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Facebook has cut the price of the Oculus Rift for the second time this year. It debuted at $800, was cut to $600 in March, and is now $400. Is there real trouble in the virtual reality market, or is it just a normal price correction now that early adopters have been served?
It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers.
Even so, it's not clear that it will be enough to lure people into buying a Rift. A year ago, our own Rachel Metz predicted that the Rift would struggle against Sony's offering because the former requires a powerful (and expensive) gaming computer to run, while the latter needs just a $350 PlayStation 4 game console.
Jason Rubin, vice president for content at Oculus, tells Reuters that the reduction isn't a sign of weak product sales, but rather a decision to give the headset more mass market appeal now that more games are available. Don't believe it: this is the latest in a string of bad news for the firm, which has also shut down its nascent film studio, shuttered in-store demo stations of its hardware, and stumped up $250 million as part of a painful intellectual property lawsuit in the last six months.
Here's a February story about the Oculus demo stations at Best Buy stores being shut down.
Previously: Facebook/Oculus Ordered to pay $500 Million to ZeniMax
Google Partnering With HTC and Lenovo for Standalone VR Headsets
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:31AM (3 children)
EAX: Dead.
The AMD TrueAudio appears to be AMD only. And I have not heard of it until now, must have been under a rock or something. I'll have to see if I can demo it on my AMD Linux box. Otherwise, my windows gaming rig is Intel/Nvidia.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:52PM (2 children)
Wasn't EAX's death due to some change Microsoft made to their driver model? OpenAL was supposed to make it work (or even take over from it), but I don't think there's much interest OpenAL.
The only game I ever remember using EAX well was Thief: Deadly Shadows (Thief 3); it added so much to the game, plus it made the Cradle level even more disconcerting. I tried running the Steam version with OpenAL but it just crashed to desktop, sadly.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 13 2017, @03:18PM (1 child)
Yes. From the EAX wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
And further down we find:
Look like AMD is trying to bring back the idea but an AMD only option is a dead end in my opinion. Either we start using the GPU or we make use of all those cores we have coming about.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Friday July 14 2017, @09:05AM
Thank you for finding that Wikipedia link that I was too lazy to dig out. :)
I agree that anything that can't be freely implemented is just a postponed dead end. Using the CPU or GPU makes sense as the market for third-party sound cards for gaming is small and getting smaller; onboard sound is improving and most people seem happy with it, plus you have external sound cards that don't require any fiddling around inside the case. I wonder if AMD wanting their own implementation is tied to the upcoming APUs based on their Zen architecture?