The PC VR/PS VR Gap Just Got Way Bigger With NVIDIA's Pascal

The PC VR/PS VR Gap Just Got Way Bigger With NVIDIA'south Pascal

With the recent releases of the Oculus Rift & HTC Vive on PC and PlayStation VR scheduled for Oct, Virtual Reality is the new hot technology in the gaming industry.

Many game developers are developing titles for the aforementioned devices and the VR market is going to be huge according to analysts. However, there are some differences between PC VR and PS VR: the Oculus Rift & HTC Vive have meliorate specifications, thus delivering a college quality VR experience equally admitted by Sony Computer Amusement'due south Executive Vice President Masayasu Ito in an interview with Polygon.

If you just talk nigh the loftier-end quality, yes, I would admit that Oculus may have better VR. However, it requires a very expensive and very fast PC. The biggest advantage for Sony is our headset works with PS4. It's more for everyday employ, so information technology has to be easy to use and information technology has to exist affordable. This is non for the person who uses a high-end PC. Information technology's for the mass market.

Sony'southward counter is that you would need a very expensive and very fast PC to accept a amend VR experience than what PlayStation VR (combined with PlayStation 4) delivers. Similarly, we have reported that PS VR is lx% more powerful than a PC with the aforementioned hardware due to several techniques used to optimize performance.

PC VR is near to go a pregnant performance heave, however. NVIDIA, which retains 79% of the detached GPU market place according to the latest figures, showcased the new Pascal architecture for the starting time fourth dimension last Friday.

The GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 GPUs are not merely more powerful, they also come with specific VR optimizations. Let's commencement with the basics: Virtual Reality nevertheless works on the principle of stereoscopy, meaning that two images (one for each center) need to be rendered thus requiring twice the power. That always struck me as a huge limitation.

NVIDIA'due south Pascal cards will prepare this longstanding consequence thanks to a technology called Single Laissez passer Stereo.

Single Laissez passer Stereo turbocharges geometry operation by allowing the head-mounted display's left and correct displays to share a single geometry pass. We're effectively halving the workload of traditional VR rendering, which requires the GPU to draw geometry twice — once for the left eye and once for the right eye.

This improvement is especially important for geometry-heavy scenes, and those featuring significant levels of tessellation, which remains the most effective style of adding real detail to objects and surfaces in VR.

With tessellation, affected game elements can be accurately lit, adumbral and shaded, and tin can be examined upwardly close in Virtual Reality. With other solutions, such as Crash-land Mapping or Parallax Occlusion Mapping, the simulation of geometric item breaks downwardly when the player approaches or examines affected objects from whatsoever angle, which harms immersion. Past increasing geometry performance and tessellation by up to 2x, developers are able to add more detail that players tin examine up close, significantly improving the look of the game and the role player'south level of presence.

NVIDIA likewise developed another technology for Pascal cards called Lens Matched Shading that will help with the performance, edifice upon the Multi-Res Shading introduced with Maxwell.

Lens Matched Shading increases pixel shading performance by rendering more natively to the unique dimensions of VR display output. This avoids rendering many pixels that would otherwise exist discarded before the prototype is output to the VR headset.

Together, Pascal's improved functioning, and new Single Pass Stereo and Lens Matched Shading significantly improve the Virtual Reality experience for GeForce GTX users.

What this means is that developers volition be able to cull betwixt considerably bumping graphics quality in VR and boosting the frame charge per unit (though perhaps it will likely be a mix of both in most cases), which is disquisitional in Virtual Reality to avoid movement sickness and other issues.

NVIDIA touts the new flagship GTX 1080 as existence up to 2x faster than the Titan Ten in VR. Perhaps nearly interesting in regards to the comparison with PS VR is the GTX 1070, though: priced at $379, it volition be affordable and even so probable to deliver a far superior VR experience.

It's non but nearly the performance, anyway. NVIDIA too wants to deliver the most realistic experience to PC VR and that includes sound, not just graphics: their new VR Works Audio will deliver path traced sound.

Today's VR applications provide positional audio, telling users where a sound comes from within an surround. All the same, audio in the real world reflects more than just location of the audio source -- sound is a function of the concrete surroundings. For example, a voice in a pocket-size room will audio different than the same vox outdoors because of the reflections and reverb caused by the audio bouncing off the walls of the room. Using NVIDIA's OptiX ray tracing engine, VRWorks Sound is able to trace the path of audio in an environment in real-time, delivering physical audio that fully reflects the size, shape, and material backdrop of the virtual world.

But put, we're able to simulate physically-authentic, super realistic real-fourth dimension audio using the power of your graphics menu.

Finally, they've also brought the whole PhysX library to VR along with a new addition specifically geared towards making controls more than immersive.

Existing VR experiences deliver these effects through a combination of positional tracking, hand controllers, and haptics. With NVIDIA's new VR Touch PhysX Constraint Solver, we can instead detect when a paw controller interacts with a virtual object and enable the game engine to provide a physically-accurate visual and haptic response.

It also models the physical behavior of the virtual world around the user and so that all interactions - whether an explosion or a hand splashing through water - conduct as if in the real world.

Overall, NVIDIA Pascal represents a significant jump forward for PC VR. Whereas PS VR used to exist almost as good every bit PC VR with a GTX 970, the new series promises to get out Sony's offer in the dust though absolutely information technology was easy to predict, given the incredible rate at which technology improves on PC.

That might be why Sony is working on the strongly rumored PlayStation 4 Neo. Co-ordinate to some of the leaks, the principal target of the enhanced PS4 would be PlayStation VR with a dedicated try to meliorate the VR feel with additional processing power.

Still, until then PC VR is bound to attract the nearly hardcore Virtual Reality fans way more than than PlayStation VR, especially now that the higher quality doesn't come at a huge price anymore.

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Source: https://wccftech.com/pc-vrps-vr-gap-bigger-nvidias-pascal/

Posted by: pachecopamentier45.blogspot.com

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