Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Epic's VR Demo Scene For the GTX 980 Now Runs On Morpheus PS4 Headset At 60 FPS

Posted by timothy on from the blit-blit-bloop-bleep dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Originally created as a Unreal Engine 4 demo scene to push the limits of VR-capable graphics on the Oculus Rift 'Crescent Bay' prototype VR headset, Showdown is now running flawlessly at 60 FPS on Morpheus, Sony's PS4 VR headset. The demo was previously only able to run at Oculus' 90 FPS target VR framerate on the Nvidia GTX 980, a GPU which costs nearly $200 more than the PS4 itself. To the delight of UE4 developers, the performance improvement comes from general optimizations to UE4 on PS4, rather than specific optimizations to Showdown.

35 comments

  1. but I thought 90fps was the thing by OutOnARock · · Score: 1

    Oculus says any less than 90fps will cause motion sickness....

    Does the Sony running at 60fps have this problem?

    1. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sony's headset is meant to reproject frames before render as needed to convert 60+FPS into steady 120FPS.

    2. Re: but I thought 90fps was the thing by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Is that 90fps recommendation universal for all VR headsets, or circumstantial to the game your playing? For example, a scenic stroll through an RPG world vs the twitch-fest that is Call of Duty.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by theArtificial · · Score: 2

      Sony is upscaling again :D

      --
      Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
    4. Re: but I thought 90fps was the thing by ArsonSmith · · Score: 1

      it's to get the best experience over all. I have a gearvr that runs at 60fps and most of the time it's really good althogh some experiences can make me want to play something else.

      My DK2 at 75fps works really good when the games/experinces can maintain that. Otherwise it can be vomit inducing. That's usually only in things that are hacked to run VR through an addon. Many games that never planned to run in VR are not a good time.

      They are pushing for 90FPS and have a tech in the SDK called time warp which can help with minor drops below that by slip streaming fake frames.

      Over all I'm pretty excited about both the new Steam VR Vive and the CV1. I don't have a PS4 but if i did I'd be excited about Morpheus as well.

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
    5. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They're right, if I watch any porn with a framerate below 90fps I get motion sickness and my willy goes soft.

    6. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not necessarily. If they do on the fly video encoding and streaming of the game to the headset and use something like SmoothVideo to interpolate the frames, it could look quite good.

    7. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

      Sony's headset is meant to reproject frames before render as needed to convert 60+FPS into steady 120FPS.

      That seems fine as far as display goes, but part of that requirement for 90+FPS is that head-tracking is congruent... if "real" tracking only is happening at 60FPS, will the faster display framerate really matter as far as people feeling sick after a while (or in some cases instantly...)

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    8. Re: but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Its to combat making the user sick. On a monitor, 60fps doesn't trick your mind into thinking the game is real, but put that same display to cover your entire field of vision, including blocking out your actual environment, your brain loses its sense of reality. one of the ways your brain can tell the difference in the monitor scenario is the "framerate" of the real world to compare the monitor to. When you take that away, that 60fps makes you sick, since your brain actually sees the world at a much higher frame rate.

      Now, this is not to say that you can necessarily notice that difference on a conscious level when comparing the monitor to the real world, since the brain filters a lot of that out of our conscious thought process, but it causes our brain a lot of headaches, partly because it doesn't have enough information to interpolate the frame rate to match its high speed rate, or maybe our minds are addicted to that high speed, and it makes us sick to go without it.

      Either way, some are affected less than others, but a good way to tell is if you get car sick, you are probably going to be more affected by this.

    9. Re: but I thought 90fps was the thing by grumbel · · Score: 2

      The 90fps is pretty much required everywhere, as the issue is your head motion, not the action happening in the game world itself. If the screen image and your head motion aren't in sync the whole virtual world is wobbling around and can make you motion sick extremely very fast. However both Sony and Oculus have a form of timewarp frame interpolation that can take the last rendered image and reproject it to your new head position, this allows smoothing out lower framerates a little. Sony is using it in some games all the time to scale an 60fps input to a 120fps output. On the Rift it's used more as an emergency tool when the framerate dips.

    10. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not necessarily. If they do on the fly video encoding and streaming of the game to the headset and use something like SmoothVideo to interpolate the frames, it could look quite good.

      From what I have read, it is not really interpolating the frames (which would increase the latency, by the way), but it is more like panning or "scrolling" the last available frame - with some correction for 3D - in response to head movement, in order to make looking around in the virtual world smoother. In other words, the scene would still be rendered at 30 fps or whatever the console is capable of, but with smooth 120 fps head tracking.

    11. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, if I understand correctly, the head tracking is at 120 fps, and the reprojection is basically like scrolling a 2D picture (in a way that looks correct in 3D) until a new rendered frame is available.

    12. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Does the Sony running at 60fps have this problem?

      Doesn' matter, it is still Sony.

      If the product itself doesn't screw you over in some way they will find another way to abuse you.
      If you are among those who like that kind of stuff than please ignore this warning.

    13. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by Kartu · · Score: 1

      I've actually used demo version of the Oculus Rift.
      Also, many of colleagues did.
      The things will cause sickness to many, no matter the FPS.

      Sony's devs also mentioned it, by the way.
      One thing is getting rid of sickness caused by rendering glitches, you could fix that.
      But there is inherent sickness caused by your eyes seeing what your vestibular system does not experience.

    14. Re: but I thought 90fps was the thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, 90 FPS is only needed for pussies who get are frail and easily get sick. I've used every single type of 3D HMD or stereoscopic glasses. From anaglyph movies to ViewMasters to shutter glasses on the Sega Master System and later Quake at 35Hz to the Sony Glasstron to polarized lenses to modern shutter glasses to Google Cardboard to Oculus Rift and never once did I ever feel sick or disoriented so speak for yourself, asshole.

    15. Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing by SuperDre · · Score: 1

      But so is Oculus, they're advising to use timewarping to get more fluid fps..

  2. No real-time shadows? by edxwelch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From the looks of the video clip the optimisation is done by removing real-time shadows. That would be the same as setting the quality to the lowest level.

    1. Re:No real-time shadows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That reminds me of when people were comparing GTA IV on the XBOX 360 and PS3 "It looks the same!" No. The Xbox version didn't have all kinds of little things, like shadows under the railway and bridges... I guess a lot of people really don't notice that stuff.

    2. Re: No real-time shadows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But does the original demo run reflections on all surfaces? If not, what's the point?

    3. Re:No real-time shadows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But the PS3 version looked all washed out when it came to the colour. In the end though, the game was amazing looking no matter what system you played it on.

    4. Re:No real-time shadows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      From the looks of the video clip the optimisation is done by removing real-time shadows. That would be the same as setting the quality to the lowest level.

      Reducing the visual quality is always the most effective way to improve the performance on consoles, assuming that the optimization was decent enough to begin with. "Low level console coding" may be worth 10-20% at best, but cutting down the resolution, frame rate, and image quality/effects can make the hardware requirements several times lower.

    5. Re:No real-time shadows? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      The PS3 version of GTA IV was extremely choppy down to being unplayable.

    6. Re:No real-time shadows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      According to the Oculus Connect presentation, there weren't any dynamic shadows on the PC version either.

  3. from what I read... by ebrandsberg · · Score: 1

    the GTX 980 was doing 90 fps without 2 years of optimization while the PS4 is now doing 60fps. Now, they are extrapolating the 60fps to 120fps for VR. From the article:

    "But now Showdown can run flawlessly at 60 FPS on Sony’s Morpheus headset for PS4, says J.J. Hoesing, Senior Engine Programmer on Epic’s VR Team. The demo of course takes advantage of Sony’s ‘asynchronous reprojection’ technique to ultimately output at 120 FPS."

    Translation: Two eyes means two frames, so you get 120fps from 60fps. Right?

    1. Re:from what I read... by pavon · · Score: 1

      The demo of course takes advantage of Sony’s ‘asynchronous reprojection’ technique to ultimately output at 120 FPS." Translation: Two eyes means two frames, so you get 120fps from 60fps. Right?

      No, they are talking about a technique that is also used by Oculus to translate variable frame rate renderings to smooth fixed frame rate output without judder.

    2. Re:from what I read... by pavon · · Score: 2

      Here is a presentation given by John Carmack that explains it a bit better than my first link.

    3. Re:from what I read... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lets not forget the 90fps was at 2160×1200 while the 60fps was at 1920×1080.

      2160 * 1200 => 2,592,000
      2592000 * 90 => 233,280,000

      1920 * 1080 => 2,073,600
      2073600 * 60 => 124,416,000

      233280000 - 124416000 => 108,864,000

      So the GTX 980 was pushing around 109 million more pixels per second, or a 1.875 times increase in pixels per second.

      Now, throw in the fact that this is two different engine releases, and the same improvements that affect the PS4 version also improve the PC version, and you will see why this is not really a story.

      This is just marketing. Now, that said, those guys at Epic are doing some amazing work to come this far, but still.

    4. Re:from what I read... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lets not forget the 90fps was at 2160×1200 while the 60fps was at 1920×1080.

      So the GTX 980 was pushing around 109 million more pixels per second, or a 1.875 times increase in pixels per second.

      Add to that that the PS4 version might very well have reduced the image quality in other ways (someone above claims it has worse dynamic lighting and shadows), and then it is no longer that impressive on a GPU that is "only" about 3 times slower than the GTX 980.

    5. Re:from what I read... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      By default the Oculus SDK is drawing to a render target that's ~70% larger than the panel resolution in order to get something that approximates 1 sample per pixel in the center of your vision. With the DK2's 1080p panel it's actually rendering something closer to 1440p. In Valve's talk at GDC they mention an even larger desired render target (96% larger than Vive's 2160x1200 panel) and give a total of 457 mpixels/sec.

    6. Re:from what I read... by SuperDre · · Score: 1

      the improvements to the PS4 UE4 MIGHT also improve the PC version, but it's not 100%, as the PS4 version is optimized to run on a one specific hardware, which also cut's out a lot of overhead, and that kind of optimization can be very benificial.. If developers got the time to actually know a specific PC GPU's inside out, then there would be a lot of performance increase available, but, it's useless as there are so many different GPU's out there with so many different PC configurations, it's no actual use trying to optimize for a specific configuration..
      And that's the advantage the consoles have and why first generation games always look worse as second and certainly third generation games on the same console..

  4. efficient prediction/interp also necessary by electrosoccertux · · Score: 1

    Oculus says any less than 90fps will cause motion sickness....

    Does the Sony running at 60fps have this problem?

    side note: Alex Vlachos is the head of something-or-the-other-VR-development at Valve and gave a fascinating presentation at GDC2015 which GDC Vault has kindly opened up viewing of for free. This is where parent's 90fps comment came from.

    What I found particularly interesting was their use of interpolation combined with efficient stacking of GPU API calls in advance of the next V-Sync to ensure the GPU hits the frame sync immediately. Their pipelined architecture predicts 2 frames in advance, updates the predictions for the frames with the latest head-trajectory calculations right before dispatch, and can blah blah go watch the video. He's an entertaining personality, talks fast to keep you engaged, and covers the content quite efficiently. In fact, I'm going to go re-watch it right.

    1. Re:efficient prediction/interp also necessary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      side note: Alex Vlachos is the head of something-or-the-other-VR-development at Valve and gave a fascinating presentation at GDC2015 which GDC Vault has kindly opened up viewing of for free. This is where parent's 90fps comment came from.

      Is the backlight really strobed at 90 Hz ? I guess that improves the perceived responsiveness of the display compared to simply holding the last frame (which essentially acts as a temporal lowpass filter), but some people will have headaches from staring into that for hours. PWM backlight dimming on modern LCD monitors usually runs at 200+ Hz, and 90 has been documented to cause problems.

    2. Re:efficient prediction/interp also necessary by electrosoccertux · · Score: 1

      hm, good question. I only had problem on crt 72hz, but I've heard of that regarding LED LCDs strobing at low brightness levels ('flicker')

    3. Re:efficient prediction/interp also necessary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hm, good question. I only had problem on crt 72hz, but I've heard of that regarding LED LCDs strobing at low brightness levels ('flicker')

      LCDs are worse at the same frequency because of the higher intensity of the flicker. A CRT does not fade out completely between the frames, whereas a LED backlight toggles between being fully lit and entirely black as a hard edged square wave. And with a VR headset, it is the only source of visible light.

  5. Diminishing returns etc etc by Kartu · · Score: 1

    Bottom line:

    1) an obvious example of diminishing returns on modern GPUs, also, go check Dark Sorcerer demo on PS4 (PS4 GPU is roughly between AMD 7850 and AMD 7870)

    2) somebody managed to bake yet another article about AMD product, without mentioning AMD