge risk with Fury X, given that it only truly shines with 4k.

Whether it will pay off? No idea tbh. Right now it's looking that way but we only have one game and one synthetic benchmark to go on.

Rift DK1 was 640×800 per eye @ 60Hz
DK2 was 960×1080 per eye @ 60 Hz
CV1 is 1080×1200 per eye @ 90 Hz

Your friend is an idiot because none of this is close to three times 1080p, and you could at least read Wikipedia for the scant thirty seconds necessary to avoid parroting nonsense.

http://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/


On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.


It seems I got a little bit confused. Overall it pretty much equates to the same, though.

OK, that's a bit more sensible as source! But I do not understand this bit at all:

I think what he could mean by "eye target" is 90 FPS? He's comparing Rift to 1080p/60hz, so maybe that's why the requirements are that much higher because you need 33(or so)% more FPS to keep it smooth?

*eats popcorn, watches geek off*

No,

1920 x 1080 x 60 = 124M
2160 x 1200 x 90 = 233M

I have been trying to google eye-target scale, but all I get is articles quoting the statement.

Refresh rate and fps are very different things. Where's anyone getting 90fps from?

Eye-target distance doesn't seem to be a term that has any widely accepted meaning

That's what they say is needed to avoid getting sick.

Oh yeah, so it does. Huh.

Is it possible to render graphics out of focus in such a way that the eyes have to focus on a point slightly further away than screen, you know, to avoid eye fatigue? Maybe it's something like that.

Apparently it's perfectly fine for OR to hit 70 FPS. Any lower and yeah, puke 'o' fest.

Also for any one interested. Here is a post from a fellow forumite chum of mine on a different forum. I asked him if he knew of a list of supported games. This guy has had both of the OR dev kits.



TBH it hardly makes me want to rush out and buy one. Especially if it's not really compatible with many existing games and or makes you want to hurl.

It sounds like an Atari VCS with Space Invaders and "Bat 'n' ball". I know it goes further than that with movies and other 'cool things' (like roller coasters and so on) but right now as a strict gamer it's not exactly exciting me. It sounds very primitive.

Sort of - you cheat it by making the point you want the user to focus on the only point that's in focus - but I think that makes people more sick if they're not looking at it.

No, that's not what I mean. I mean rendering the entire image out of focus. Presumably they are using a constant focal point (everything being sharp) in any case, but by rendering everything slightly out of focus uniformly, the screens would appear to be further away than they actually are. Otherwise it would be like reading a book a few inches away from your eyes, which could cause strain.

That's what gave me massive headaches with 3D films until I learned not to try and focus on things that aren't what the film wants you to focus on

That's why 3D films are shit. I sometimes want to look at background stuff and it doesn't want to let you do that.

I try not to watch 3D normally, unless it is a sci-fi like Star Wars etc

Thinking further about this, it would probably have to be combined with physical lenses that puts the image back into focus (I'm not really sure, I don't know that much about optics).

But, if this is how it works, imagine looking at a painting on a wall, through a window in another wall in front of it in such a way that the edge of the window lines up with the edge of the painting from your point of view. The painting would take up a larger area than the window due to perspective. So maybe the larger resolution needed corresponds the larger area of the image actually being rendered.

It makes sense in my brain.

Pretty sure that you can't render something blurred and then put it back into focus with a lens. The screens just have a lens in front of them which requires your eyes to focus at a given distance to view them giving the appearance that it's further away than it really is.

It's not really 90 fps. What it is is latency between a head movement and the viewpoint reflecting that movement, and Oculus claim that 11ms and below is the maximum you want that latency to be. If its too high it breaks immersion and can lead to nausea.

11 ms is equivalent to a framerate *lower* bound (not mean) of 90 fps, but actually that's not sufficient; you can have 90 fps but with, say, 100 frames of latency and that'd still suck.

Related: Carmack has lead some research on reprojection (and the PlayStation VR will use this.) The PS4 outputs a 60 Hz signal, but the headset supports 120 Hz (as in that's the latency on its sensors and refresh rate on its screen.) The headset generates intermediate frames in between the PS4's actual rendered frames by applying geometry warps to the last frame it has that distort the image to match whatever the head just did. You head isn't moving far in 11 ms, so this is (apparently)_quite a successful approach without significant degradation in the image. AFAIK Oculus doesn't support this.

TBH the more I read and see the more I am thinking it would probably be much better if I waited and bought a PS4 and VR headset for that, rather than constantly gambling on compatibility on a PC. Right now I have one Fury X and Saturday I should get a second. That opens up a whole new can of worms with regards to OR and compatibility.

VR sounds more like a bit of a tech demo right now than something that is complete and ready.

Well I did it.





I had to make an adapter plate to shift the second 120mm mount up by about 12mm so that the rads didn't hit each other. It was close.. They almost hit.

Massive improvements in some games, doesn't work at all in others. BLOPS 3 the scaling is so good I can max it with MSAA @4k but Just Cause 3 apparently doesn't work with multiple GPUs.

Hmmmm, my new PC outputs iRacing on the highest settings at 455fps, so I capped it at 120fps so the video card doesn't catch fire.

Presumably also because your monitor/TV would just be dumping most of the 455 frames anyway.

Indeed.

Yikes, that's a creepy doll you have there

Where is the best place to get a internal HDD from, I want 1-2 TB as my PC is filling up.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... dm003.html

Word on the street is that Seagate are not very good any more. I've never had issues with them though.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B008 ... ers&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B006 ... ers&sr=1-9

I'm not sure which one is better though. I *think* the greens use less power? you would need to do some Googling

Amazon certainly are cheap, I just got a Samsung EVO 500GB SSD off them for fully £20 cheaper than anywhere else had one, and postage was free as well.

Whoever decided that SATA cables don't need any sort of clipping in mechanism properly deserves a punch in the face.

My Steam controller has arrived. First impressions out of the box are that it's a nicely put together piece of hardware! All satisfying clicks and whatnot. Will try it out later on a variety of games.

Does it charge with a standard Micro-USB plug?

It has a standard Micro-USB port yeah, but not to charge... it comes with two AA batteries. So no rechargeable battery unit.

Really? Goodness, that seems like a strange decision to make.

Cheaper to make.

Yeah, but even so.

Games I have tried so far:

Portal 2:
Didn't think much of the default controls, but downloaded the highest-rated community config and it was immediately much better. Fidelity on the right pad is incredible. So much so you have to be a lot more delicate with it than I'm used to. A whole swipe turns you 180, and the back buttons crouch and jump, so no real need to find the slightly out of place face buttons at any point.

Tomb Raider 2013:
A similar experience to Portal 2, seemed fiddly at first to move the camera around, but it will take some getting used to. You can now aim and shoot with one trigger as it has a digital button press at the end. Squeeze gently to aim, press in to fire (sextape).

So that's a first- and third-person game that already supported normal controllers. Just downloading Civ V and Bioshock to test out a mouse-driven game and an old FPS that doesn't have controller support.

Just outta interest, how are you downloading those community config things - like, what's the process?

Does it set up the controller for whatever-you-downloaded to each game or just the game you were playing?

It's per game. In BPM it should have 'Manage Game' on the left-hand side. Controller config is in there. Ignore the recommended one and go down to community and pick the most popular.

Ok so Bioshock plays very well using it and even Civ 5 is pretty playable too (although the fonts are tiny)!

I'm really impressed by this!

I could not get on with the Steam controller at all, had to plug a 360 jobbie into my Steam Link.

It actually makes a lot more sense but will take some serious unlearning on my part re: the muscle memory I have using the right stick. Having a trackpad simulate mouselook is a lot more accurate than looking around with a standard right stick, but it's much more sensitive and only requires very small inputs. When you've been throwing a right stick around for the last ten years at first you just spin around on the spot. I was getting the hang of it by the end of the first level of Bioshock. Swiping to turn 180 is genius.

Fancy selling it to me?

Plugging a jobbie into anything never goes terribly well.

Spacedockers of the world disagree.

I need it to turn the Steam Link on, as often using the 360 controller to switch it on doesn't bloody work.

Wired or wireless? My wired one works all the time.

Wireless. It's fine provided I never let the Steam Link turn off, if it just goes to sleep the 360 controller wakes it up, but if I ever absent mindedly turn it off it'll not switch back on from the 360 pad.

Wired ain't an option due to distances.

Having a £40 controller just for turning it on is fucking ludicrous though

Once I have turned on my TV PC I just use something similar to this to operate it "pre game".

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-4G-Mini-Wir ... SwkZhWSuqC

Mine has a trackball though and was slightly more expensive.