What kind of resolution and framerate are sufficient for a good VR gaming experience?
What are the likely hardware requirements for that? How will they compare to ordinary 1080p gaming?
Will we mostly see graphically simple indie games in the first 2-4 years?
Nvidia’s Gameworks VR is supposed to reduce the number of required pixel rendering by a factor of 1.3 to 2*. How much credence should we give to that?
Are there any other tricks expected to improve the performance of VR?
Anything less than 60 fps is likely to cause motion sickness. I know some games in development are even shooting for 90 fps. Motion sickness is such a serious challenge in VR that it’s definitely worth it to sacrifice render quality for higher frame rate.
I wasn’t previously aware of Gameworks VR, but their claims make sense. If you know you’re rendering a non-rectangular image and that you can get away with lower-quality shaders on the edges, there are lots of optimizations you can perform.
Most of the “tricks” I’ve seen in VR aren’t about boosting framerate (rendering is rendering) but are about mitigating sickness. Put the player in a cockpit, eliminate roll, keep pitch and yaw to a minimum (or eliminate them too), avoid textures that flicker during movement … that sort of thing.
I didn’t think the floor was 60fps. I thought 90 fps was what was required as opposed to merely preferable.
Is it about giving the player something that doesn’t move in their vision?
You mention eliminating roll and perhaps eliminating pitch and yaw too. Are there games that plan to do all 3? That seems rather restrictive.
What percentage of people seem completely insensitive to VR motion sickness? I hear VR motion sickness is less common among men and I presume even less so among people who grew up playing FPSs (which is mainly men below 40-50).
I realize that any opinion you may have about this is a combination of objective knowledge and subjective taste: What do you think developers could do to maximize frame rate while still making games visually appealing?
60 fps is fine a lot of the time, although 90 is certainly better. The improvement from 30 to 60 is huge, while the improvement from 60 to 90 is more incremental.
It’s about giving your brain a way to rationalize the mismatch between inner ear and eye. It’s more than just something that doesn’t move. You need a large stationary framework around you that anchors you in space.
You can have a third-person game where your viewpoint moves slowly along a smooth spline while the character does all the quick moves. Or you can have a Time Crisis-like first person game. Or you can design your levels so you mostly move straight ahead and strafe and rarely turn. I’ve even seen games that black the screen when you turn (it feels like blinking); so you can rotate without seeing rotation.
I don’t know what the numbers are, but I don’t think anyone is completely insensitive. I’m pretty resistant and yet playing *Descent *in an HMD back in the 90’s made me want to hurl.
Acclimatization can make you better at handling VR, but it can also make you worse. If you come to associate wearing a headmount with feeling queasy it will take less to set you off.
I haven’t done any serious graphics programming for years, so I’m not current on optimization methods. But all the usual stuff: keep poly counts low, avoid multipass shaders, minimize material swaps, minimize overdraw, limit dynamic lights, etc.