News Sony reveals PlayStation VR headset tech-specs

I had a go of an oculus rift and the samsung gear vr this week. The samsung was excellent but the oculus made me feel pretty queasy, even sitting down. I liked the prospect of using them as a tool for exploring visualisations and 3D models but count me out for gaming. I thought it would be great for games but having tried it I actually really don't like the immersion and the lack of 'real life' in the periphery.

 

Seriously doubt the PS4 has the necessary grunt to power this for anything other than glorified tech demos.

 

I am skeptical that it’ll run well. Consumer Oculus Rift will run at 1080*1200 per eye whereas PlayStation VR is 960*1080; the Playstation VR will have around 20% fewer pixels to render than Oculus. That’s not a drastic figure - nowhere near as much as going from 1920*1080 to 2560*1440 for example (77.8% increase, since you asked) - but Oculus is recommending a GTX 970 or better as the minimum spec. You can probably push the GPU in a console a lot harder than you can in a PC but it’s hard to see that the PlayStation GPU can come to within 20% of the performance of a GTX 970.

Though the consumer Oculus will run at 90Hz and I didn’t see mention of refresh rates for PlayStation VR - if they’re both locking framerate to refresh rate then 90FPS will push the graphics hardware a lot harder than 30-60FPS. And perhaps Sony aren’t as fastidious (elitist…?) about performance as Oculus are – maybe “just good enough” is good enough for them to justify the investment, and good enough for the consumer.

As with any VR peripheral however, I only have two questions: "When can I buy it?", and "Am I going to have to sell my left testicle to be able to afford it?".

 

Going on what Sony say it's capable of 120Hz, although i get the feeling that maybe like ISPs say you'll get "up to"

 

The screen is that but they are processing the image from the source to that, like TVs do.

 

The PSVR can operate either with natively 120Hz panel updates, or with a 60Hz input with frame interpolation (or rather, frame extrapolation using the Timewarp technique), or at 90Hz (as yet unannounced how this is handled, but likely native 90Hz panel updates).
Of these announced specifications, the only new one is the 18ms latency figure. Hopefully this is an upper bound rather than a lower bound.


Performance is not a massive issue. Gear VR delivers an entirely acceptable experience with a Mali T760. PSVR needs to deliver somewhere between the same and twice the framerate (depending on whether the game is targeting 60Hz, 90Hz or 120Hz) at a very similar resolution (Gear VR renders to a subsized framebuffer for most games, but the PS3/PS4 are hardly strangers to dynamic resolution scaling), with a dramatically more powerful GPU.
John Carmack's estimate is that the PS4 can drive 'PS3 level' graphics are acceptable latencies for VR. I'd rate that as entirely acceptable.

 

Would not imagine the Ps4 will struggle to drive it. PC specs are always super high in comparison to anything console related.

Sonys big ace is Gran Turismo 6 if they can get it to launch with this VR they will sell a lot of units.

 

I had a go of Oculus at a recent games expo and played it for 5 mins on a fps game, whilst it was very impressive being able to look around ,I did get a big dose of motion sickness and that was just after 5 mins so I could'nt envisage playing for any length of time.

 

It's a issue that seems to effect oculus more than the others I've tried VIVE and oculus in the same game and did struggle more with the oculus. Can't say I've ever suffered from motion sickness.

 

Did you use one of Oculus' current headsets (the Crescent Bay prototype, or the CV1), or an older DK2? The DK2 is technically inferior to the Vive, whereas CB/CV1 and the Vive are nigh-identical in terms of display and optics (and in terms of tracking capabilities, if not method).

 

This was dk2 I have yet to test or use later headsets.

 

Gran Turismo 7* GT6 was released in 2013 for the PS3.

 

I would not know been a while since I owned a console just mensions gran turismo in press release we really at 7 already wow.

 

So a playstation only just does 30fps a 1080p, how are they imagining they can get 120fps on a resolution only slightly smaller? The motion sickness present in the DK2 is from low fps (60). For consoles, can't imagine this being any more faddy than the xbox kinect.

 

It would be trivial for the PS4 to output at 120hz, the game developers just have to reduce the graphics settings on their games.

Of course, that will never happen; the shiny stuff sells.