Michael Brookes talks to Eurogamer about ED VR hardware requirements.

wstephenson

wstephenson
This article about hardware requirements was just published, with MB telling us that the game actually supersamples to get the best image quality on Vive:

Michael Brookes said:
"The GTX 980 is still our recommended spec for running Elite Dangerous in Vive at a full 90fps with our VR optimised graphics settings. It's what we all agree will get you the most consistent and comfortable gameplay, even in cases where the GPU will be under greater load," Elite Dangerous Executive Producer Michael Brookes tells us, before going on to say that the game actually super-samples for the best possible presentation.
"The human brain has a low tolerance to hiccups in the VR space, and that's the spec we're confident putting our name on for a consistent gameplay experience when you're exploring our galaxy. Our spec also takes into account that we're not rendering at Vive's native resolution of 2160x1200 but at 3024x1680 (1.4x each dimension recommended by Valve) and then scaling down. We believe this is hugely important for anti-aliasing in VR to avoid noticing pixels so much, as other solutions can leave them appearing relatively large at the centre of your vision."
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Michael Brookes said:
"Again, it's about a better experience in an environment where you're especially sensitive to anything that breaks the reality of the world," says Brookes. "With that said, we've had a number of reports from our community saying they've achieved comfortable results with a lower spec. They've embraced VR since we supported the first Oculus Rift development kits in 2013, and they're really testing the limits of the experience. We don't want to recommend a lower spec ourselves, but some players may find they're still comfortable even with a lower spec GPU than the 980 we suggest."
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Michael Brookes said:
"Our VR CPU spec matches our recommended spec for running the game outside of VR (see Core System Requirements Here too, our community reports quality experiences with more modest CPUs, and our own minimum spec requires only a general quad-core CPU at 2GHz," says Frontier's Michael Brookes.

"That said, we want a near flawless VR experience and running the physics and simulation components at 90fps puts even greater load on the CPU, so the Core i7 3770 is what we're happy to put our name to for consistent, high-quality gameplay in VR."

"System specs are always a question for PC gaming, and it's made more complicated by VR," he confirms. "We've been working with VR since the hardware was available, and we've found what is and isn't comfortable varies from player to player. That makes picking a 'minimum' spec for virtual reality more challenging. We're recommending the spec we feel will offer an experience matching our standards. We're optimising and adding to Elite Dangerous all the time, so there's always a degree of 'wiggle room,' even on our rigs."
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Ian Phillips

Volunteer Moderator
Ian Phillips
Interesting read!

One thing I would like to get some clarification on.... being a CPU and GPU layman.

The quotes from MB in that article are stating different recommended specs for CPU and GPU than the Oculus recommended specs.

I am considering a step-by-step upgrade to eventually have a rig capable of running VR, but have no idea how an i7 3770 relates to the Oculus recommendation for instance.

Can anyone explain this for me to help me choose what to get? The GTX980 seems to be the obvious GPU choice as it is better than the 970 that oculus recommends, but comparing CPU's seems like some sort of astrology to me :)
 
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Distance

Distance
There's lots of misinformation regarding cpus and that's mainly down to oculus' tool.

I have a 3930k that fails in oculus' tool but passes in geforce experience and gets over the recommended score in the 3d mark firestrike demo. I also have a 4670k that is clearly worse than my 3930k that passes the oculus tool but doesn't come close to my 3930k firestrike score.

A lot of it is supposedly down to single core performance which is why a lot of the amd cpus fall short. At the end of the day if you're getting over 9000 in firestrike you should be hitting the minimum (Oculus') for vr.
 
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Nicky the Hutt

Nicky the Hutt
Indeed, Distance and DOCa Cola. Most of us anticipating Elite in VR who haven't upgraded our GPU for it yet have no idea how nice the game looks in "Low" graphic setting because we've been using "Ultra" all along.

10 years ago the majority of gamers used low and medium graphic settings (and still had a better experience than on consoles), but it didn't stop us. Now everything is more efficient. The VR requirements set a new bar but Oculus PR teams (at least them, not sure about HTC) take upon themselves to set hardware requirements that are minimum for players, and maximum for developers.

I believe that's because they're taking in account the worst case scenario in their game support scope: that the most popular and majority of games applying to be sold in their store exceed the maximum load at their lowest graphics settings. Oculus are not only selling heasets, they're selling the access to their store too, with a promise that all of the games in there will offer the expected VR experience. It isn't mentioned anywhere that they'd leave it to gamers to change anything more than a gamma correction slider, let alone upgrade their hardware above the fixed hardware requirements printed on the package and at shop.oculus.com. So I can only guess that by 2017 many games won't make it to the "Rift-enabled" stamp, until they make up some "Next-gen VR 2.0" performance standard with updated requirements and then allow such games to be sold in the Oculus Store.
 
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Distance

Distance
Also bear in mind the minimum requirements people are talking about for vr aren't purely "can it run". They're there so people have a good experience and don't puke. You're having to hit a constant 90fps rather than running an AAA game on low so it hits 30fps.
 

Bran Tse Mallory

Bran Tse Mallory
It looks like FD are backing the Vive more and more these days which I'm glad about as I think it's better than the Rift after trying both. Getting up and walking around in VR trumps sitting still everytime!
 

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
Bran Tse Mallory said:
It looks like FD are backing the Vive more and more these days which I'm glad about as I think it's better than the Rift after trying both. Getting up and walking around in VR trumps sitting still everytime!
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Personally with VR so niche as it is I would rather not have an either or scenario. Also I personally have no interest in wondering around . I respect your view to differ of course but given frontier have been supporting the rift for 18 months it would be nice to have both and not just the new kid on the block which may or may not be crazy expensive
 

Nicky the Hutt

Nicky the Hutt
Mad Mike said:
Personally with VR so niche as it is I would rather not have an either or scenario. Also I personally have no interest in wondering around . I respect your view to differ of course but given frontier have been supporting the rift for 18 months it would be nice to have both and not just the new kid on the block which may or may not be crazy expensive
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Indeed, it's really not an area where you want one HMD for one set of games, and one HMD for the other. But to be fair to either Oculus and HTC, it's really the speculating press and social media that is entertaining the idea that it is an 'either or' scenario even with regards to game support.

FD could be omitting the mention of the Rift for the reason that their VR-grade recommended specs are incompatible with Oculus store's "GTX 970 and you can run everything in the store", add to that the fact that only Oculus Store games get an early release of the 1.0 Oculus SDK. Without the SDK there'd be nothing to say about the consumer Rift at this point.
 
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Mazhurg

Mazhurg
So, not AMD min specs? No mention of AMD at all?

Ps. R9-290 is adequate at low. 390 or Fury should be fine at high, so why no mentions?
 

Distance

Distance
Mazhurg said:
So, not AMD min specs? No mention of AMD at all?

Ps. R9-290 is adequate at low. 390 or Fury should be fine at high, so why no mentions?
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Run 3d Mark firestrike, the demo is free on steam. It has the specs for rift pc, if you match them you're good to go.
 
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Mazhurg

Mazhurg
Distance said:
Run 3d Mark firestrike, the demo is free on steam. It has the specs for rift pc, if you match them you're good to go.
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That was not the point of the question. I know that the GPUs I mentioned can and do work.

My question relates, and is about why FD has no mention of AMD GPUs in either their formal minimum specs or posts.
 

shadragon

shadragon
@Ian Phillips

If you have a decent spec machine, you should be able to use the VR even if it does not meet min spec. There will always be the folks who have bleeding edge machines, but most can run VR in a stable fashion with decent FPS on existing hardware. If you need to make incremental improvements to your rig (like if it's five years old) to get better performance then fine, but I wouldn't obsess too much over what you need until you get a VR unit in hand.

PC performance is tied to motherboard, RAM and HDD performance as well as CPU / GPU. A dual turbo V12 running in a Gee Whiz won't give ideal performance.

I have a GTX 970 and plan on getting a Vive. I can always tweak res and graphics quality downward a bit, for playability. If the 970 has issues I can't live with then I'll look at a Titan or higher, but I'm not spending cash unnecessarily until I need too. :D
 

Ian Phillips

Volunteer Moderator
Ian Phillips
My PC is 2 years old - I got it to play Premium Beta :)

I have
i5 4670
GFX 770

and am assuming that both are underspec for VR
 

Soda Popinski

Soda Popinski
Good to know. I can live without Super Sampling with the 970 until the 1000 series comes out. Hope the 970 can handle 90hz.

Beachlight7 said:
If you have a gtx 970 It's worth noting that it can be clocked to be near equal or sometimes better performance than a 980, as Eurogamer mentions.
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I've got a Gigabyte, so I'm using the OC Guru and have it to 110% speed. Haven't tried any higher. How does that compare to a 980?
 

SeeZaa

SeeZaa
xyphic said:
It saddens me that Frontier only ever talk about Vive these days. It's like they've gone through a messy breakup with Oculus and are pretending they don't exist.
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i wouldn't say 'only ever talking about' or 'pretending they don't exist' but i can see your point lol.. did you read this recently..?

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=221107

there is bound to be an inherent cost in supporting development of a VR, and making the decision to fully support the product that appears to be best for the game is a sound idea, especially if it means having to shift to a different manufacturer, after the time spent working with another. I'm sure there must be strong reasons why they have gone the way they have, so it is pretty cool that when all is said and done, they are still working with OR. another nice example of Frontier trying to do the right thing by the community.
 
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