What happens if you don't hit 90 FPS?

[mabsey]

As per the title really, when CV1 is released, if I don't manage to hit a Constant 90 FPS and say I hit 80 FPS, whats going to happen, no low persistance and experience broke with Judder? Will there be no 75 FPS fall back mode, so it runs like the DK2 for example?

The more I'm thinking about this, the more I don't want to go spending another £600 on machine upgrades just to get a better experience on top of the price of the CV1, I've got a I7 with a GeForce 970 GTX now and there are some titles I'm struggling to get decent frame rates without turning the settings down. I feel I've gone from being on the fence, to really wanting the CV1 to being back on the fence again.

Mabs

[RonsonPL]

No, there won't be any switching to 75Hz.
Oculus gave the minimum specs for a good reason.

Those are minimum specs. Minimum specs won't allow for ultra gaming. Learn what settings are worth to be turned down, and set them accordingly to you PC possibilities. Simple as that.

About what happens if you go below 90fps: VR not worth using happens.

Doesn't matter what exactly happens.
Wait for first commercial VR games and make your decision then.
It'll probably be not worth updgrading gtx970 to anything else, if we won't get games created for faster hardware, so if your PC meets minimum requirements, then you can relax, not worry, and wait for things to happen. When the Rift hits the market, we should know a thing or two about HBM2 equipped cards, so it will be a better time to make a decision about 980ti or Radeon Fury X.

[Anonymous]

Nothing really happens for say ~ but there will be a disconnect between what the gpu should be showing and what the screen should be showing and that could in theory cause you to be sick just a bit faster ~ We call this input lag.

In some ways it'll cause stuttering in the images/motion. Also, it'll push your GPU even harder as it'll try to keep up and this can cause issues where objects will tear with in the display images.

Over all, yea, RonsonPL right, you should try and meet the minimum hardware levels so you have the best VR exp you can, but learning to turn off settings might be another way to meet the FPS levels as well.

[Anonymous]

"RonsonPL" wrote:
No, there won't be any switching to 75Hz.
Those are minimum specs. Minimum specs won't allow for ultra gaming. Learn what settings are worth to be turned down, and set them accordingly to you PC possibilities. Simple as that.

I agree with you here... which is why I found it very odd that Oculus put out there that is the recommended spec for the full Oculus Experience....

We all get that frame rate is the most important thing but if we have the extra cycles to put to soft shadows and over sampling then of course that's going to be way better.

Besides a Palit Jetstream 980 OC edition like mine, which cost me £500 a year ago now only costs £380 and that card is over the spec given. So it's not that hard cost wise to beat the recommended spec.

Very odd.

[Paul33993]

I'm of the opinion the best VR experiences will be games built exclusively for VR. And anyone with any sense at all (unless they hate money) will design their worlds around GPU limitations. I suspect it's going to be a much larger issue for traditional games with tacked on VR support. VR exclusives will probably have the lowest GPU requirements of all the VR games.

[richhard1]

Asynchronous timewarp will play a big part in allowing you to experience higher FPS despite only reaching around 1/2 of the expected 90fps.

FlyInsideFSX does exactly that already, it was incorporated back in version 5 of the oculus SDK.

"TLDR: Asynchronous timewarp (ATW) is a technique that generates intermediate frames in situations when the game can’t maintain frame rate, helping to reduce judder"

[VizionVR]

Ideally, Oculus (and I assume other manufacturers) want to eventually reach 120fps but this wont happen for a couple generations or more.

Not reaching 90 could cause nausea, depending on how sensitive you are to the experience.

"Paul33993" wrote:
I'm of the opinion the best VR experiences will be games built exclusively for VR. And anyone with any sense at all (unless they hate money) will design their worlds around GPU limitations. I suspect it's going to be a much larger issue for traditional games with tacked on VR support. VR exclusives will probably have the lowest GPU requirements of all the VR games.

Couldn't agree more. VR devs are very aware of the limitations and are striving to make their experiences as comfortable as possible (easily hitting 90fps with a gtx970 or equivalent).

[RonsonPL]

"Paul33993" wrote:
I'm of the opinion the best VR experiences will be games built exclusively for VR. And anyone with any sense at all (unless they hate money) will design their worlds around GPU limitations. I suspect it's going to be a much larger issue for traditional games with tacked on VR support. VR exclusives will probably have the lowest GPU requirements of all the VR games.

+1 on that. It's certain that i5+gtx970 will give you stable 90fps in games designed for VR from the start.
It's unfortunately also almost certain that there won't be ANY game (besides the smallest indie titles or mods) designed for VR that will require 980ti or faster GPU, in next few years.

"richhard1" wrote:
Asynchronous timewarp will play a big part in allowing you to experience higher FPS despite only reaching around 1/2 of the expected 90fps.

FlyInsideFSX does exactly that already, it was incorporated back in version 5 of the oculus SDK.

"TLDR: Asynchronous timewarp (ATW) is a technique that generates intermediate frames in situations when the game can’t maintain frame rate, helping to reduce judder"

ATW is NOT a silver bullet. You will fight nausea with it, but you'll stay with stutter and huge image quality degradation in moving objects. Let's say there's a swarm of tiny flying robots in some sci-fi game. The rule is that even a single frame below the refresh rate ruins the image in motion and that won't ever change until we'll get to 500fps so we can "guess" the missing frames at 250fps rate. So back to those flying robots - you won't see them. You won't easily track their motion. You'll have no idea how exactly they look like. You'll see a mess.
I'm a huge fan of low persistence and even bigger "blur and stutter-hater" 😉 and I look at the posts like yours with fear (of devs thinking it's not imporant to reach stable X fps in their VR games)
Besides Carmack once said the time warp technique requires 60fps on a 120Hz display to give decent results. 90Hz means the image artifacts will be more visible.
Anyway, it's just a lesser evil, understandable for mobile VR, but still a "trojan horse". Carmack admitted a few days ago - only a fraction of games/experiences sent for the mobile VR competition worked at full, not time warped framerate.
I'm afraid if this will plague the PC VR, it will poison the well of VR, slow down the rate of people getting out of the medieval age of blurry motion, slow down the gamers' education of how much low persistence and clear motion adds to the experience.

I even created a thread about it:
viewtopic.php?t=14858

[Anonymous]

"RonsonPL" wrote:
I'm afraid if this will plague the PC VR, it will poison the well of VR, slow down the rate of people getting out of the medieval age of blurry motion, slow down the gamers' education of how much low persistence and clear motion adds to the experience.

It might plague it ~ but I bet it wont be the devs fault for the same reason ~ people are going to "cheap" by and "hope" it works for their setup and come back here wondering why it doesn't work and or a way to make it work for their setup. Even if it's the devs ~ it's mostly going to be just a few set games and they will come quick with warnings that the game could cause some sickness to it by anyone that plays it.

~ I don't see why it's hard to meet the mini specs as new GPUs will becoming out next year along with the CV1 or shortly after that will increase the availability of cards that support VR in a greater range from both GPU makers within a a greater price range.

VR not cheap if you ask me though xD I know I am going to hear the back lash at my shop about why their "gaming computer" isn't "fast" enough to play it, lol. It'll be fine, but I know I'll have to explain the difference (new area of VR instead of the 2d/3d).

[RonsonPL]

Mradr

That's why Oculus, having three years for that, should've came up with some "tough love" system. Either a pre-game benchmark, or simple turn off with a message "We're sorry, your PC hardware or software running in the background prevents this VR game/experience from working correctly. It might result in making you sick and some other stuff. Click here to learn more about why stable framerate is so important. Continuing is not possible until you remove the performance defficiency and run benchmark again".

Oculus talked so much about avoiding poisoning the well. I still hope for some system like that, but it's getting late and nothing like this came up, so I think it'll be just another PC VR matter that was simply ignored by FB/Oculus.
Just a message displayed once is not enough. You know what will people do. The same gullible people who chose 30fps The Last of Us Remastered (it didn't matter that all experienced gamers and developer itselft, explained that 60fps is better for games), will choose to play as they want, and then rush to YT or even gaming portals to report how bad VR is and how not worth investing more money. 😕