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If a literal new Half-Life game couldn't sell current and near-future VR tech, nothing will.
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Mar 11, 2020 16:46
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ufarn posted:Is VR still gonna get talked up a lot? Even Half-Life: Alyx doesn't seem to be doing great numbers. It's also not out yet, but it's true that it probably won't find a huge audience. Sit down, static VR is just crap, and a decent VR setup requires space, and ideally should be always left set up, because setup and calibration is just tiresome. It can, however, be a great experience - room-scale that is.
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Mar 11, 2020 17:37
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HalloKitty posted:It's also not out yet, but it's true that it probably won't find a huge audience. Just because it supports sit down doesn't mean you can't move in-game. Standing VR also works just fine and you can play pretty much everything that way; most people have enough space to move your arms around without hitting anything. And most headsets use inside-out tracking and don't require you to set things up around your room anymore. You just put it on and the cameras recognize your play space, which means you don't have to set up your boundaries every time. The thing that works against VR is that you need a gaming PC with at least a GTX 1060 / 1070, plus $400 for the headset. That is still a decent chunk of money for people.
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Mar 11, 2020 17:49
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The difference between VR applications designed for full roomscale and sitting/standing is night and day, the magic happens when the answer to 'how do I get over there?' is 'walk'. And that takes quite a large space. You're totally right about price though. It's a big outlay for a peripheral of limited, however cool, application.
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Mar 11, 2020 17:53
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my 5700 XT hosed up again. this time I wasn't even running a game and only one monitor stopped working. should I just RMA it? is that still possible three months after I bought it?
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Mar 11, 2020 18:51
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ItBreathes posted:The difference between VR applications designed for full roomscale and sitting/standing is night and day, the magic happens when the answer to 'how do I get over there?' is 'walk'. And that takes quite a large space. My instinct is that all of this current development is fantastic groundwork for the next generation of augmented reality devices like google glasses, but just isn't the future of video games.
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Mar 11, 2020 19:32
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Kazinsal posted:If a literal new Half-Life game couldn't sell current and near-future VR tech, nothing will. I can't afford it.  NotNut posted:my 5700 XT hosed up again. this time I wasn't even running a game and only one monitor stopped working. should I just RMA it? is that still possible three months after I bought it? Don't most things have a 2 year warranty? (this might be a UK/EU thing).
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Mar 11, 2020 19:53
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Alchenar posted:My instinct is that all of this current development is fantastic groundwork for the next generation of augmented reality devices like google glasses, but just isn't the future of video games. I'm regrettably inclined to agree. I haven't tried arm swinging or thems fancy be treadmills but I can't imagine them being as good as actually walking. Large scale VR gaming I see mostly as super lazertag / escape rooms - full installations where the physical space maps to the digital one. It still makes for cool arcade style games, sims, and, though I haven't tried any, it seems a natural fit for strategy / city builder kinds of games.
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Mar 11, 2020 20:07
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ufarn posted:Is VR still gonna get talked up a lot? Even Half-Life: Alyx doesn't seem to be doing great numbers. The game isn't out yet and the latest batch of $1000 Indexes completely sold out within minutes so
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Mar 11, 2020 20:56
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ItBreathes posted:Creepy. I'm guessing eye tracking. I hope this won't lead to some performance/IQ features requiring eye tracking telemetry data to be sent to Nvidia...
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Mar 11, 2020 21:18
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eames posted:I hope this won't lead to some performance/IQ features requiring eye tracking telemetry data to be sent to Nvidia...
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Mar 11, 2020 21:22
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Lockback posted:The game isn't out yet and the latest batch of $1000 Indexes completely sold out within minutes so I can't imagine there's a huge supply of indices, probably speaks more to hardware manufacturers being really cautious as to not sit on tons of inventory.
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Mar 11, 2020 21:29
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VR seems real neat, but then I look at the price tag for the cost of entry with a halfway decent headset and am immediately pulled away from any thoughts of maybe buying one, because I know I'll only use it a few times a year.
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Mar 11, 2020 21:43
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Geemer posted:VR seems real neat, but then I look at the price tag for the cost of entry with a halfway decent headset and am immediately pulled away from any thoughts of maybe buying one, because I know I'll only use it a few times a year. A halfway decent headset costs less than a halfway decent monitor or a mid-range video card, but it's true it has less utility than those things.
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Mar 11, 2020 21:58
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A halfway decent headset is halfway decent as VR headsets go, but the experience feels like 1998. Mid-range VR does not feel "mid-range" by comparison to a midrange monitor or GPU. If the experience gap closes a bunch, VR may take off more, but it will always be niche and it will always really only shine for simulation or games designed around the very specific strengths and weaknesses of room-scale VR as reasonably achievable to the average person. Assuming it is VR related, I'm interested to see what Nvidia's presenting, because I'm sorta interested to see how invested in it they are.
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Mar 11, 2020 22:08
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If it is something related to foveated rendering, maybe we'll see headsets powered by Tegras or whatever. It's not the market I'd be trying to get into, but if you've got a whole hardware and software stack for it, mise. Good practice for military / industrial contracts at least.
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Mar 11, 2020 22:48
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K8.0 posted:A halfway decent headset is halfway decent as VR headsets go, but the experience feels like 1998. Mid-range VR does not feel "mid-range" by comparison to a midrange monitor or GPU. If the experience gap closes a bunch, VR may take off more, but it will always be niche and it will always really only shine for simulation or games designed around the very specific strengths and weaknesses of room-scale VR as reasonably achievable to the average person. idk what any of this means
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Mar 11, 2020 22:56
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K8.0 posted:A halfway decent headset is halfway decent as VR headsets go, but the experience feels like 1998. Mid-range VR does not feel "mid-range" by comparison to a midrange monitor or GPU. If the experience gap closes a bunch, VR may take off more, but it will always be niche and it will always really only shine for simulation or games designed around the very specific strengths and weaknesses of room-scale VR as reasonably achievable to the average person. This is really not true unless you're talking about WMR or something. A Occulus Quest is really not that expensive and gives a really good experience. Not quite as good as a Index but really not that far off. You don't need to spend $1000 and you don't really lose out on much at all if you don't. There's junk in the marketplace, but you can get a Quest and get a really good wireless AND wired experience with everything you need for under $500. I'm not saying its worth it for everyone (though if you think there's only 1 or 2 games that are worth playing you haven't been paying attention). I think most of the people who are detractors at this point either aren't aware of the game quality the last 18 months has brought or think the PSVR represents the pinnacle or something.
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Mar 11, 2020 23:54
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Or maybe they just don't like the experience VR provides and are fine with screens where you don't have to strap some contraption to your head to be able to play a minigame?
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Mar 12, 2020 00:23
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Index, Rift S and Quest have all been sold out / hard to find for months on end now, and we're entering year 4 of "it's just a fad".
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Mar 12, 2020 00:30
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It's a tiny niche and will remain a tiny niche. Acting like it's some huge thing because hardware that's being produced in very low numbers is sold out seems weird.
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Mar 12, 2020 00:30
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This whole discussion was about HL failing to move VR headsets, I'd say the fact that they've been sold out everywhere for months is fairly relevant.
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Mar 12, 2020 00:37
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VR has games, people are making them. people enjoy them, people are buying headsets. Does pointing out VR is a niche something that brings you some kind of joy or satisfaction? Why? Does someone liking something that is less popular than whatever you like really piss you off that much?
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Mar 12, 2020 00:38
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Lockback posted:This is really not true unless you're talking about WMR or something. A Occulus Quest is really not that expensive and gives a really good experience. Not quite as good as a Index but really not that far off. You don't need to spend $1000 and you don't really lose out on much at all if you don't. The Quest is still a super janky experience compared to like... the last 15 years of standard gaming. VR still has a LONG way to go before it's as polished as normal gaming. Finding it enjoyable doesn't change that. To analogize it to the early days of 3d gaming, it's like the Saturn or something. 3d was cool and all but the experience was still janky as gently caress and aside from the gimmick of being 3d and being able to do things 2d games couldn't, it just wasn't that great. We're still waiting for the N64 moment where hardware capable of being actually impressive becomes available at a reasonable price. Or for a more modern analogy, the Switch, which is the first time that portable gaming is just straight up as good as home gaming. You don't feel like you're missing a drat thing playing a Switch handheld, it's a loving great experience and while clearly the graphics aren't as good as a PC or even home console, the screen is good, ergonomics are good, battery life is good, etc. VR still feels like you're missing a lot. The visual clarity is just not at a level that can be compared with the last decade or two of gaming on screens. The weight sucks, the tethering sucks, the downsides of not tethering suck, the tracking on everything not lighthouse based is not quite there, etc. It's still very compromised.
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Mar 12, 2020 00:39
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K8.0 posted:The Quest is still a super janky experience compared to like... the last 15 years of standard gaming. VR still has a LONG way to go before it's as polished as normal gaming. Finding it enjoyable doesn't change that. To analogize it to the early days of 3d gaming, it's like the Saturn or something. 3d was cool and all but the experience was still janky as gently caress and aside from the gimmick of being 3d and being able to do things 2d games couldn't, it just wasn't that great. We're still waiting for the N64 moment where hardware capable of being actually impressive becomes available at a reasonable price. Or for a more modern analogy, the Switch, which is the first time that portable gaming is just straight up as good as home gaming. You don't feel like you're missing a drat thing playing a Switch handheld, it's a loving great experience and while clearly the graphics aren't as good as a PC or even home console, the screen is good, ergonomics are good, battery life is good, etc. VR still feels like you're missing a lot. The visual clarity is just not at a level that can be compared with the last decade or two of gaming on screens. The weight sucks, the tethering sucks, the downsides of not tethering suck, the tracking on everything not lighthouse based is not quite there, etc. It's still very compromised. You spent a lot of time saying what everyone already knows: nascent tech is janky. No poo poo, I still played Doom despite it running at quarter resolution at 10fps on my 386.
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Mar 12, 2020 00:48
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You can always tell whether something is not catching on by how desperate its few fans are to talk away any shortcomings. The VR experience could be perfect, but it's main problem is that it's something most people have no interest in. Most people don't want to be "fully immersed" in some minigames. I like playing games on a screen, having a second screen with Netflix open and being able to chat etc. Lambert fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Mar 12, 2020 |
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Mar 12, 2020 00:54
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Anyone talking about anything they like is going to not emphasize the shortcomings of said thing since those shortcomings are likely things that don't matter to them, which is why they're into the thing in the first place. You know, people like different things and stuff. You're able to comprehend that idea, right Lambert? Lambert posted:The VR experience could be perfect, but it's main problem is that it's something most people have no interest in. Most people don't want to be "fully immersed" in some minigames. Less than 1% of the human population would be enough to sustain a healthy VR industry. What "most people" want is irrelevant, it just needs to be enough. You can overlay windows from your desktop in VR already, Netflix playing on a virtual flatpanel placed somewhere in the cockpit when trucking in Elite Dangerous is a common use case. Text input is still an ongoing problem, virtual keyboards suck. SCheeseman fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Mar 12, 2020 |
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Mar 12, 2020 00:59
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Just put them on ignore if it bugs you that much dude, they're not going to stop.
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Mar 12, 2020 01:18
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Enos Cabell posted:This whole discussion was about HL failing to move VR headsets, I'd say the fact that they've been sold out everywhere for months is fairly relevant. Another data point would be that that Valve sold 149,000 Indexes last year but 103,000 of those were sold in Q4, i.e. when HL:A was announced. And they would have sold more if they could have kept it in stock.
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Mar 12, 2020 01:30
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File this under interesting but not useful in any real way: Some folks used DX12 and Vulkan's multi-GPU support to test a RX5700 and RX5600XT in "Crossfire" mode
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Mar 12, 2020 01:43
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SCheeseman posted:You know, people like different things and stuff. You're able to comprehend that idea, right Lambert? I think it’s fairly obvious that they are not able to comprehend that idea.
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Mar 12, 2020 01:50
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Fabulousity posted:File this under interesting but not useful in any real way: Some folks used DX12 and Vulkan's multi-GPU support to test a RX5700 and RX5600XT in "Crossfire" mode The big question that jumps out at me is "lol what about the frametimes". Assuming it's AFR then half of your frames are getting rendered way faster than the other half. looking at the actual results, it does kinda look like the frametimes have widened significantly and I'd be curious what an FCAT profile looks like. apropos of nothing: god I loving hate how people now use "frametimes" to mean 0.1% or 1% lows. Frametimes already mean something different, it's the same thing as "frame pacing", or framerate variance. I'm looking at you, GN Steve, stop loving misusing the word, you should know better. (and if you want to really be pedantic, it actually means the same thing as framerate, frametimes are just 1/framerate.) Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Mar 12, 2020 |
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Mar 12, 2020 01:57
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I'm just glad frame pacing awareness is a thing now, 10-15 years ago it wasn't, and people were seeing 60fps on fraps with their ATi cards and wondering why the gently caress it was still hitching everywhere. I can't remember who 'discovered' it but one day some dude pointed it out and it's been a revelation ever since. It was around the late PS3/360 era, I think either blurbusters or some guy off guru3d spoke about it first before anyone else realized it was as equally important as overall framerate. I like to think it caused a big shift in drivers as well as killing off crossfire/sli once everybody realized they were stutterfests incapable of doing good frame pacing.
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Mar 12, 2020 11:42
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:I'm just glad frame pacing awareness is a thing now, 10-15 years ago it wasn't, and people were seeing 60fps on fraps with their ATi cards and wondering why the gently caress it was still hitching everywhere. As far as I remember, it was basically NVIDIA FCAT that revolutionised this type of testing, and really shone a light on the whole thing. Then ATI decided they had to fix their extreme crossfire stutter. HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Mar 12, 2020 |
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Mar 12, 2020 16:28
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Truga posted:lol shut the gently caress up lambert
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Mar 12, 2020 16:38
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HalloKitty posted:As far as I remember, it was basically NVIDIA FCAT that revolutionised this type of testing, and really shone a light on the whole thing. https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/fcat-benchmarking-review.html Crossfire was (is) a shitshow but GCN had significant frame pacing issues with single cards back then.
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Mar 12, 2020 16:42
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Arzachel posted:https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/fcat-benchmarking-review.html I don't doubt it tbh, I just remember crossfire being the focus
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Mar 12, 2020 16:48
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Arzachel posted:https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/fcat-benchmarking-review.html bear in mind that since NVIDIA came up with this testing methodology they basically got to fix all their own frame pacing problems before they started shopping this around to tech media, so it's not necessarily a 100% fair comparison. It would be interesting to pick a driver from a year or two before that and see how NVIDIA's frame pacing used to be. but yeah AMD had frame pacing problems back then, and FCAT is a fantastic tool for ferreting it out. this is one of those instances where NVIDIA really made everyone better off by taking the initiative and developing something that pushed gaming tech forward. See also: variable refresh.
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Mar 12, 2020 17:17
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Paul MaudDib posted:but yeah AMD had frame pacing problems back then, and FCAT is a fantastic tool for ferreting it out. this is one of those instances where NVIDIA really made everyone better off by taking the initiative and developing something that pushed gaming tech forward. See also: variable refresh. I don’t think FCAT was the first tool. I remember the first reporting I read on it was a tech website that had purchased a capture card capable of real-time DVI capture and noticed the raw data out had very strange properties with seemingly duplicated frames. They did a big investigation into it, and discovered the issue with minimal frame times vs maximum frame times, etc. Nvidia was better than AMD in their testing, but not by as much as in later tests. Nvidia did, however, respond much more directly, producing updates drivers and testing tools very quickly after publication, where AMD did nothing for a long time. I think the it was tech reports ‘inside the second’ article from 2011, but I can’t check for sure on mobile. EoRaptor fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Mar 12, 2020 |
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Mar 12, 2020 18:02
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EoRaptor posted:I don’t think FCAT was the first tool. I remember the first reporting I read on it was a tech website that had purchased a capture card capable of real-time DVI capture and noticed the raw data out had very strange properties with seemingly duplicated frames. They did a big investigation into it, and discovered the issue with minimal frame times vs maximum frame times, etc. Nvidia was better than AMD in their testing, but not by as much as in later tests. Nvidia did, however, respond much more directly, producing updates drivers and testing tools very quickly after publication, where AMD did nothing for a long time. It looks like they were still using FRAPS at that point and note that it doesn't always square with what they're seeing. quote:Still, even that approach has some obvious weaknesses. We’ve noticed them at times when results from our FRAPS-based testing didn’t seem to square with our seat-of-the-pants experience. The fundamental problem is that, in terms of both computer time and human visual perception, one second is a very long time. Averaging results over a single second can obscure some big and important performance differences between systems. I think the "person with the DVI capture card" is NVIDIA's FCAT, that's how it works. They sent it out to a couple sites once they'd developed it, I think TechReport was one of the first to get it. But I could be wrong. edit: here is the second article in the series and he says that NVIDIA came up with the DVI capture approach, and that they'd been working on it for two years by the time he did the first article. quote:You may recall that we first talked to Nvidia’s Tom Petersen about frame latencies and multi-GPU micro-stuttering right when we first started looking at these things. To our surprise, Petersen had obviously been working on these matters before we spoke, because he very quickly produced a fairly robust presentation related to micro-stuttering and Fraps captures. That was about a year and a half ago. Turns out Peteresen and his team have been working on FCAT tools for about two years. We’ve had a few hints along the way that something along these lines was in the works, and that some tools might be presented to the press when the time was right. A couple of weeks ago, Petersen and another Nvidia rep visited Damage Labs to help us get up and running with a frame capture setup and the FCAT suite of tools. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Mar 12, 2020 |
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Mar 12, 2020 18:25
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