Sony's PSVR Official, Undercuts Rift And Vive At $399

[cryoburner]

Puke Goggles...for ~500.00 when everything is said and done. Current gen consoles should have left VR alone and waited for their new HW refresh.

The PS4 can't provide 60fps @ 1080p across titles...and the latency will be killer. The PS Eye wasnt made for VR.

The PS4's hardware should certainly be capable of providing sufficient fps for VR games, so long as they are designed with its performance in mind. It's not like every AAA game will be including full VR support, and many kinds of games wouldn't play so well in VR anyway. The games that are built specifically for VR can simply tone back the graphical detail a bit to maintain a suitable frame rate. Just because Oculus set high recommended system specs for their consumer launch doesn't mean that kind of hardware is necessarily required for VR. Many of the games and tech demos made by developers for the Rift devkits didn't require such high specs to run well, and VR games made for the PS4 won't either.

As for the PS Eye not being built for VR, it's undoubtedly being used in combination with additional sensors on the headset itself to provide accurate tracking. From what I've heard, those who have demoed the device didn't notice any notable issues with motion sickness.

When I first heard of Sony's 'Project Morpheus', I originally thought it would cost more than the Rift's targeted $300-$400 price range, but instead, Sony continued the trend of pricing their hardware reasonably this console generation, and it's actually the Rift that ended up costing significantly more.

 

[kcarbotte]

@kcarbotte: I tried the Samsung Gear VR at Best Buy, and what bugged me was the resolution. The first thing I noticed was that I could distinguish all the pixels. When you tried the Gear VR< did you experience this, and are the Oculus and Vive VR dramatically different? I know you were talking about how the pixels act as their own colors in the Rift. So do you not notice the pixels at all? Because I did on the Gear VR.

It depends a lot on the content actually.
If you look for them, you wil see the pixels. It's very easy to forget about them when the content is compelling.

I have a gear VR and an S7. I don't notice the pixels while I'm playing a game at all.
If you were experiecing 360 video, a lot of that content is just not very sharp, so maybe that was the problem.

The Dk2 was very noticeable. Even in compelling games, you can still make it out very easily. The new Rift and Vive are definitely not that way. Neither was the PSVR when I tried it.
It comes down to better screens, and properly engineered optics. The GearVR has pretty basic optics, that can't be adjusted at all.

 

[problematiq]

My question is how much more powerful this external processing unit really will be. It looks to me like the PSVR (external procesisng unit) connects via USB to the PS4. USB 3.0 transfer speeds are really slow, little bandwidth for a processing unit. How exactly is this going to communicate with the processor and the other GPU in the PS4 quickly enough over the limited bandwidth of USB 3.0? USB 3.0 bandwidth is 640 megabytes per second. Normal DDR memory technology used in GPUs has a bandwidth far exceeding that. Of course, I'm no expert when it comes to this memory and bandwidth, so I may be overlooking something here.

Also, how will the CPU not bottleneck? Eh, I guess good optimization will do it. The real question now is if Nintendo is getting into the VR game also with the NX console.

60 games at release seems like a lot more content than we have on PC.

USB 3.0 is 1.5 Gbps not 640mbps.

 

[clonazepam]

My question is how much more powerful this external processing unit really will be. It looks to me like the PSVR (external procesisng unit) connects via USB to the PS4. USB 3.0 transfer speeds are really slow, little bandwidth for a processing unit. How exactly is this going to communicate with the processor and the other GPU in the PS4 quickly enough over the limited bandwidth of USB 3.0? USB 3.0 bandwidth is 640 megabytes per second. Normal DDR memory technology used in GPUs has a bandwidth far exceeding that. Of course, I'm no expert when it comes to this memory and bandwidth, so I may be overlooking something here.

Also, how will the CPU not bottleneck? Eh, I guess good optimization will do it. The real question now is if Nintendo is getting into the VR game also with the NX console.

60 games at release seems like a lot more content than we have on PC.

USB 3.0 is 1.5 Gbps not 640mbps.

He was right. He specifically wrote out megabytes per second. You shorthanded megabits per second. It's actually 5gbps if I know how to google properly.

 

[problematiq]

My question is how much more powerful this external processing unit really will be. It looks to me like the PSVR (external procesisng unit) connects via USB to the PS4. USB 3.0 transfer speeds are really slow, little bandwidth for a processing unit. How exactly is this going to communicate with the processor and the other GPU in the PS4 quickly enough over the limited bandwidth of USB 3.0? USB 3.0 bandwidth is 640 megabytes per second. Normal DDR memory technology used in GPUs has a bandwidth far exceeding that. Of course, I'm no expert when it comes to this memory and bandwidth, so I may be overlooking something here.

Also, how will the CPU not bottleneck? Eh, I guess good optimization will do it. The real question now is if Nintendo is getting into the VR game also with the NX console.

60 games at release seems like a lot more content than we have on PC.

USB 3.0 is 1.5 Gbps not 640mbps.

He was right. He specifically wrote out megabytes per second. You shorthanded megabits per second. It's actually 5gbps if I know how to google properly.

USB 3.0 is 1.5 gbps when converted to MB/s your looking at 187.5 MB/s
I'm unsure where he got 640MB/s. Whether or not he meant 640MB/s MiB/s or Mbps it's still incorrect.

 

[problematiq]

My question is how much more powerful this external processing unit really will be. It looks to me like the PSVR (external procesisng unit) connects via USB to the PS4. USB 3.0 transfer speeds are really slow, little bandwidth for a processing unit. How exactly is this going to communicate with the processor and the other GPU in the PS4 quickly enough over the limited bandwidth of USB 3.0? USB 3.0 bandwidth is 640 megabytes per second. Normal DDR memory technology used in GPUs has a bandwidth far exceeding that. Of course, I'm no expert when it comes to this memory and bandwidth, so I may be overlooking something here.

Also, how will the CPU not bottleneck? Eh, I guess good optimization will do it. The real question now is if Nintendo is getting into the VR game also with the NX console.

60 games at release seems like a lot more content than we have on PC.

USB 3.0 is 1.5 Gbps not 640mbps.

He was right. He specifically wrote out megabytes per second. You shorthanded megabits per second. It's actually 5gbps if I know how to google properly.

USB 3.0 is 1.5 gbps when converted to MB/s your looking at 187.5 MB/s
I'm unsure where he got 640MB/s. Whether or not he meant 640MB/s MiB/s or Mbps it's still incorrect.

I Retract this i have no flipping idea where 1.5 came from.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

My question is how much more powerful this external processing unit really will be. It looks to me like the PSVR (external procesisng unit) connects via USB to the PS4. USB 3.0 transfer speeds are really slow, little bandwidth for a processing unit. How exactly is this going to communicate with the processor and the other GPU in the PS4 quickly enough over the limited bandwidth of USB 3.0? USB 3.0 bandwidth is 640 megabytes per second. Normal DDR memory technology used in GPUs has a bandwidth far exceeding that. Of course, I'm no expert when it comes to this memory and bandwidth, so I may be overlooking something here.

Also, how will the CPU not bottleneck? Eh, I guess good optimization will do it. The real question now is if Nintendo is getting into the VR game also with the NX console.

60 games at release seems like a lot more content than we have on PC.

USB 3.0 is 1.5 Gbps not 640mbps.

He was right. He specifically wrote out megabytes per second. You shorthanded megabits per second. It's actually 5gbps if I know how to google properly.

I just Googled it, so I apologize if I was incorrect. I don't bother memorizing the bandwidth of the different USB ports I guess Google has failed me.

 

[alidan]

cant wait till someone gets this to work on the pc.

 

[Tykkopoles]

120 Hz display, but games can opt to run at 60 Hz? No thanks. That's guaranteed motion sickness with a VR headset. Sony should mandate that developers optimize it for no lower than 90 Hz.

games can be made to run at 60Hz but Sony has a method of doubling that to 120Hz. This hasn't been explained in great detail. It remains to be seen how well this works.
It is likely that AAA games that have optional VR support will make use of this feature, but I suspect most VR only games will be 90Hz. Most developers are working together as a community to come up with best practices, and 90 fps is widely accepted as one of those.

That makes zero sense. You can't just magically double the performance of a fixed piece of hardware. On the rendering side, you can render the same frame twice in order to "fill in the gaps" for higher frequencies (effectively double the on-paper fps), but that does absolutely nothing to alleviate motion blur since the image is not changing any faster.

See, the reason why myself and many others experience motion sickness with VR goggles is because of motion blur... In games that translates to a mixture of response latency and frames-per-second that actually hit your eyes (in other words, 120 fps on a 60 Hz monitor is just 60 fps).

As you said, through some experimentation, it was found that 90 fps / 90 Hz with a <5 ms response is the ideal minimum.

I do not see how a PS4 can magically double the speed at which it renders a frame and the amount of space in it's buffer. That's just not how graphical rendering works. This is why the Rift/Vive have such heavy requirements.

My suspicion is that a select few low-fidelity games will support it at 90+ like it's supposed to, but any major AAA launch will likely opt-out because they don't want to spend the time/money to optimize their games better.

 

[kcarbotte]

120 Hz display, but games can opt to run at 60 Hz? No thanks. That's guaranteed motion sickness with a VR headset. Sony should mandate that developers optimize it for no lower than 90 Hz.

games can be made to run at 60Hz but Sony has a method of doubling that to 120Hz. This hasn't been explained in great detail. It remains to be seen how well this works.
It is likely that AAA games that have optional VR support will make use of this feature, but I suspect most VR only games will be 90Hz. Most developers are working together as a community to come up with best practices, and 90 fps is widely accepted as one of those.

That makes zero sense. You can't just magically double the performance of a fixed piece of hardware. On the rendering side, you can render the same frame twice in order to "fill in the gaps" for higher frequencies (effectively double the on-paper fps), but that does absolutely nothing to alleviate motion blur since the image is not changing any faster.

See, the reason why myself and many others experience motion sickness with VR goggles is because of motion blur... In games that translates to a mixture of response latency and frames-per-second that actually hit your eyes (in other words, 120 fps on a 60 Hz monitor is just 60 fps).

As you said, through some experimentation, it was found that 90 fps / 90 Hz with a <5 ms response is the ideal minimum.

I do not see how a PS4 can magically double the speed at which it renders a frame and the amount of space in it's buffer. That's just not how graphical rendering works. This is why the Rift/Vive have such heavy requirements.

My suspicion is that a select few low-fidelity games will support it at 90+ like it's supposed to, but any major AAA launch will likely opt-out because they don't want to spend the time/money to optimize their games better.

Oculus is doing the same sort of thing with Asyncronous Time Warp, where it pulls the data from the last frame with updated position information from the headset, when it can tell the next frame will be delivered late.
PSVR is essentially doing that, but as I said, they haven't explained the process in great detail yet.


Most AAA games won't support VR. You are absolutely right about that. PSVR will get many of the same games you see on Rift and Vive right now. Some games will, namely Gran Tourismo Vision, but most VR titles will be VR specific titles.

as more information is revealed, and we get more hands-on time with the hardware we'll talk about it more. At this time we just have to sit and wait.