Can you Game in VR on a Budget?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,571 words · ~7 min read
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virtual reality or vr has been hailed as the next paradigm for gaming and
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immersion ever since it rolled out then
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rolled over back in the late 90s with early implementations like sony's glass
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tron being described by john carmack as
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like looking through toilet paper tubes
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fast forward to 2016 though and the tech
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was awesome but it still had a big problem the price
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because on top of the headset gamers in particular needed to shell out
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for much more powerful hardware than they would need to play the same game in
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flat mode but there's some good news
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since that time oculus who sponsored this video has dropped the price of the
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rift and continued development on some pretty
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neat invisible mechanisms that work in the background to make vr run on even
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relatively modest machines and we spent the last week testing to see
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just how modest a machine you can use and i think you'll be surprised
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let's begin with some of the efficiency improvements that are handled by your
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graphics card because in theory every frame of an image in vr needs to
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be rendered twice once for each eye
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so technologies like NVIDIA's single pass stereo make it so your pc only
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needs to set up the scenes geometry once and their lens matched shading actually
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cuts off any pixels which would not be
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visible anyway due to how the lenses in the headset work
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pretty neat then we've got the headset specific tech
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like oculus's asynchronous time warp and space warp which kick in any time your
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machine can't maintain the steady 90 frames per second that's required to
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prevent motion sickness by generating synthetic preemptive frames that act
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like a sort of suspension mechanism to smooth out the low FPS bumps
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getting this tech working right was quite a bit of work because
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gpus are designed for high throughput but not
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preemptive frame guessing so oculus
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worked with both GPU manufacturers as part of NVIDIA's vr works and AMD's
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liquid vr initiatives so it's more than
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a catchy slogan now let's introduce our bare minimum
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system so we paired uh where is it here it is a core i3 8100 quad core processor
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and a gtx 1050 ti and ran future marks
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vr mark which has a neat feature both the rift's minimum and vr ready
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performance requirements are baked into the results graph and what we found was
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that even our bottom of the barrel actually managed to meet the minimum
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spec bar so there you go video done
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peace out right no no wrong so upon further analysis we
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actually found that while our rig was outputting 90 frames per second in the
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basic orange benchmark which matches up
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with the refresh rate of the head mounted displays in the rift
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the actual target is 109 frames per second this is because
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aside from the graphics going on on the screen in vr the system also needs to
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read sensors and do a bunch of stuff in the background so
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with the overhead of vr the calculation
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is that 109 frames per second in flat
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mode should correspond to 90 frames per
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second in vr and superposition basically
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said the same thing so that setup was only good enough for
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like the very barest minimum spec
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so we do need to go a little higher but do
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we go for CPU or GPU
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well we were watching our CPU load pattern during the runs and our
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processor even though it's a measly core
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i3 well it is a quad core and it didn't look that busy so we bumped our graphics
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up to a gtx 1060 to see where that would get us
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usually people would pair such a card with an i5 class chip but
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we're focusing on vr here and even with
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all the trickery it is still mostly GPU bound and check this out so it turns out
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that i3 plus 1060 combo here
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actually looks good to go with a super rating in vr mark orange room and a full
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bar in super positions optimum preset so that puts our total system cost at just
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over 900 us dollars and bear in mind that that is including the Windows 10
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home operating system which microsoft recently jacked up to 140 bucks so if
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you already have Windows or whatever then
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well you can subtract that of course though those are synthetics so
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the next step is to go lab rat mode and put this to the test now
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normally i game in vr at home on a gtx
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980 ti so i will be able to tell the difference if
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this doesn't manage to stay as smooth so let's fire up the oculus performance
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profiler analysis tool and head up display which should help us pinpoint
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the cause of any frame rate drops that we experience
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oh cool okay so this is oculus's redesigned home
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interface thing now you've got this control panel here that you can move to
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wherever it is that you want it to go and then you can uh
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go ahead and decide well you know which menu do you want to see oh
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close them so there's my library there's my explore tab here then you can kind of
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adjust this one over here oh neat you can interact with the
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desktop as well oh that's trippy let's go ahead and look at the other
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monitor the one that's not capturing my experience right now ah yes
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hey you can mess with ivan hey ivan i am opening your start menu
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what are you gonna do about it i can touch you inappropriately
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oh wait i probably shouldn't open fraps oh that just glitched it out
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i don't know i don't know what this thing is yeah thank you
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let's go are your monitors different sizes yep
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one is 4k one is 1080. dang it ivan game now right
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uh walk around the place somewhat because see they've made it social so
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you can invite people to come over to your virtual home friends currently zero friends online
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thanks that's why you wanted me to open that isn't it all right what's
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next i play some robot recall you've played this game before haven't you i've
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played vr shooters dang it
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yeah it's really fun all right well i think that's good i
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think that's all the evidence i need this is working awesome
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so for our last trick we're trying out the climb
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kind of the the crisis of vr if you
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think about it that way like the graphics in this game are
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especially when it was first released are pretty incredible compared to
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what else there is now what i just
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all right oh that's a long way to fall
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huh this is maximum settings too
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yeah go go go go look at me i'm like superman
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superman oh wait oh oh no superman falls sometimes
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okay so actually that went surprisingly well but
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still the point remains that in a massive surprise to no one just because
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a benchmark gives you a good score and you can run many vr games well on a
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relatively inexpensive budget does not automatically mean that you can run any
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game maxed out in vr it's i mean same idea as in
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flat mode right so just like flat mode if you do have
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some more budget and you're buying a vr gaming rig it wouldn't be a terrible
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idea to bump your specs a little if you want to play uh vr versions of flat
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games like fallout 4 and skyrim since vr
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is more demanding but frankly i've actually found that the
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most fun that i've had is in games that were designed for vr and what's cool is
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that the climb in my opinion is more of
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a tech demo than an actual game and that one still ran decently
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and most of the vr games out there that i've tried some of which are good and
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free like robo recall are not nearly as demanding because it's in the developers
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best interest to reach as many customers as possible with their games so our pc
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right here and of course we're not factoring in some of the RGB nonsense
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and stuff like that in our in our cosport but our pc here can enable a ton
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of awesome vr experiences exactly the way it is
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so thanks to you guys for watching thanks to oculus for sponsoring this
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video if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe
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consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the
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video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like
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uh is anyone wearing an lt t-shirt not no one where's your team spirit um
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like the lt t-shirts that we have and also our community forum which you
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should totally join