[Hardware] Why is Virtual Reality still residual on PC?

[Mr.Hacker]

While the rumors of an ultra-high-end virtual reality helmet, it is said that it will cost around 3,000 euros, by Apple, does not stop appearing in the rumor mill, the reality is that in the world the PC there has been sabotage to VR, and the culprits in this have been NVIDIA and AMD who have done everything possible so that their GPUs do not have the necessary optimizations for virtual reality.

 

 

Because for immersion the latency must be as low as possible, and by this we refer to the entire process, from the moment the player performs an action until the consequence of it is seen in our eyes. Not only the time it takes for the CPU and the GPU to generate a frame, but also the time before to interpret said actions and the time after to send it to the screen. This is called photon motion latency, if it is above 20 milliseconds it can cause dizziness and nausea. The ideal? 5 milliseconds for augmented reality applications and 10 milliseconds for virtual reality. The other problem is that since the screen is so close to our eyes, the density in pixels and, therefore, the resolution must be very high, if we do not want to see the grainy image or the spaces between them. This further increases the technical requirements in terms of power.

 

 

Now, many of you will think that the solution can come from NVIDIA and AMD's resolution scaling techniques that allow more frames to be generated. Well, the problem comes from the fact that they add a fixed latency to carry out their work, which can be counterproductive. We must bear in mind that one thing is the speed at which the frames are generated and another is the latency of movement to photon. And this is something that many of you are going to experience when you are using FSR3 or DLSS3 and the frame interpolation that both have. Take a game at 60 FPS interpolated at 120 FPS and then another native one at 120 FPS and believe us that you will notice how in the first case the response time will seem much higher. This breaks the immersion in virtual reality and its inclusion and promotion can be seen in a certain way as a sabotage of VR.

 

Hardware