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Graphics cards manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD have gone to great pains recently to point out that to experience Virtual Reality with a VR headset properly, you need a GPU capable of pushing at least a steady 90 FPS per eye, or a total of at least 180 FPS for both eyes, and at high resolutions to boot. This of course requires the purchase of the latest, greatest high-end GPUs made by these manufacturers, alongside the money you are already plonking down for your new VR headset and a good, fast gaming-class PC.
This raises an interesting question: virtually every LCD/LED TV manufactured in the last 5 — 6 years has a "Realtime Motion Compensation" feature built in. This is the not-so-new-at-all technique of taking, say, a football match broadcast live at 30 FPS or Hz, and algorithmically generating extra in-between frames in realtime, thus giving you a hypersmooth 200 — 400 FPS/Hz image on the TV set, with no visible stutter or strobing whatsoever. This technology is not new. It is cheap enough to include in virtually every TV set at every price level (thus the hardware that performs the realtime motion compensating cannot cost more than a few dollars in total). And the technique should, in theory, work just fine with the output of a GPU trying to drive a VR headset.
Now suppose you have a entry level or mid-range GPU capable of pushing only 40 — 60 FPS in a VR application (or a measly 20 — 30 FPS per eye, making for a truly terrible VR experience). You could, in theory add some cheap Motion Compensation circuitry to that GPU and get 100 — 200 FPS or more per eye. Heck, you might even be able to program a few GPU cores to run the motion compensating as a realtime GPU shader as the rest of the GPU is rendering a game or VR experience.
So my question: Why don't GPUs for VR use Realtime Motion Compensation techniques to increase the FPS pushed into the VR headset? Would this not make far more financial sense for the average VR user than having to buy a monstrously powerful GPU to experience VR at all?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday July 15 2016, @08:33AM
Humans cannot see changes at anything like that rate.
That's rather the point. You don't want them to see changes at all.
As smooth as 60fps might look to you on a TV screen, once you're trying to fool the brain into thinking it's inside a real environment, 90-120fps looks more realistic.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 15 2016, @03:40PM
Also, 60Hz is visible to many humans. 72Hz, fewer; 75Hz, fewer, 80Hz, not very many, 90Hz, I've not yet met someone who expressed being bothered by it.
60Hz is absolutely, absolutely vertigo-inducing. In North America power systems, lots of folks get headaches from the cheapest fluorescent lights with bad ballasts because the underlying 60Hz AC leaks through.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday July 15 2016, @03:56PM
Yeah, I just thought of this: if you wave your hand back and forth in front of a 60Hz CRT, you'll be able to see a strobe effect. That won't happen if a) you up the framerate or b) you up the persistance of the image (but then you run the risk of visible blurring).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk