Gadgetory

I don't think you should be a day one adopter of the HTC vive oculus rift or any other virtual reality headset especially as relates to gaming the technology is an impressive fusion of display advancements frame time pacing optimization input latency management and infrared scanning just the display tech alone is nearly unrivaled with the rift packing 2160 by 1200 pixels into a space smaller than a phone screen and the vibe exceeding that resolution but I don't think it's ready for the general gaming audience yet it's impressive what can be achieved on these VR screens though nothing has surmounted the challenges facing virtual reality and those primary core challenges are hardware requirements that are excessively high high cost logistical and use case limitations and a myopic understanding of game design as a whole and that last point is the biggest one there just isn't a good games ecosystem for VR right now and we'll discuss that here the oculus rift drew serious flak for six hundred dollar price point announced during CES which has almost doubled the initial $350 ballpark estimate that was stated for the headset back in the early days of development we're still not sure what the HTC vive will cost but it will almost certainly be more than the rift especially with the addition of the two lighthouses for positional and spatial awareness of the headset does all that I are tracking to figure out where you are that costs money and we talked to valve about a year ago now and this was all unfun I'm they were still targeting a December 2015 launch of the vibe and we were told to expect something nearer to a thousand dollars now none of this was an officially stated number it wasn't really set to be a final goal but we can certainly expect the vibe to cost more than the rift which is already a lot at six hundred dollars not unfair mind you not necessarily unfair anyway but that doesn't make it affordable just because the price is fair and it certainly doesn't make it a viable solution for gaming the rift pushes a 2160 by 1200 resolution the vibe pushes an effective render resolution of 30 24 x 16 80 which is 1.5 million pixels up more than 1440p on your standard desktop and few video cards can even drive 1440p above 60 FPS let alone the 90 FPS required by virtual reality headsets and video recommends a GTX 970 or better AMD recommends an R 92 93 90 or better and we disagree with both of these bottom-line recommendations both the rift and the vibe demand a constant throughput of 90 FPS at high resolutions with a heavy emphasis on stable frame times to avoid inducing nausea in the wearer latency has to be below 20 milliseconds and neither the vive nor the rift presently support adaptive synchronization technologies which certainly doesn't help in the delivery of that high constant frame rate Assassin's Creed sits at 65 FPS average in syndicate using a 980 TI at 1440 ultra which is again a lower pixel count then the vibe produces although the vibe does some interesting trickery around the edges to lessen the sort of value of those peripheral pixels and improve the performance but still 65 FPS and syndicate at 1440 ultra not great and not good news for the support of ER fallout 4 was at 78 FPS average using a 980 I initial launch at 1440 and fallout 4 is also uniquely unusable for VR since it's FPS should not really be unlocked from 60 as that introduces a ton of physics issues more of a problem with fallout but still that is one more game off the list that is not inherently built for VR to play anything resembling a modern a triple a title is going to require a lot more than a GTX 970 or r9 390 to push 90 FPS at 30 24 x 1680 on the vibe requires 457 mega pixels of throughput per second for the rift although lower resolution we'd still need 233 mega pixels of throughput assuming the average game where we'd want as an example 60 FPS on a flat or curved panel display throughput demands are massively lowered and tolerances for frame times are widened on these more standard displays so there's a big emphasis on better frame times and more three put Triple A titles require video cards that exceed the cost of the rift just to run at the high minimum FPS for either of these two major VR devices 90 FPS and that's including the fact that we can't really count SLI or crossfire because neither has had persistently good frame times even when their averages exceed single GPU solutions and they've also got kind of still even to this day questionable day 1 launch support for certain games Just Cause 3 a very good example of this Assassin's Creed syndicate a very good example of it lacking sli and crossfire scaling so those are sort of ruled out and at this point it just makes better sense to wait until superior hardware comes out before investing in these VR solutions and with Pascal coming with Andy's Polaris coming it could be the case that VR is more viable on the new architectures and would make sense to at least wait and see how they perform even if they're not really what we need just yet even if they're still expensive still 600 650 dollars to play at the required 90 FPS frame rate it is a good idea to wait until those come out and see what happens but then there's the whole point of logistics to logistics is more poignant for the vive than the rift and this photo shows one of our editors trying out a 30 or 40 pound virtual reality jetpack of sorts which allows tether free vr gaming by carrying around a 10 pound laptop with a 300 watt hour battery accompaniment and this is the only way to cut the tethers of VR the cable is the biggest limitation to large-scale VR since cable degradation over HDMI and latency concerns become seriously problematic it's also just a jumbled mess of face breaking potential waiting to happen though that's really a lesser concern since you learn how to deal with that as you use the device but it doesn't restrict gameplay options before this though is the concern of having an empty room available just for VR the vibe is best used in an empty room and not many people have spare rooms lying around especially in Asia and Europe and generally outside of places like the US where we have a lot of space and temporarily rearranging just to play games isn't sustainable in the long run even assuming such a room exists in your house the tethers intrinsic clumsiness limits movement to more caution steps and don't think you'll be running around and ducking and diving even when comfortable because there's a constant external awareness of the tethers location and this absolutely kills immersion the logistical challenge of room scale VR kills its mechanical viability for games as we know them today it is in that respect in novelty but game design is another challenge to VR and could be reworked to bypass on all these limitations a lot of traditional games don't make any sense for VR whatsoever first-person shooters for example are sort of right out as is anything else that's even moderately competitive because that instant ego check just isn't worth trying to overcome when you're competing against people who are using more standard input or display devices it's just not possible to beat someone flicking the wrist with a mouse when you're using head movement tracking and all this advanced technology and demanding high frame rates and things like that it's it's not going to be a winnable scenario for the VR user but VR was never meant for FPS or competitive games gaming has evolved to consist of three constants a stationary player and input device and a flat display the rift is meant to improve upon traditional gaming by adding full spatial awareness and head look enabling the player to easily isolate head and body movements for better survey of the environment a joystick or other device will still be required for about-face or 180 degree turns but free look means that we can glance around that 180 degrees roughly anyway of terrain in front of us by physical head movement within the field of view restrictions of each respective headset games that are fun because of their mechanics are challenged by the rift and the vibe the best use case is for cockpit oriented games like elite even star citizen but that's an awfully specific gaming scenario these work well because we're seated in game and in life and there's actually a functional gain from being able to head look out of the cockpit window while managing the controls separately as for the room scale VR with a vibe that's a completely different challenge the vibe is biggest challenge and this is for the roof too but to a lesser degree is a myopic understanding of game design the vibe needs new types of games to be created to truly use the physical movement to its fullest potential and I'm not talking about more of that experience either I don't want to put any developers down but wandering around Everest isn't fun and neither is walking around the bow of a sunken ship and looking at whales it's cool for one demo it is technologically staggering the graphics technology the photos that go into these things it's very impressive and it's mind-blowing how much technology has gone into these demos and experiences but they're not fun they're just cool and after that first time the charm is gone they're not games there's no mechanical depth there's nothing to propel that high created by a proper games ever-present sense of player self betterment or of exploration or of learning or learning how to get better at the game it's entirely observational and this fpx stuff first-person experience and the notion that walking around a virtual landscape recreating some real or non real or inaccessible world would be fun is just naive after initial onset after that first experience it becomes a novelty it becomes a hassle to set up to experience it's something that you show your dinner guests when they come over it's not a game it's not something you sit down for at the end of a day and play for fun to relax it's something that you have to go through effort to set up and put on and once you've done it you've done it there need to be new types of games for this type of VR and just redeploying what already exists isn't going to work it's not going to cut it this time around be ours tried a lot before and this time it is technologically financially in terms of respect in the industry the mainstream it is here to stay vr is very real has a firm grasp on a foothold in the industry but it's really got to execute with the developers there have to be the right games the right new moves away from what exists in order to really leverage that new type of exploration that room scale service and on the side of the rift or even the vibe you're just seat plain there's still problems because yes it works very well in cockpit simulators it can even work in racers though I don't really personally think I would want to use that as someone who plays a lot of racing games but for competitive games for first-person shooters for anything that is very heavily invested in the mechanical and the skill set of the player you're suddenly challenging your own ego by trying to learn this new way of playing and if there's an online element it's just damaging to your ability to compete so but that's not really a thing that people I think who are pre-ordering this stuff are worried about they're probably worried about rpgs and star citizen elite dangerous Eve even on that side the space Sims aside because I do agree that those are fantastic use cases for this technology even outside of RPGs you're still seated playing you're still holding a controller and you've got this sort of this area that you can see and look around with head look but you've still gotta move a joystick to turn around and look that way and it just feels very sort of haphazardly thrown together right now which is not to speak down to the dr technology because again it's impressive but in terms of mechanics it's just not there yet the games need to catch up they need to really support this stuff before it's worth buying and in an industry where desktops with monitors are obviously a dominating force that's going to take a while because these developers these publishers they're in it to make money they can't make games that they're not making money and/or well they can but they hold a spray on so it's going to be a little while before this stuff really gets pushed into the mainstream and that requires some patience and that is why i am so heavily in favor of waiting ultimately at at our site at the channel gamers nexus we work pretty hard to protect consumers from things that are maybe unethical or in the very least hype trains and vr is a hype train it is a bit out of control at this point and my advice to you as a consumer is to distance yourself a little bit sit back let the first wave hit for the rift for the vive whatever you're interested in and observe serve and read the reviews we're going to have one even though I'm saying don't buy one it is our job to research these things to analyze on benchmark them so we will have these devices at some point anyway and whether or not you get the info from us just read some reviews read user comments and then wait to see how the development community responds and starts putting out games to leverage each of the headsets respective advantages so I think that pretty much covers what I wanted to say here I just want to make sure everyone's protected from the runaway hype train I'm not trying to diss on VR again i've said this i need to say again it is seriously impressive but also every time we're doing these demos their experiences for the room scale stuff and experiences do get boring so there needs to be more than that there's some stuff like there's a zombie shooter for the vibe I've tried all of the demos and even a zombie shooter is just a king of the hill that's kind of what they all boil down to it's a king of the hill because you've only got a 12 x 12 room you can walk around in so at some point you're hitting a wall any that limits your exploration abilities and that's why I'm saying they need to be new types of games for the vibe for the rift it's just all these other potential things where it kind of feels disjointed you've got a controller you're sitting in front of a monitor but you have another monitor strap to your face and it's there can be a better solution or at least better development and it will happen in the semi near future but the biggest point is just wait for better Hardware because it's kind of hard to run this stuff anyway at least that good graphics quality so that's all for this video as always if you like our type of coverage and dedication to this sort of consumer advice hit the patreon link the postural video helped us out directly and you can read a lot more on this topic on the website gamers Nexus Donette where I've got a full opinion piece written out completely documented for your purvey and so you can decide if you agree with us or not and that is all for this time I will see you all next time