First let me start by saying that while I disagree with many points below please don't think this is anything other than a very fun and geeky debate. I've worked in IT for a long time and have been a gamer for over 20 years so I have a fair bit of experience with all this. That said these are my opinions and while I feel I've arrived at them from a lot of experience I don't mean to sound argumentative or attacking in any way. Honestly I'm *very* much enjoying this thread and debate and love that several have shared so much detail and thoughts. Please, please keep it up!! Okay, now some more thoughts...
It's cool, I'm not going to take offence just because you disagree. I probably wouldn't visit this forum anywhere near as often as I do if people didn't reason their own opinion. I too have 20 years of gaming ref and now work with a visual team for flight sims. We are probably quite like minded.
While I understand what you're saying about the number of pixels that have to be pushed I think your math is a bit off here. Right now 980's can be had new for about $350 at various places. And remember the minimum published spec for the Rift, on the GPU side, is actually a 960. I do think that's a bit low but I know several that are using 970's with the Rift with totally acceptable results. Those are now in the $225 range. While I'm not a fan of AMD the new RX 480 is more than powerful enough and clocks in at right around $200. So the cost barrier for entry on the PC side is getting cheaper every day. You could easily build a VR capable PC for $1000 right now and that number will continue to fall.
I think the 980 was about £500 on its release. I had to pick a point in time, I chose the Gfx cards release date instead of now. I use a 970 and it is good with ED on Med graphics but as I was talking about "higher graphics settings" so I used the 980 as my example. I agree the price will fall, but the tech will get better, which puts it back up again. Look at mobile phones, top of the range has always been in the £500-£600 mark upon release, each an every year. Same goes for Gfx cards. I believe this is intentional becuase it is good for the business. I imagine VR HMDs will be the same.
So if we're talking about 2 full resolution 4k displays you're absolutely right that it's a rather huge jump in the number of pixels from what we have today. While 120hz is ideal it's far from necessary, 90hz is more than enough for things to look butter smooth. In fact I've played around with the asynchronous spacewarp features Oculus added a bit back and locked my Rift at 45 instead of 90. While it's certainly less smooth than 90 it's a very minor difference to my eyes and so far a few friends/neighbors haven't been able to see the difference.
I have a DK2, which runs at 75 hz. It's ok, I have tried the Rift @ 90 hz and its loads better. I believe 120 hz is the point when it becomes smooth even when turning your head quickly. Beyond that I don't think any improvement will be percieveable so I reckon the industry will strive for 120 hz and then hold it there for some time, just like 60hz is the industry standard for desktop monitors.
Again I couldn't disagree more. I have a slightly old LG G3 Android phone that has a 5.5" 1440p OLED display. I grabbed one of the plastic GearVR like mounts for it just to play around with. I couldn't believe how much clearer it is than the Rift, it's rather startling. I have near perfect vision, 8/20 last time I was tested and I'm *very* sensitive to screen door - with that 1440p OLED display in my knockoff headset (with Fresnel lenses) I can only barely, slightly see any SCE. Even if I look *really* hard I can only see it on very bright images, pretty much only when there's a large white item or background. Other than that it's shocking how much better it is. I actually think we'll see a generation of HMDs that use 1440p or even 1600p displays as it's far less pixels for the GPU to push and virtually eliminates SDE. My personal order of annoyance is FOV, God Rays and SDE in that order. With 1440p SDE wouldn't even be on my list. Question - have you tried a 1440p HMD of any type yet? Which do you have, the Rift or Vive?
Yeah but at 220 degrees? I mean the Rift offers about 110 degrees, so in width you need quadruple the number of pixels to achieve double the resolution of the Rift. FOV in height needs increasing too, maybe not by 2 times but at least by 1.5 times which would require triple the number to better the vertical resolution from the Rift. I have not tried the 1440p res in a GearVR like you have, my point of reference was going from how big a pixel appears in my headset and that after halving it's size I think it would still be noticeable. Especially when looking at a spaceship at some particular distance, it just becomes a blob of about 4 (2x2) pixels. A blob of 16 (4x4) pixels is still going to look like a blob. It wont be until its about 64 (8x8) pixels that you will start to be able to recognise the ship. Just.
Again I think you're 100% completely wrong here, as I said in my experience a 1440p image has virtually no SDE and a 4K one would have zero. While 8K would be a huge jump in terms of pixel density it's not only completely unnecessary it's a long way away. As far as I know there is no commercial 8k display and certainly not one in the 5-6" range. Dell had a large one at CES, 27" I think (or about that) and it's not a product yet, maybe later this year. I will agree that video cards that can push dual 8k screens are 5+ years out I don't see that as an issue at all as it's just not needed.
Yes, my mistake, the G3 was only 1440p not 4k. The G4 is full 4k which was released April 2015 so not quite 2 years ago. I still reckon that 2x 4k screens stretched to 220 degrees is only going to give you the same resolution you get with the current Rift. I'm talking about improving upon that..
As for aliasing issues and small text being legible again you need to see a 1440p and/or 4k display via VR - it is a non-issue, even with 1440p today. If my current CV1 Rift was 1440p I wouldn't even bring up SDE and small text other than to say "small text is a bit fuzzier than other things but really not bad". While writing this I put on a random movie, The Martian, on my 1440p phone via the headset and when the credits roll they look fantastic and are totally readable.
I think the SDE is greatly reduced by the use of the Fresnel lenses as they gently blend the colours together to reduce the SDE. They also reduced the gap in between each pixel. Perhaps it'll be solved by 4K resolution, but I still say that this will have to be closer to 8K if you want that 4k resolution to cover 220 degrees. Perhaps 6K would do it...maybe that would work.
If you're saying you don't see video cards being able to push dual 4k displays in the next 10 years again I think you're *way* off the mark. Right now, today, I can get a Titan X (Pascal) that will run almost all games at 60fps in 4k at very high settings. Remember with 4k you generally don't need anti-aliasing given the huge pixel density. Now I absolutely know that a Titan X is $1200 and that's rather insane for virtually all budgets but the point is we have cards on the market right now that can do that. In SLI, if the game is fully optimized for it (and yes, virtually none are) you could get very close to dual 4k displays at 60fps - again today. And yes, $2400 in video cards is insane and I'm not trying to say it's anything other than that. It's clear that future VR tech will move to support SLI, Oculus has talked about using a separate GPU per/eye and as we move to 4k that will almost have to happen.
With my belief that they will aim for 120hz, we are already asking for a card 2 times more powerful than a £1000 card (Sorry, I'm from UK). 2 times is a big leap for a Gfx card. Using a Toms chart, on a game at 3840x2160 the 770GTX managed about 45 fps and the TITAN X managed about 90fps. They have big technical hurdles to overcome to make SLi work for VR. It probably will become a standard to use a card for each eye but I can't see that being common given the cost.
When the next generation of GPUs come out in about 2 years we'll absolutely have SLI solutions that will be capable of dual 4k at 60fps and almost certainly at 90. That will still likely be very expensive, probably $1500+ At the same time the next gen 1180 (making up that name) will likely drive dual 4k at some lower detail setting and using something like Oculus ASW tech 45fps will be attainable making dual 4k VR possible. While my numbers may absolutely be too soon I think saying it's more than 10 years out is an extreme exaggeration.
If you look at what GPU Nvidia released in 2007 it was the GeForce 7025. Using UserBenchmark.com to compare those cards the GTX 1080 is 239,476% faster than the 7025. Almost 240,000% faster. Using a curve that's even close to that for the next 10 years and the power we'll have is absolutely insane - certainly enough to power 2x 4k screens.
Nah, now you are *way* off the mark, that's a terrible example. The 7025 was an nForce integrated graphics chip. You can't use that to compare the improvements of dedicated Gfx cards. May of 2007 saw the release of the Geforce 8800 Ultra with a processing power of 384 Gflops single precision. The GTX1080 manages 8228 Gflops in single precision so that's actually only an increase of ~2,150% when comparing top of the range mid 2007 to top of the range at mid 2016, definitely not 240,000%! What you have done there is demonstrate very nicely just how terrible integrated graphics was in 2007. So glad I had a 8800GTS to see me through it!
Ding ding ding, here we go, I absolutely agree. I'm not sure we'll see wireless on all next gen headsets but I do think it'll be an option - especially as there are a few 3rd party wireless devices coming this year for the Vive. There are some latency issues that have to be addressed and I want to see what the reviews there are like but obviously VR will have to go full wireless while getting lighter than it is today. Both will happen by gen 4 if not by gen 3.
It's basically the main problem with room scale VR. It works nice in a demo room with an assistant but no-one at home has their own demo guy hanging around to hold the cable everytime your about to trip on it!
This misconception keeps bugging me. Save for the games that require motion controllers the Rift can play every VR game on Steam just fine. Now with Touch on the market all the major titles that required the Vive controllers are adding in Touch support as they want to double their potential customer base. When people ask me "Rift or Vive" my answer is always Rift and a big reason is the software selection. The Rift can play any Steam game (as noted about motion controllers above) AND the Oculus exclusive titles in the Oculus store. The Vive can only play content from Steam. There are many other things to discuss between the two, I'm just addressing software here.
Ah, I wasn't making a Vive to Rift comparison here, I was making a Steam game store to Oculus game store comparison. There is not one Rift exculsive that is good enough to warrent it swaying a decision between the two IMO. I use my DK2 on Steam and that works out great. The PSVR store has more than the Oculus store, and even that is lacking IMO. Still... its early days for VR.
Again I think this is an exaggeration. VR was all over CES this year and from what I've read the PSVR is actually selling rather well globally. The numbers I can find show 1.4 million PSVR sales to date with Rift and Vive combined are around the 500k mark (that's from Tim Sweeney at Epic Games). It doesn't surprise me that PSVR would be outselling Rift/Vive by a good bit given the cost of entry is FAR lower than on PC. From what I've read part of the reason they aren't doing a huge marking blitz for PSVR is they are still ramping up production. I don't see this growth as a bad thing as there are still many things being worked out with VR and right now there aren't really any big must have VR titles yet.
I'm comparing the amount of marketing that was present 6-9 months ago to now.
But PSVR does get VR exclusivity on the new resident evil for a whole year so yeah.. thanks for that Sony.
While I sorta agree with your comparison to home cinema I think there will be a far higher adoption rate when compared to people with true dedicated home cinema rooms. In my last home I finished my basement into a stadium seating home theatre, with curtains, lights, risers, 7.1, etc. Not only did I dedicate a whole room to that I spent something north of $10k for everything (without furniture). If I compare that to a dedicated VR gaming room as you suggest I would build that today for say $2500, maybe more if I'm using a surround audio system and not headphones of some kind. Regardless it's far cheaper and the room need not be dedicated to just VR. I know several, Metsys from this thread being one, who routinely move his Vive gear into another room/living room for either room scale games or more for social gaming with friends and family coming over to play. Move your PC and cameras/lighthouses, slide the coffee table over and bingo, dedicated VR room. Or spend a few hundred and run the appropriate extensions for USB/HDMI to another room and all you need do us move the headset and you're done, everything else could just live there making the room easily multi-purpose.
Sure, $2500 today... but I'm talking in 5-10 years time. When £1000 graphics cards do work in SLi and uni-d treadmills are becoming practical and we have sensors on our feet, hands, elbows, knees, waist and chest so that we can be completely present in the game. Then you are looking at north of £10k.
Now debate that.. You geek.
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