SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Baseline hardware requirements to run the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset have been determined. They recommend a NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater GPU, an Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater CPU, 8 GB RAM, 2x USB 3.0 ports and "HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297 MHz clock via a direct output architecture."
Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock explains: "On the raw rendering costs: a traditional [1920×1080] game at 60 Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90 Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift's rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering." He also points out that PC graphics can afford a fluctuating frame rate — it doesn't matter too much if it bounces between 30-60 fps. The Rift has no such luxury, however.
The last requirement is more onerous: Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 or newer. Binstock says their development for OS X and Linux has been "paused" so they can focus on delivering content for Microsoft Windows. They have no timeline for going back to the less popular platforms.
Are there any good alternatives that make use of a more open GPU (say, from Intel) from a VR manufacturer that provides proper support for FOSS platforms? Even better would be if the RAM requirement were lower, and something other than USB were used, perhaps Ethernet. And an alternative to HDMI that doesn't require a 10,000 US$ fee per manufacturer, regardless if you make 10 circuits or 100,000.
Tom's Hardware and Anandtech.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday May 16 2015, @09:01PM
2160*1200*90 is about 233 million, but what is "eye-target scale"? Surely not 2160*1200 at 150 Hz? Maybe 120 Hz at a greater resolution?
"Shaded pixels per second" is a metric I hadn't heard of before this announcement, but it makes sense. 4K @ 60 Hz draws 4 times as many pixels as 1080p, almost 498 million per second. So 4K/5K displays and triple monitor setups are now being joined by high framerate VR strapons in requiring beefier GPUs. Demand for better GPUs from enthusiasts with too much money will continue as planned.
Even if you aren't buying into the VR hype, the work on VR is leading to greater attention paid to framerate, latency, and consistency. For example, not only do they want a high framerate, they don't want jitter and screen tearing [tomshardware.com]. NVIDIA's G-Sync [anandtech.com] and AMD's FreeSync [anandtech.com] have popped up in monitors recently to combat those problems.
I'm guessing that VR will help with the adoption of higher framerates in video as well. H.265 supports up to 300 FPS [wikipedia.org], and in the real world GoPro's latest $500 camera [gopro.com] can record 1080p at 120 FPS. With VR, you'll be able to watch 90-120 FPS video immersively without leaving the basement. Peter Jackson won't be alone [indiewire.com] in advocating higher framerates. Maybe we will even see Hollywood producing shipping a 24 fps copy to theaters, 60 fps to UHD Blu-ray [soylentnews.org], and 120 fps to VR.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @09:11PM
Your comment reminds me of a famous song:
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday May 16 2015, @09:12PM
cool story bro
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @09:30PM
Please don't use the word "bro". It has sexist connotations.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Kell on Sunday May 17 2015, @02:46AM
cool story non-gender-specific sibling.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2015, @11:45AM
*TRIGGERED*
*Snarkisian mode engaged*
The word "gender" serves to describe an artificial social construct which exists purely to reinforce conceptions of restrictive social roles. When used to address an anonymous Internet user, "gender" serves as a reminder that the reader must confirm to the norm of their biological sex and makes non-sexual or asexually-curious readers feel unwelcome in the community. It's no surprise that this tactic is often used by males, who as victims of the toxic masculinity they have been nurtured with cannot help but to enforce an imposing environment in which they feel safe, as they feel threatened by any idea which questions the fundamental aspects of the patriarchy and see that as an attack on their insecurities. This creates a sense of unpleasant uneasiness known as cognitive dissonance, which prompts the male to aggressively defend the gender stereotypes and in doing so, inadvertently become the oppressor of women, agendered people, as well as himself.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Sunday May 17 2015, @02:16AM
"Shaded pixels per second" is a metric I hadn't heard of before this announcement,
I refers to the number of pixels that are pumped through a shader pipeline per second. This is extremely misleading because it is application dependent, not hardware bound. I can have a very compute intense shading algorithm that samples many textures and adds contributions from many kinds of lights or a simple colorless, texture-less, (normal_vec dot light_vector) equation, and on the same hardware these two applications will have vastly different shaded pixels per second. Furthermore, depending on the scene and the culling algorithm, If I draw further objects first then nearer objects (as is typically done with transparency), then each screen pixel could be overwritten with multiple shaded pixels; This is called overdraw.
The "shaded pixels per second" attempts to correct for complex scenes with lots of overdraw by attempting to give a baseline cost per pixel pushed through the pipe, and while this is related to screen resolution it is not completely dependent upon screen resolution.