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Ask Slashdot: Why Don't Graphics Cards For VR Use Real-Time Motion Compensation?
dryriver writes: Graphics cards manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD have gone to great pains recently to point out that in order to experience virtual reality with a VR headset properly, you need a GPU capable of pushing at least a steady 90 FPS per eye, or a total of at least 180 FPS for both eyes, and at high resolutions to boot. This of course requires the purchase of the latest, greatest high-end GPUs made by these manufacturers, alongside the money you are already plonking down for your new VR headset, and a good, fast gaming-class PC. This raises an interesting question: virtually every LCD/LED TV manufactured in the last 5 or 6 years has a 'Real-Time Motion Compensation' feature built in. This is the not-so-new-at-all technique of taking, say, a football match broadcast live at 30 FPS or Hz, and algorithmically generating extra in-between frames in real time, thus giving you a hyper-smooth 200-400 FPS/Hz image on the TV set with no visible stutter or strobing whatsoever. This technology is not new. It is cheap enough to include in virtually every TV set at every price level (thus the hardware that performs the real-time motion compensating cannot cost more than a few dollars total). And the technique should, in theory, work just fine with the output of a GPU trying to drive a VR headset. Now suppose you have an entry level or mid-range GPU capable of pushing only 40-60 FPS in a VR application (or a measly 20-30 FPS per eye, making for a truly terrible VR experience). You could, in theory, add some cheap motion compensation circuitry to that GPU and get 100-200 FPS or more per eye. Heck, you might even be able to program a few GPU cores to run the motion compensation as a real-time GPU shader as the rest of the GPU is rendering a game or VR experience.
So my question: Why don't GPUs for VR use real-time motion compensation techniques to increase the FPS pushed into the VR headset? Would this not make far more financial sense for the average VR user than having to buy a monstrously powerful GPU to experience VR at all?
So my question: Why don't GPUs for VR use real-time motion compensation techniques to increase the FPS pushed into the VR headset? Would this not make far more financial sense for the average VR user than having to buy a monstrously powerful GPU to experience VR at all?
You can't change the angle at which the scene is rendered by interpolating between frames.
It's not the raw framerate. It's that the scene your viewing has to match where you're looking that quickly or you get motion sick.
You can rely on a 24 FPS steady signal when outputting to a television and interpolating the incoming frames is safe and predictable. When your FPS is dynamic due to varying quantities of draw calls, the interpolation becomes far less predictable, and will result in artifacting.
Also, VR headsets render the whole screen, so its not a magical '180 FPS' number when multiplied by two eyes. Two render channels each rendering at 90 FPS doesn't mean the GPU is taxed at '180 FPS', the GPU load depends on pixel density, and high end VR headsets are extremely pixel dense.
Feels like the submitter is a child of some sort...
In order to add a frame between 1 and 2, you have to have received both frame 1 and frame 2. People are already getting sick because what they see and do don't match, you're going to make it worse by making what they see lag further behind what little the headset picks up.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I agree, it's almost motion-sickness inducing.
Plus it looks very unrealistic; quite eerie.
Like interpolating pixels in the uncanny valley.
Oculus 1.3 runtime for the Rift was released with async timewarp. When it was released DK2 users used to earlier runtimes without it were all over the boards with phrases like "holy shit" and "DK3" to explain how ATW changed everything for them. Jitter issues magically disappeared overnight with only a simple software update.
More generally there is one and only one "trick" for improving VR quality going forward and that is foveated rendering. This technology is absolutely critical to any serious vision of future HMDs.
To provide some context cones of our eyes cover a massive (cough cough) 15 degrees of arc. That's it. You can't even lean back and read 1/4 of what is on your monitor without moving your eyeballs around to do it. 4k is overkill.. 1080 is overkill... The future in VR is entirely locked up in sensing eye orientation and optical and or electronic steering of relatively low resolution displays in response.