Carmack Compares Oculus Quest Hardware Power To Last-Gen Game Consoles (arstechnica.com) 73
During a talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, Oculus' CTO, John Carmack, compared the company's newly announced Oculus Quest headset to the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of power. Ars Technica reports: That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well. "It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said. Expecting Rift-level performance from a self-contained mobile headset like the quest isn't realistic, Carmack said, partly for simple electrical reasons. While a high-end gaming PC often draw up to 500 watts of power, Carmack said the Quest only uses about 5W, a tidbit that should be of benefit to the Quest's still unconfirmed battery-life statistics.
That relative lack of hardware power is going to require some developers to adopt "a different programming style that's been necessary on the PC," Carmack warned. "With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don't need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love. You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform." That's not an insurmountable problem, Carmack suggested, as long as developers focus on the dozen or so things that players really need to concentrate on in an average game, rather than "thousands" of pieces of graphical fluff. He suggested developers look back to the lessons of platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo DS to see how developers crafted memorable experiences on much less-powerful hardware. Carmack went on to say that "realistically, we're going to end up competing with the Nintendo Switch... they'll pick up Quest as [a] mobile device, just like Switch."
That relative lack of hardware power is going to require some developers to adopt "a different programming style that's been necessary on the PC," Carmack warned. "With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don't need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love. You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform." That's not an insurmountable problem, Carmack suggested, as long as developers focus on the dozen or so things that players really need to concentrate on in an average game, rather than "thousands" of pieces of graphical fluff. He suggested developers look back to the lessons of platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo DS to see how developers crafted memorable experiences on much less-powerful hardware. Carmack went on to say that "realistically, we're going to end up competing with the Nintendo Switch... they'll pick up Quest as [a] mobile device, just like Switch."
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As long there's enough memory... (Score:3)
You just can shove a crapload of big textures and pretend the hardware is more powerful than it actually is.
Baking, PRT, more baking, normal maps...
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Textures are only sampled N times per pixel onscreen, not mattering if its a 32x32 or 4096x4096 piece of thing.
Of course, caches may get into play, but i never seen an actual performance hit caused by a bigger texture, unless was a texture being pulled from the main RAM thru a slow bus (not that there is such thing as fast card bus).
Now anisotropic filtering on the other hand....
Also i don't think we're talking PS1 levels of low poly here.
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This is exactly why i said "unless was a texture being pulled from the main RAM", which is what happens when you run out of VRAM, which is why the OP is also named "as long there's enough memory".
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Baked GI can look quite convincing as long you don't actually rotate objects around.
Also you can kinda get away with dynamic simple light with baked ambient occlusion, like it's done with super mario galaxy.
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Thanks for nothing (Score:1)
Hey Facebook! you suckered me into a high end PC for the Rift and now you are abandoning me to compete with Nintendo - suck it!
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Come on, it's not like it's that hard to survive the next nintendo portable thing. The PSP did survived it quite well and also the...
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Or Not (Score:5, Insightful)
lack of hardware power is going to require some developers to adopt "a different programming style that's been necessary on the PC,".
Yeah, they'll either have to do that, or simply not develop for the platform. I wonder which they will do.
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Yeah, they'll either have to do that, or simply not develop for the platform. I wonder which they will do.
Why wonder when you can look at similar platforms, e.g. Anything Nintendo has ever made.
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Shouldn't he be sitting in a parking lot somewhere in a Ferrari?
This means throw out OOP and C++ (Score:2, Insightful)
C++ written in OOP doesn't respect the modern CPU architecture because it trashes the cache. It doesn't matter that the CPU is blazingly fast if it's waiting several cycles to load data from memory. OOP is the worst thing that has happened in terms of the video games industry (or performance oriented software) because it over-emphasizes some human philosophy by assuming its good to ignore the actual hardware by abstracting away from it. At the end of the day, you are talking to hardware and hardware doesn't
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After watching Mike Acton's video I now realise that my 15 year career of being a software developer was a lie
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The problem with C++ is that it's meant to be a low-level language that you choose for performance, but with OOP it introduces these higher level concepts that negate the performance benefits, making it a less obvious choice as a language. If you don't care about performance then choose Java or C#, it's can get to up to 60% to 80% performance of C++ and you don't need to worry about all the pitfalls. If you care about performance pick C or C++ written in a C-style. C is high performance and actually simpler
Pfft... it's worse than the old PSVR (Score:1)
Sure, the PSVR has a slightly lower resolution at 960x1080xRGB per eye, but it does it at 120Hz.
I've found zero mention whatsoever of what type of screen is actually in it (OLED or LCD), which makes me think it's LCD based. At least the PSVR is an emissive OLED screen meaning black pixels are actually black and not some light-leaked-through-crappy-LCD-cells version of black.
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Re: Pfft... it's worse than the old PSVR (Score:1)
I'm not so sure this'll work (Score:2)
Nice backhand there John (Score:4, Informative)
"With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don't need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love. You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform."
In other words, game developers have become less interested in hardware familiarity, algorithm efficiency, and counting cycles, preferring to let the compiler optimize out their f**kups or the hardware to overwhelm bad style with massive parallelism. I guess I can understand; features and delivery schedules are set by marketing and management and aren't related to reality. And if you are a manger needing to cut overhead, and you decide to hire a bunch of fresh-out-of-school straight-A engineers in, let's say, southeast Asia who look good on paper but can't program worth s**t, you get what's coming to you.
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> You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform."
That strategy worked out great for the Nintendo 64! Let's see how it works out for them...
Takeda said, "When we made Nintendo 64, we thought it was logical that if you want to make advanced games, it becomes technically more difficult. We were wrong. We now understand it's the cruising speed that matters, not the momentary flash of peak power."[2]
Rant. (Score:2)
"With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don't need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love. You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform."
The hotshot programmer tends to deliver a tech demo, not a game.
That is why the Disney or Pixar movie with include end with 400 engineers credited in very fine print and 50 other creative talents given top billing. Script and story, Art design. Character design and animation. Vocal performance . Music and sound.
Give us Rift + wireless + no sensors. Thanks. (Score:3)
I own an Oculus Rift and have spent a substantial number of hours on VR.
What we really want, is an Oculus Rift with:
* Wireless headset. I would be very happy to have a battery back around my belt, or whatever. Please not on my head.
* Sensort-less tracking. I want to be able to take it anywhere
But, having a small bloody computer in there... really? No thanks. I will gladly use my own computer with a nice 1080, or my Gaming laptop with a nice 1050 (not much, but OK) if I really want to take it outside.
I really hope I can hook up the Quest to a PC and use it as a headset.
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Dinosaurs are cool. Plus they have lovely plumage.
This is DOA. For more than one reason. (Score:2)
First, developer support. Unless Facebook is REALLY putting a LOT of money behind it and develop a fair amount of good applications themselves, nobody else will. You'd have to train your staff to program for a platform that will likely have very few users in the beginning and is vastly different from any other platform you developed for so far. This alone will almost certainly guarantee that no AAA studio will jump onto it, they are VERY risk-averse. So what you'll probably get is smaller studios and indies
Hope it flops (Score:1)
Nothing but win (Score:2)
I see nothing but wins here;
- devs who make a game for quest will need to optimize it, this should benefit any platform as well.
- competing with the switch (compared power wise), i fail to see how this is bad, the switch is doing great!