Higher Resolution in the Pipeline

A lot of people prefer monitors over VR because of the relatively low resolution in current gen VR. We all would like higher resolution. It may be on its way:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6dcdd2/samsung_quietly_announces_what_appears_to_be_the/

Not sure when, but Samsung apparently just showed VR-optimized OLED panels that are 2010 x 2230 for a total HMD resolution of 4020 x 2230. The single panel resolution is more what matters.

Great news even if it is 12 -18 months away.

Hope nvidia will come up with smthg like VR SLI before that, single 1080 Ti having hard time coping with present titles and resolution, 4020 x 2230 is out of the question for current GTX gen & probably next as well.

VR-SLI is available as Noorbeast says but devs have to build in support and it's a niche market. I wouldn't put too much stock in widespread adoption. Nvidia has a demo but I think there is only one other app that has support built in. Maybe more by now but it is not taking the world by storm.

However, HTC has been working with a company called Sensor Motoric Instruments to do eye tracking. Nvidia is working on adding support for foveated rendering in their driver and the combination has already been demonstrated publicly. SMI says the added cost for mass produced headsets will be about $10 per to include their technology.

SMI will even retrofit a Vive with eye tracking today if you want to pay the bucks, but at the current resolution you don't really gain that much in performance but you do gain some. At the resolution Samsung is showing, it will be necessary to do eye tracking and foveated rendering but that can cap the performance requirements for hardware pretty close to what they are now.

4020 x 2230 VR is not out of the question. You probably need a 10 series card, but it will work now. We just need the headsets.

Foveated rendering explained by SMI:

Nvidia foveated rendering demo:

I hadn't heard of the work Invensun is doing. Cool stuff! For those near the edge of performance, depending on how close they are and how much of a performance increase this gives, kicking up to 90 fps fully rendered can be very nice compared to 45 with time warp.

Eye tracking and foveated rendering are the magic that enables truly high resolution in VR since you only need or notice high resolution where you are looking.

That looks a heck of a lot better ,,,, ,,,lets hope they don't take years to release the next instalment of headsets.

I reckon if they are going to be using this new display in the next gen VR they will probably need to do it sooner rather than later as in a year or 2 there will most likely be much better screen tech out there,,

It would make a lot of sense for the big VR companies to coincide their release dates with the next gen graphics card release dates ,,,, i'll be interested to see if that is the method they start to use ,,,

I wonder if there might not be an intermediate step coming since LG has announced their headset will have higher resolution than Rift or Vive. The LG isn't a huge bump in resolution but still could take sales from Rift and Vive. Lots of strategy to play out in the coming months.

But even if we do have to wait a while for this kind of resolution, it will be amazing! (Thanks for that update, Noorbeast!) And on top of that, by then we should have Volta hitting which ups the graphics capabilities even more.

It's going to be very damn cool. Get your platforms ready!

perfectly happy waiting for that kinda quality....That looks MUCHOS better.







Where did your build thread go @Zed

I think that wireless will likely be kept as an option or if it is built in, it will split the product line somewhat like HTC has already done to some extent with the commercial and home versions. There are a lot of people who are seated users mainly who don't really need wireless, and a lot who may want to economize at least a little - even though compared with a $600-700 top video card, it's not much of a difference.

You are probably right about the rest, though. I think eye tracking and higher resolution will be crucial for more market penetration to win over the monitor folks, and for getting current owners to pony up again. It's going to be a long wait, though. I, for one, welcome our new VR overlords...

It still can be problematic to enable at software level and actual difference in FPS remains to be seen. Lots of technologies promised to make life better, but the raw power of PC rig is what it usually comes to. Especially when people, who write video drivers, are benefitting solely from hardware upgrades.

While it may need to be enabled at the application level, it also may not. It depends on how tightly the eye tracking and foveated rendering are Or can be implemented. The processor will still have to make draw calls but that load is set by field of view and what needs to be rendered. If the graphics driver itself can back off on render detail in areas outside the foveal render area, then it may just work with all applications.

I can see it going either way. VR-SLI does need to be enabled by the application so depending on the reason why, foveated rendering may as well. That will be problematic for all those flying FSX and FSX-SE though Dan Church may be able to enable it in his FlyInside plugin. But for other applications that are actively supported, as VR gets more popular, and higher resolution is one thing that could help drive adoption, there will be more impetus to support higher resolution because it will mean more sales.

As to Nvidia somehow sandbagging to sell more hardware, while it could happen, it seems unlikely. They have been selling out GPUs for a while now for long periods of time. And VR-SLI would seem to be the perfect test case for improper behavior. When they announced the feature as being on the way, lots did buy two 900 series cards but it took them so long to actually deliver and it has such low adoption that if anything, they turned consumers against it. They haven't been promoting it since the VR Funhouse demo application. It was a perfect opportunity to drive sales to 2x and it wasn't high priority. I think, but don't know, that that speaks to them not especially playing dirty or trying to manipulate the market.

Also the whole selling point of eye tracking and foveated rendering is reducing GPU demand at higher resolution. You'll still need GPU horsepower. It just allows higher resolution that would bring current hardware to its knees. That still means sales of powerful graphics cards and probably means even more sales because better experiences will increase demand for VR.