Clever VR Tricks: A 60fps VR Experience On An Old Phone With Tessellation And Vertex Displacement

[Guest]

How the creators of "Arctic Journey" for Google Cardboard created a 60fps VR experience that will run on a four-year-old-phone.

Clever VR Tricks: A 60fps VR Experience On An Old Phone With Tessellation And Vertex Displacement : Read more

 

[none12345]

Or we could just do VR with large high quality screens, and get rid of the lenses, distortions, and all the extra processing power they entail.

 

[none12345]

With eye tracking and rendering only your binocular vision in high detail, and render your perferial with lower detail, you would also cut a lot more processing power.

 

[bit_user]

Oculus and Vive rely on a more processor-intensive implementation called “Timewarp."

It's not the same thing. However, the implementation of timewarp might be one thing that drives them away from vertex displacement.

I wonder whether these pixels are lit using normal geometry or in the warped space. If the latter, then your shadows would be distorted. However, lighting them in world space would involve another transform. That might pose another limitation for this technique. Perhaps this app doesn't use dynamic shadows?

With eye tracking and rendering only your binocular vision in high detail, and render your perferial with lower detail, you would also cut a lot more processing power.

What you're describing is called foveated rendering. Some eye tracking systems already utilize that technique.

 

[Crystalizer]

"Rendering this many more vertices isn’t significantly taxing on the CPU." But GPU is the one that actually draws those triangles. Adding shadows and dynamic lights to game multiplies the amount of vertices to be drawn. The game they developed doesn't seem to have those. According to the picture.

"If his team can run a VR game on a Galaxy S3, why do the Oculus and Vive require such powerful hardware?" It's easier to do optimization in specific cases, with specific rules for the content developers. How painful and limiting would it be to develop for vive or oculus if you are given specific way to develop your games. Would minecraft even be possible. You would have to use tesselated cube for every cube in the world. There are 60,000,000x, 256x, 60,000,000 cubes. Some of them are rendered in chunks and with limited distance. There is a way of getting games in vr with older hardware too, but it would require drawing all unlit with artistic textures and with the latest optimization advancements in vr rendering.

 

[beetlejuicegr]

We all know the era of 8 bit gaming where software developers had to surpass with their brilliant minds the hardware limitations.
I almost cried from happiness when i read this article, it just means there are still ways and people who can prove you can make development with ideas and not raw hardware power.
Gratz to these guys and i also see it as a slap on the hardware requirements the vr gear needs. GG

 

[bit_user]

Would minecraft even be possible. You would have to use tesselated cube for every cube in the world.

Well, no. As the article pointed out, modern games already make use of dynamic tessellation for adjusting the level of detail, based on the distance. That should still be the case, here.

We all know the era of 8 bit gaming where software developers had to surpass with their brilliant minds the hardware limitations.

Okay, but show me an 8-bit game that was more aesthetically appealing than its 16-bit counterpart. There were plenty of fun 8-bit games, but the technological constraints imposed huge creative constraints, as well. I'm sure there were plenty of deep games that couldn't be made, or didn't fulfill the creators vision, until 16-bit came along.

Gratz to these guys and i also see it as a slap on the hardware requirements the vr gear needs. GG

I don't mean to detract from what they've accomplished, at all. I agree with you that it's great.

But I think going too far to conclude that the PC VR hardware requirements are overkill. For VR to fulfill its potential, games and experiences can' be limited to environments with no dynamic lights or shadows. It needs to run at > 60 Hz. And tricks like time warping are needed to keep some users from getting sick.

Google's Daydream VR spec will be in between this one and the current PC spec. I suggest you pay close attention to the differences in the kinds of experiences available on each. It's going to be at least as big of a difference as there is between console generations.

 

[Crystalizer]

Would minecraft even be possible. You would have to use tesselated cube for every cube in the world.

Well, no. As the article pointed out, modern games already make use of dynamic tessellation for adjusting the level of detail, based on the distance. That should still be the case, here.

Their example of where it works. When I look at the wireframe there aren't that many polygons so doing some tesselation on quads and transforming every vertex might not be a great issue. In pc games the situation is very different. The requirements from players are too. You need realism, which means high res shadows, tesselation maps, cool particles and superior antialiasing that needs to support latest shading etc. The amount of polygons/vertices is getting so high due to addittional passes that warping the pixels at post process way is wiser. What I'm trying to say is that in my opinion this is a duck tape solution for a very specific and primitive case. It's exactly the same reason this is not adopted by unreal. Don't know maybe they will figure this somehow to work well with billions of polygons. There has to be a threshold when it comes a problem. That applies to the other direction too

Minecraft is on vr now. I can't test it because the crashing issue still exists. How would this work on it? I would love to know. I think it would be the ultimate test for their solution. I think that the best solution for the pc and consoles would be to improve the headsets and their screens. Something like curved/improved screens and maybe improved lenses too, but anyways warping the image is not the reason why Vive and Oculus have gtx 970 as recommendation. As said in the article it's done by cpu in additional pass. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[bit_user]

What I'm trying to say is that in my opinion this is a duck tape solution for a very specific and primitive case.

Yes. I don't know if you read my whole post, but we definitely agree on this point. I was just saying you wouldn't have to subdivide every cube in the world - just the ones close to the camera.

Something like curved/improved screens and maybe improved lenses too, but anyways warping the image is not the reason why Vive and Oculus have gtx 970 as recommendation. As said in the article it's done by cpu in additional pass. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'd expect & hope that it'd be a GPU pass. But, as you say, the hardware requirement has to do with a lot more than that.

Curved screens is a good idea, but I think the added cost to the VR HMD might be more than the work it'd save, on the GPU. In other words, if it added $100 to the cost of a HMD, you could as easily spend that $100 on a better GPU, continue to do the warping in software, and probably have additional performance left over. I think it's not a very time-consuming task, for higher-end GPUs. It probably simplifies time warping, too.

 

[ammaross]

Curved screens is a good idea, but I think the added cost to the VR HMD might be more than the work it'd save, on the GPU. In other words, if it added $100 to the cost of a HMD, you could as easily spend that $100 on a better GPU, continue to do the warping in software, and probably have additional performance left over. I think it's not a very time-consuming task, for higher-end GPUs. It probably simplifies time warping, too.

As the SMP feature of the 1080/1070 has shown, it's the brute-force methods of current VR that demands the GPU horsepower. A few more innovative corner-cutting ideas and VR will continue to improve without much need of stronger hardware. Don't, however, expect Battlefield One to be playable on an Intel iGPU or even an R7 370.