[mgo]

I just get the feeling VR technology simply will not work because the resolution isn't high enough, and even the most top-end monster PCs cannot handle standard resolution VR, let alone 4K or even 8K in the future.

Graphics cards really need a huge performance jump to make VR work, and given both Nvidia and AMD seem to be happy releasing a new set each year with only modest 20-30% performance gains then what does this mean for VR?

[Karunamon]

Eh. VR "worked" quite well enough for presence on the now-ancient Rift devkit 2. And my machine is hardly top of the line. A many gens old Intel proc with modest RAM and a GTX970.

Worst case? It means that details are scaled back in the name of framerate. Presence still works in a world that doesn't seem perfectly lifelike, so as long as the player is in another world, that's the single most important thing.

Less AA, less texture resolution. We can dial that back up as the tech gets better.

VR is the new Crysis when it comes to stress testing your hardware :)

[corysama]

Exactly. Half Life 2 worked when hardware was 10x slower than today. Lots of 3D games worked even before that. They just didn't look like Star Wars Battlefront.

[ethbro]

Unreal Engine 1 is still my benchmark for doing impressive things on pretty much any level of hardware at the time.

[Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd]

> Worst case? It means that details are scaled back in the name of framerate.

No, the worst case is that using them makes people sick.

[Karunamon]

Which comes down to framerate, not detail. Put somebody in a grayscale world with simple geometric primitives (something even a mobile processor could render back in the 90s) with sub-60 framerates and people will get sick.

Most gamers that I see nowadays are all about the detail. Crank the AA up to max, the texture resolution to max, draw distance, and so on. If you lose a frame or two, it's not a big deal as long as the average is 60+.

VR completely reverses that - losing frames destroys immersion and causes motion sickness. Since even a fax-machine detail world still produces presence, we can easily sacrifice some detail for better framerates.

[djloche]

Even with DK1, a single 1 minute demo was enough to hook me. It works.

[strictnein]

3D graphics didn't really "work" originally either. 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 used to seem like insane resolutions. Gotta start somewhere.

[wlesieutre]

Heck, you can get a $1500 iMac with 5120x2880. That still seems insane to me. Granted the Iris Pro would have a tough time rendering 60 fps 3D for that, but even for 2D graphics it's crazy.

[gervase]

There seems to be some speculation[1] that the performance increase from Maxwell to Pascal will be larger than usual.

Given that 2016 is supposed to be the "year of VR", it makes (marketing) sense that the GPUs released this year will be designed and/or optimized for that purpose. We'll have to wait and see how that plays out.

[1] - http://www.pcgamer.com/nvidias-pascal-is-10x-as-powerful-as-...

[agildehaus]

Foveated rendering would make 4K and 8K easier to reach.

Also, with VR, you can just upscale. You don't need to render a 4K/8K image to eliminate the screen-door effect.

[endergen]

Have you tried either the Vive or CV1 Oculus? Both are quite immersive, sure pixels are larger like some 2000 era graphics. But back then I was immersed just like now. Devs tend to be overly picky about things they didn't used to be just because say on mobile or monitors you have higher. The immersion trade off of full wrap around head tracking compared to high res in a rectangle is worth it.

[baby]

I tried it and it works. Any people who tried it will tell you the same...

[innerspirit]

You really better have a high end PC if you're gonna spend $500 on a gadget for it, though.