bit_user :
If display resolution outpaces GPU advancements, you haven't really solved anything.
Actually, that shouldn't be a problem with fast eye-tracking and foveated rendering*, tech that already exists, and will likely start appearing in headsets within the next couple years. With foveated rendering, you render the area of the screen that the viewer is looking at using the display's full resolution, while everything in their periphery gets rendered at a lower resolution and detail level. Using these techniques, you could render a scene to 4k displays without increasing the performance requirements much from what today's existing headsets need, and the results would look virtually indistinguishable from rendering the full scene at 4k.
*and I didn't see Sakkura's post, which mentions the same thing. : P
bit_user :
But is $800 really that outrageous? Enthusiasts spend as much on a single gaming monitor. Or consider two midrange monitors and a gaming mouse/keyboard. That can easily reach over $800. It's an enthusiast price for enthusiast customers. But that notwithstanding, the cost will come down eventually. It'll have to if the tech wants to survive. While you can spend $800 on a gaming monitor, you can also spend $200 and be perfectly happy if your expectations are appropriate. And most people have $200 expectations, so if we could give them a $200 VR solution, problem solved.
Considering that only 0.22% of Steam users use 3840x2160 (4K) resolution, according to their latest hardware survey, I would say that yes, $800 is too much. And consider that some 4k monitors are available at less than half that price now. Similarly, only 0.23% of Steam users have an HTC Vive, and 0.12% have an Oculus Rift, and those numbers didn't rise at all from the previous month. Enthusiasts simply don't make up enough of the market to justify having big games developed exclusively for them. You need more mass-market adoption for companies to be willing to invest millions of dollars in games developed exclusively for VR, and as such, VR is going to need more mass-market pricing to really take off.
The consumer version of the Rift was originally intended to be around $300 to $400, but that somehow went up to $600 for its release, and now matches the Vive's $800 once its arguably-overpriced Touch controllers are added. This kind of pricing is not very appealing, especially when you consider that this is first-gen hardware with significant limitations that will likely be superseded by much-improved headsets very soon.
jossrik :
No, Resolution isn't everything, on the DK2 for me it was the screen dooring that put me off from retail...
Actually, the Rift and Vive both "cheat" a little with the resolution of their displays by using Pentile OLED panels that double up on red and blue subpixel elements, resulting in them having a third fewer subpixels than a true RGB display, which is part of why many consider the PSVR's display to look a bit better.
jossrik :
...One of the reasons I said resolution was a biggie for me is that I game in 4k, and while there is very little in the way of 4k movies and television, games look hella fantastic. For a comparison, go from a 1080p image to the same thing in SD. 352x240. It's a big jump...
That's not an entirely accurate comparison. SD is not 352x240, but rather 854x480 for widescreen, but even that isn't one fourth of 1080p. That would be 960x540. And of course, the amount of detail you can discern will be dependent on how big your screen is and how far you are from it, and past a certain point, you start getting diminishing returns from throwing in more pixels. On your 55 inch screen the difference is likely pretty clear, but at more common screen sizes the differences might be less noticeable. Of course, the current generation of VR headsets all have less-than-ideal resolutions stretched across your field of view, and I'm sure we'll be seeing that improve, particularly once eye-tracking starts appearing in headsets.
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