virtual reality or vr has been hailed as the next paradigm for gaming and
immersion ever since it rolled out then
rolled over back in the late 90s with early implementations like sony's glass
tron being described by john carmack as
like looking through toilet paper tubes
fast forward to 2016 though and the tech
was awesome but it still had a big problem the price
because on top of the headset gamers in particular needed to shell out
for much more powerful hardware than they would need to play the same game in
flat mode but there's some good news
since that time oculus who sponsored this video has dropped the price of the
rift and continued development on some pretty
neat invisible mechanisms that work in the background to make vr run on even
relatively modest machines and we spent the last week testing to see
just how modest a machine you can use and i think you'll be surprised
let's begin with some of the efficiency improvements that are handled by your
graphics card because in theory every frame of an image in vr needs to
be rendered twice once for each eye
so technologies like NVIDIA's single pass stereo make it so your pc only
needs to set up the scenes geometry once and their lens matched shading actually
cuts off any pixels which would not be
visible anyway due to how the lenses in the headset work
pretty neat then we've got the headset specific tech
like oculus's asynchronous time warp and space warp which kick in any time your
machine can't maintain the steady 90 frames per second that's required to
prevent motion sickness by generating synthetic preemptive frames that act
like a sort of suspension mechanism to smooth out the low FPS bumps
getting this tech working right was quite a bit of work because
gpus are designed for high throughput but not
preemptive frame guessing so oculus
worked with both GPU manufacturers as part of NVIDIA's vr works and AMD's
liquid vr initiatives so it's more than
a catchy slogan now let's introduce our bare minimum
system so we paired uh where is it here it is a core i3 8100 quad core processor
and a gtx 1050 ti and ran future marks
vr mark which has a neat feature both the rift's minimum and vr ready
performance requirements are baked into the results graph and what we found was
that even our bottom of the barrel actually managed to meet the minimum
spec bar so there you go video done
peace out right no no wrong so upon further analysis we
actually found that while our rig was outputting 90 frames per second in the
basic orange benchmark which matches up
with the refresh rate of the head mounted displays in the rift
the actual target is 109 frames per second this is because
aside from the graphics going on on the screen in vr the system also needs to
read sensors and do a bunch of stuff in the background so
with the overhead of vr the calculation
is that 109 frames per second in flat
mode should correspond to 90 frames per
second in vr and superposition basically
said the same thing so that setup was only good enough for
like the very barest minimum spec
so we do need to go a little higher but do
we go for CPU or GPU
well we were watching our CPU load pattern during the runs and our
processor even though it's a measly core
i3 well it is a quad core and it didn't look that busy so we bumped our graphics
up to a gtx 1060 to see where that would get us
usually people would pair such a card with an i5 class chip but
we're focusing on vr here and even with
all the trickery it is still mostly GPU bound and check this out so it turns out
that i3 plus 1060 combo here
actually looks good to go with a super rating in vr mark orange room and a full
bar in super positions optimum preset so that puts our total system cost at just
over 900 us dollars and bear in mind that that is including the Windows 10
home operating system which microsoft recently jacked up to 140 bucks so if
you already have Windows or whatever then
well you can subtract that of course though those are synthetics so
the next step is to go lab rat mode and put this to the test now
normally i game in vr at home on a gtx
980 ti so i will be able to tell the difference if
this doesn't manage to stay as smooth so let's fire up the oculus performance
profiler analysis tool and head up display which should help us pinpoint
the cause of any frame rate drops that we experience
oh cool okay so this is oculus's redesigned home
interface thing now you've got this control panel here that you can move to
wherever it is that you want it to go and then you can uh
go ahead and decide well you know which menu do you want to see oh
close them so there's my library there's my explore tab here then you can kind of
adjust this one over here oh neat you can interact with the
desktop as well oh that's trippy let's go ahead and look at the other
monitor the one that's not capturing my experience right now ah yes
hey you can mess with ivan hey ivan i am opening your start menu
what are you gonna do about it i can touch you inappropriately
oh wait i probably shouldn't open fraps oh that just glitched it out
i don't know i don't know what this thing is yeah thank you
let's go are your monitors different sizes yep
one is 4k one is 1080. dang it ivan game now right
uh walk around the place somewhat because see they've made it social so
you can invite people to come over to your virtual home friends currently zero friends online
thanks that's why you wanted me to open that isn't it all right what's
next i play some robot recall you've played this game before haven't you i've
played vr shooters dang it
yeah it's really fun all right well i think that's good i
think that's all the evidence i need this is working awesome
so for our last trick we're trying out the climb
kind of the the crisis of vr if you
think about it that way like the graphics in this game are
especially when it was first released are pretty incredible compared to
what else there is now what i just
all right oh that's a long way to fall
huh this is maximum settings too
yeah go go go go look at me i'm like superman
superman oh wait oh oh no superman falls sometimes
okay so actually that went surprisingly well but
still the point remains that in a massive surprise to no one just because
a benchmark gives you a good score and you can run many vr games well on a
relatively inexpensive budget does not automatically mean that you can run any
game maxed out in vr it's i mean same idea as in
flat mode right so just like flat mode if you do have
some more budget and you're buying a vr gaming rig it wouldn't be a terrible
idea to bump your specs a little if you want to play uh vr versions of flat
games like fallout 4 and skyrim since vr
is more demanding but frankly i've actually found that the
most fun that i've had is in games that were designed for vr and what's cool is
that the climb in my opinion is more of
a tech demo than an actual game and that one still ran decently
and most of the vr games out there that i've tried some of which are good and
free like robo recall are not nearly as demanding because it's in the developers
best interest to reach as many customers as possible with their games so our pc
right here and of course we're not factoring in some of the RGB nonsense
and stuff like that in our in our cosport but our pc here can enable a ton
of awesome vr experiences exactly the way it is
so thanks to you guys for watching thanks to oculus for sponsoring this
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