Slashdot Mirror
Valve Releases SteamVR Perf Test To Measure Your PC (pcper.com)
Vigile writes: Valve took another step to prepare the world for VR gaming by releasing the SteamVR Performance Test today. This application that is free to download through Steam, runs a portion of the Aperture Science Robot Repair demo originally built for the HTC Vive VR headset, and reports back performance metrics and a grade for your PC's hardware. Scores include a Not Ready, Capable and Ready result as well as an "average fidelity" numeric score that is even more interesting. Valve integrated a dynamic fidelity feature "that adjusts image quality of the game in a way to avoid dropped frames and frame rates under 90 FPS" — a target for an acceptable VR experience. Early results put the GeForce GTX 980 Ti at the top of the GPU stack though AMD's Radeon products do very well at every price point below $600. Is your wallet ready?
Here's the link to the application on steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/...
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Windows only means VR games will only be available on Windows? Seeing as how Valves own OS is Ubuntu based, one would think they'd support that as well.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
My build about 1.5 years ago was old drives from old PC, AMD 6 core, and 8GB RAM, plus a decent big PSU and an AMD R& GPU. Total cost ~$600. Since then I have upgraded to a Samsung PRO SSD, and upgraded to a better nvidia GPU. But I was able to do it ON MY TERMS.
Try that with our rootkit pal sony.
Silence is a state of mime.
Windows only means VR games will only be available on Windows? Seeing as how Valves own OS is Ubuntu based, one would think they'd support that as well.
Steam Hardware & Software Survey: January 2016
Windows --- All Flavors 95.4% [No change]
Win 7 64 bit 34.3%
Win 10 64 bit 32.8% [Up 1.5%]
Win 8.1 64 bit 14.0%
OSX --- All Flavors 3.55% [No change]
Linux --- All Flavors 0.95% [No change]
Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS 64 bit 0.2%
Ubuntu 15.10 64 bit 0.2%
Linux 64 bit 0.1%
Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa 64 bit 0.1%
It would be mean to remind folks here how often Linux Mint has been suggested as a plausible migration path away from Windows.
What I find more interesting and unexpected are the stats for Language. The US has 41 million native Spanish speakers and only Mexico has more.
English 46%
Russian 18%
Simplified Chinese 6%
Spanish 5%
Unfortunately Macs are all wrong, both from a hardware perspective and a software perspective.
The killer issue is that no Mac ships with a GPU fast enough to meet the Vive or Rift recommended specs. The fastest Mac Pro GPU is essentially a Radeon R9 280X, but the recommended spec is an R9 290 (and don't let the name fool you, there's a good 20%+ per difference between the two). And that's the fastest Mac; every other Mac Pro configuration, the iMacs, and the MacBook Pros all ship with slower GPUs. So right off the bat, you don't have enough performance to match what devs are being told to design their games around. Also, most of the Macs use Apple's Optimus-like implementation of utilizing the iGPU plus the dGPU, which means the display ports are not wired directly to the dGPU.
However software is also a big problem. Only Apple distributes GPU driver updates these days, and while OS X is a competent platform, it's not a cutting edge platform for new driver features or API updates. In particular, AMD and NVIDIA have developed low-latency rendering paths for their GPUs specifically for VR in order to cut down on input lag, and ultimately motion sickness. These low-latency paths are not available under OS X, and since Apple maintains the OS and distributes drivers, they would need to participate to get any of this supported. And unfortunately, Apple moves slow on the graphics tech front.
Mac users do tend to be upscale buyers with more money to spend, but the technical issues coupled with the small user base makes this a non-starter. Early adopters are going to fall into the "PC Master Race" crowd: enthusiasts who are primarily PC users and build workstation-class systems with high-performance parts.