News Sony opens PlayStation VR pre-orders

Awesome.

I will see how this goes, but will more than likely go this route.

 

With you on this. Seems like a great first step while the hardwear requirements level out a bit for the Oculus ands Vive.

 

That's a significant cost saving considering it will likely end up with a better games list.

 

This was the sort or price I was expecting for the Rift and Vive. I don't think I was the only one.

What are the odds VR becomes the next Wii or 3DTV? A brief fad that fades out in a couple of years.

 

It depends on how quickly they can make the headset good. I read an article where a guy from AMD said that for proper VR you really need 5k screens with huge FPS. Obviously that's not going to happen for a while, but I kinda see his point.

Vive and Oculus are the VHS vs Betamax for 2016. So buying either is taking quite an expensive risk. At least with the Sony one you know you'll definitely get stuff made for it.

I'm pretty much 99% certain now that I will end up getting a PS4 and going that route. However, even though it's "only" around £800 for the full set up I want to see if it goes the same way as the 360's Kinect.

 

Quite high, I think.

It might take a while for it to be admitted (ie: more than a 'couple' of years) as 3DTV was pushed hard for a quite some time... I think VR will be as well... but as long as <1% of the 'gaming public' have it, no sane developer (other than those paid handsomely to hamstring their target market) will develop solely for VR.

If prices drop rapidly, and actual utility goes up (for more than just games) then larger scale adoption will occur and we/I will be proven wrong. Think 3D cards...

There is, however, the "I have a large lump of plastic and electronics strapped to my head" barrier to overcome. Sure, enthusiasts won't care, but others will. People didn't want to wear special glasses for watching the TV... how many, after the initial "wow" factor wears off, will want to strap that to their head to do anything/everything?

 

Most of my friends have the PS3 move controllers that work on ps4 and have picked up a camera for free with a game that requires it.

Advantage of having young kids they like stuff like that I guess.

Sub £400 is still a much better price than Oculus + controllers will be or VIVE currently is.

They will sell a lot to the casual crowd.

VR in general with glasses is a tough area, Oculus dk2 scratches glasses if they are to big a issue a friend of mine had.

Depends what you need glasses for though.

 

Everything - I've got three pairs of glasses: one pair for reading; one pair for middle distance PC use; and one pair for long distance general use (actually, I have varifocals for reading and long distance, and use an old pair of now-too-weak reading glasses for middle use).

And that's a problem: the screens in a VR headmount are probably too close for my eyes to focus comfortably which means that I'd have to wear glasses to use them properly. And then we get into the whole discomfort issue.

I realise I'm in the minority here and I'll probably let the VR wave wash over me, just like I have with 3D (mainly because I can't use 3D glasses because my eyes are weird )

 

Cheaper, but i doubt will be anywhere near as good as the Vive or Oculus. For a start it's only 1080p compared to 1200p and to get it running at the frames they are quoting i would imagine the graphics will be inferior to the PC versions even with the addon GPU box thing that comes with it. Move controllers are terrible in every way. Keep the kid's amused i suppose.

 

Graphics in VR will be greatly reduced no matter platform, You will need a 980ti at least to get Eliteangerous frontier running on near max settings in VR.

There recommended settings are at least a 980 with alot of ram and cpu. ( Which gets the target fps at medium on Elite confirmed by Frontier themselves.) Which pc versions do you expect to get made of current playstation titles?

PS VR will be first party titles that are core to playstation only. Anyone thinking sony will joint release them for PC is in a different world.

Sonys Launch title list is impressive with Ace Combat 7 and Gran Turismo sport been 2 huge titles. EVE Valkerie is the only cross platform title on the games lists that I have saw for the VR headsets.

 

Playstation VR will be the Eyetoy of this generation, with a games selection to match. If they support it in triple-AAA titles they've have to upscale to maintain even 30 fps; It'll be no more than a novelty, unsuitable for serious play.

Vive and Oculus are entering the market prematurely, but with good reason - While initially seen as premature DX12, and it's ability to treat gpu resources as a fungible commodity, will give the perception of "VR technology" advancing at breakneck speed as its more efficient concurrent rendering pipeline is on top of normal advances in gpu manufacturing processes.

The Oculus will die a slow death because Facebook are trying to introduce it to an ecosystem that simply isn't conducive to it's survival, while the 2nd generation Vive will be launched once DX12 adoption has reached a plateau as the first truly feasible gaming VR platform.

 

Drive Club has been optimised for VR so I am in.

 

I cancelled my Rift order last week. As much as I think the the technology is great. I have decided that my £600 is better spent elsewhere.

I would guess that a lot of people who are interested in VR would more likely have a PS4 than a capable PC, and Sony giving this a relatively low cost compared to the Rift is going to be a huge game changer for them.

Also being a fixed hardware specification would mean that developers have a much easier time ensuring that their game will work for the maximum amount of consumers at an acceptable framerate and quality.

 

Resolution is too low and the FPS is 60 (AKA 18ms per frame as they announced), which physiologically is not acceptable according to research.
Or in other words people can only use this for short moments, making any 'large game library' not be enough to not turn off people.

Sony can't just ignore the reality of the human brain and toss in a headset like that and expect it to be the same as something which is the result of study. Unless of course.. they just want to take money from suckers.

 

The min fps per game is 60 fps the target is 90-120

 

It's a low end system though, and it needs to do the view shift, so double calculations and drawing two scenes, albeit each eye only needing half horizontal resolution on the drawing part of course. Oh and also do the camera tracking on top of it all, so I don't see them do more than 60 on most any game.

But the proof is in the pudding, and we'll just have to wait to see what the reviewers conclude and how actual players experience it to know how it'll work out.

 

Reviewers tested drive club in VR and said it looks identical to the game outside of VR but is running at a higher resolution due to reduced cars, 8 instead of 12 and using a more optimised engine than they had available on launch of orginal game.

I think the graphics that consoles can output has always been surprising, Uncharted 3 on PS3 looked a lot better than the PC ports we get 99% of the time. It took till this year to see games graphically pass what it was doing on 9 year old hardware.

PC gaming has always struggled between the needs for high end graphics with having the systems capable of delivering it.

Batman and Just cause 3 are 2 such examples of them going beyond the means of most buyers with high min specs and poor fps across the board no matter system till recent patches on just cause 3, Batman will never be fixed for PC.

Native PC games that push graphical boundries are few and far between The orginal Farcry and Crysis since then unique PC games are Mobas or MMOs. We get very few single player titles.

Elite Dangerous tries but the latest expansion needs a very high spec PC to get decent figures on.

4K 60fps is at least next gen away for most new titles if not further away.

 

@Rollo
From what I understand it's also because on the PC you have to run things through a layer like DirectX and that just has a toll compared to having a fixed system under control of the console maker.
But the new DirectX12 with its mantle-like functionality should push things along a fair deal to alleviate the DirectX bottleneck.
Same for the new OpenGl versions (and Vulkan).

Although it will probably will never reach the same utilisation of resources as a console I suppose.

But oddly if you look at the so called demo scene, where they do quite incredible things in tiny bits of code. you have to wonder if the game makers are really trying on the PC platform