Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Carmack Compares Oculus Quest Hardware Power To Last-Gen Game Consoles (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the less-than-or-equal-to dept.

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."

28 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. As long there's enough memory... by Z80a · · Score: 2

    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...

    1. Re:As long there's enough memory... by Z80a · · Score: 2

      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.

    2. Re:As long there's enough memory... by Z80a · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:As long there's enough memory... by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      Why dont any of you understand that the bulk of the market is people watching those VR porn videos. This product is enough for that purpose.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    4. Re:As long there's enough memory... by Z80a · · Score: 1

      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".

  2. Thanks for nothing by Anonymous Coward · · 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!

    1. Re:Thanks for nothing by Z80a · · Score: 1

      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...

    2. Re:Thanks for nothing by N1AK · · Score: 1

      You might be a sucker but I can't see why anything in this announcement means Facebook suckered you. Your rig will still work, people will still develop for higher end platforms. This could be a really good step for all VR gaming. Companies can only invest so much on developing for VR when it's a tiny market, if standalone devices like this considerably expand the market then the resources spent on providing content for that market will increase. Once a company is well positioned to develop for VR in a limited resource environment they are also in a better position to develop for VR on higher end devices.

  3. Or Not by dohzer · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:Or Not by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      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.

  4. Re:I can see the VR migraines already by Penis++Breath+(TM) · · Score: 1

    Why don't you just step over here and DIE IN A FIRE?

  5. This means throw out OOP and C++ by Anonymous Coward · · 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 care about your philosophy. If you get a cache-miss it can be an order of magnitude slower than if you organise your data properly and follow Data Oriented Design. Check out Mike Acton's talk on this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc). Even Scott Meyers beats around the bush on this topic on how it's a flawed language (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIkqP4JbkE&amp=&index=22&amp=&list=WL&amp=&t=15s)

    1. Re:This means throw out OOP and C++ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      After watching Mike Acton's video I now realise that my 15 year career of being a software developer was a lie

    2. Re:This means throw out OOP and C++ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 and less pretentious than C++. Take a look at how many different meanings the word const takes depending on where you put it. Take a look at all these rules you need to remember - rule of 3 becomes rule of 5 and all the gotchas when doing operator overloading. All the C++11 and 17 features are basically there just to try to fix the broken parts of the language (move operators).

      Also if you every opened up profiler on a C++ application, you see that so much time is wasted on object construction/destruction. "new" is not the same as "malloc" because doing new invokes a constructor and that implicitly sets off a chain reaction of other things like it's member's constructors and fills up the stack with all of this stuff that you probably didn't need at that point in time, trashing the cache.

      It's a common misconception that writing performance oriented code needs to look ugly and hard to understand. C style sequential code is simple to understand and easier to get the compiler to generate assembly that makes more sense in terms of performance. Somewhere along the line we all got caught up in Object Orientation - almost like taking some analogy too far and we convinced ourselves that all these layers of abstraction were necessary and everyone forgot that they were engineers who actually know about hardware and shouldn't try to run away from it

  6. Pfft... it's worse than the old PSVR by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:Pfft... it's worse than the old PSVR by locopuyo · · Score: 1

      It's probably OLED considering the standard Rift is OLED.

      --
      The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
    2. Re: Pfft... it's worse than the old PSVR by batukhan · · Score: 1

      If you're going to compare it to PlayStation VR that's tethered to a console box, you might as well compare it to the Rift which is tethered to a PC

  7. I'm not so sure this'll work by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    folks developed for the 3DS because the install base was so huge. At $400 for a niche tech I don't see this taking off. Plus, well, a lot of the folks I know who want VR want it to be a bit more photo-realistic for... um... reasons. Maybe if they make games like this.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  8. Nice backhand there John by mnemotronic · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
    1. Re:Nice backhand there John by ckatko · · Score: 2

      > 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]

  9. Give us Rift + wireless + no sensors. Thanks. by tonymercmobily · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. I am a simple man. by CptLoRes · · Score: 1

    When Carmack speaks, I listen.

    1. Re:I am a simple man. by blkhawk · · Score: 1

      Dinosaurs are cool. Plus they have lovely plumage.

  11. This is DOA. For more than one reason. by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    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 that can take a risk.

    Then there's the hardware. If the hardware is as powerful as last-gen console hardware, anything you produce will invariably suck if it has to stand against other VR titles on Occulus Rift and Vive that can tap the power of high-end PC gaming hardware. If you want to avoid motion sickness, at least to the best of your ability, you need to be able to produce a smooth simulation. Anything under 30 fps, more likely 50fps, will make people feel queasy. That means the poly count needs to go down. WAY down. In other words, the graphics you'll get will by no means be close to PS3. Playstation, maybe PS2, is more what you could expect.

    A more sensibly comparison would be pitting it against mobile consoles. Comparing this VR set against other VR sets or making people expect playing current console titles in VR will lead to VERY disappointed customers.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  12. Hope it flops by TAz00 · · Score: 1

    Chubby Luckey can suck it

  13. Nothing but win by sad_ · · Score: 1

    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!

    --
    On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
  14. Re:LOL by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

    Shouldn't he be sitting in a parking lot somewhere in a Ferrari?

  15. Rant. by westlake · · Score: 1

    "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.