[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.