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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.

17 of 35 comments (clear)

  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 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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...)

      --
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    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. 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 jones_supa · · Score: 1

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

  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 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 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')

  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