Yesterday, Sony revealed its VR device for PS4 called Project Morpheus. Naturally, we’ve been waiting to see what Oculus Rift’s reactions would be to that announcement and today John Carmack shared his first thoughts about it.
According to Carmack, console gamers should expect a game that ran 60 fps on PS3 to be done in VR on PS4.
As Carmack said:
“Calibrate PS4 VR expectations: a game that ran 60 fps on PS3 could be done in VR (stereo 1080 MSAA low latency 60 fps) on PS4.”
The reason Carmack suggests 60fps is pretty obvious. While running a game in stereo mode, your framerate gets halved. This means that 60fps feels like 30fps in stereo mode (as a 60fps game runs at 30fps in both of the dual VR screens). This also explains why most 3D monitors are running at 120Hz (thus giving gamers the ability to run games at 60fps in stereo mode).
Naturally, fans of Sony’s console got slightly annoyed by Carmack’s claims and when a fan told Carmack to stop snipping PS4 and focus with the Oculus Rift team in their own VR device, Carmack replied and said:
“That wasn’t sniping; I think PS4 is a great platform, sufficient to drive VR. People just need to understand the demands.”
PS4 already has a number of games running at 60fps, meaning that they could work on Project Morpheus. Yes, the experience will be less enjoyable than the one of Oculus Rift running on high-end PCs, but that’s irrelevant at this point.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
Honestly, I don’t give a penny for VR. I don’t really want to play games differently as I play them now. Current games won’t adapt to VR as easy as I’d want.
I’m all into ray tracing now. Just hope to live long enough to see games adopting that technology.
Carmack and co are probably freaking out over morpheus. In one press release, Sony has stolen all of the thunder for VR from oculus. One will be an industry mainstay, one will become a PC accessory. Can’t blame him for being coy and under-enthused, if Oculus had stock, it would’ve plummeted yesterday.
What? They stole what from who? They didn’t do shit. Valve does vr now, microsoft does vr and sony does vr. Better for us, competition is good. Carmack fears no one, im sure he has things under control.
Maybe Oculus shouldn’t have written off console support so early. For a start-up like Oculus, who doesn’t even have a consumer product on the market, to go head-to-head against the marketing, money, and developer support of Sony has got to be intimidating.
To be honest, one of Sony’s commercials probably costs as much as the total dev costs associated with Rift so far.
Competition is great for the industry but there has to be a lot of sweaty brows at Oculus right now.
Well Sony has interest for VR for it’s console. So all us billions of PC gamers couldn’t care less what Sony does or doesn’t do. Oculus is an exclusive PC product focused on PC gaming. Right up my alley
I’m a PC gamer too but there are a large amount of blockbuster console games I want to experience in VR. In fact, blockbuster PC-only games are becoming a thing of the past due to development costs and piracy. Indies are fun, but choice is better. I might get a Rift, but it will depend on developer support. I’m not paying $300-$400 for exclusive indie games in VR.
It’s cool if you don’t have a PS4 tho, I understand your position better now.
You are talking about console exclusivities (’cause multiplatform will always be better on PC), but PC has it’s own stuff like ArmA, Star Citizen, lots and lots of simulators and so on. It really depends on what rocks your boat.
Sounds like this is a battle of consoles vs pcs again. The games you listed are all games I don’t personally have an interest in. I’m also lucky enough to own all the platforms as well as a really powerful pc. I tend to favour console type games with a controller. However if I can get the same title on PC with full controller support, then it’s an obvious choice. My PC is hooked in my lounge to a large TV with wireless 360 controller. It is in effect a super console. I still buy consoles for the exclusives and because I enjoy the controlled experience. I’m personally looking forward to whichever VR headset turns out best. As a predominantly 3rd person gamer it remains to be seen how many titles will interest me but I have had some great experiences with the early Rift prototypes.
Like I’ve said, it really depends what you like. Personally, I can’t stand the controler (gave up RDR and Alan Wake on consoles due to extremely bad control scheme and FPS) and I’m not interested in any of the consoles exclusive content.
However, if you do like that, then by all means, enjoy! Each to it’s own style.
True that. Yeah funny how opinions differ. RDR is my favourite game of all time. I liked Alan Wake as well. You could’ve played Alan Wake on PC though, no? Shame they never did RDR on PC – for the GPU improvements (and for you, – mouse controls).
Yes, I did finish it on PC in Eyefinity; whole different game! 🙂
PS 4 is weak even now. How do you think it will keep up in the future, by maintaining the current complexity and quality of games? That’s no win in my book. You cannot cheat here with lower FPS, like a lot of devs have done on old gen, letting FPS go into 20s.
I’m pretty sure Oculus is still in development, all Sony did was reveal a concept to gain attention and mass appeal, I really hope they dont do an Apple and claim it as innovative and their own idea, VRs been around for many years tbh.
Matters of fact, Microsoft had a patent of a VR implementation since two years ago…just saying.
Lol not even close. Sonys VR is only a prototype now with tech demos, not games. If u seriously think VR will flourish and be a mainstay on consoles, ur crazy. It will flop and big. $300 to buy plus a ps eye, and games that will suck and there won’t even be many released at all as it is a gimmick/niche peripheral. U are loving in the clouds champ lol, time to come back to reality.
Hows that ps now going? What about that failed 3d? or ps vita? People are overhyped from something that is a prototype now while oculus is actually doing it right now.
typical sony dtrone damage controling and defending sony believing that everyone who doesnt lick sony’s D is hating sony.
Last time I checked everyone was still waiting for Oculus Rift, and not Sony’s knock-off. Also last time I checked, everyone was waiting to see how Oculus Rift will change the landscape of gaming, not Sony’s poorer version of it.
Articles about Oculus Rift on tech and gaming websites outnumber articles about Sony’s VR by a ratio of 10:1, if not more.
People will talk about a Sony knock-off for a while, just like they did when Sony copied the Wiimote, but in the end the better craft will reign supreme, which is Oculus Rift, a hardware that will run games better,, more polished with much higher visuals and framerates than anything Sony could come up with.
Wow, is that you John?
Fact – Sony has first party devs to build it’s VR games, Oculus doesn’t.
Fact – Articles outnumber Sonys because their tech was just formally announced.
Fact – The Move worked very very well, much better than the wiimote, it just wasn’t supported well enough and the built in audience wasn’t interested in a nintendo knockoff.
Fact – Sony has access to much more B2B support for the R&D, manufacturing, marketing and end sales of a VR unit. Oculus has not even shipped a consumer grade product yet and as any company’s first product release, it will undoubtably be plagued by problems (not the least of which the tech is a year later than originally promised).
Fact – Sony has pre-existing relationships with every publisher, developers and retailer in the industry. These relationships don’t spring up in a day, a week or a year. Have these channels available will position Sony for VR mass-market sales, something Oculus will not be able to match regardless of what you think.
Now, who is this “everyone” you are canvassing? You and your two friends? These “people” you refer to, is that your family? Or just the people at the Oculus offices?
Everyone has focused on Oculus for lack of a better tech, now we have a major player bringing out their take and it will be the one to watch. Oculus is nothing more than an indie product until they ship ANY product to retail customers.
Pretty sure there’s a lot more people waiting for Oculus Rift than Sony’s knock-off.
Oculus doesn’t need first party devs, having third party devs implementing VR functions to their games is what people are actually looking for, not some more exclusive titles for a closed market.
There are rumors of Sony VR for a long time, it’s not something that was just discovered.
If the move was so great, why nobody bothered buying/using it, it was almost a dead gadget that no one was interested in.
Oculus in on the spot light by many major companies, I’m sure they won’t have problems shipping their product.
Oculus already has tons of partners and many companies are looking forward to its arrival, they realize they can profit more from an open platform than a closed one.
As for everyone, I’m sure the number of people talking about/looking for Oculus Rift is objectively higher compared to Sony’s copy.
And everyone is focused on Oculus because it’s something that can actually change gaming, unlike Sony’s knock-off which will be restricted and controled by a single company and won’t do anything that the Oculus does better.
Google is the exception – not the rule.
That being said? Sony has the money/resources to make their VR infinitely better than Oculus… Wonder if any other major players are going to be jumping into the ring? http://gamerant.com/microsoft-vr-headset-xbox/ Combining VR with the Kinect functionality could be awesome for gaming. (The first real gaming application for Kinect.)
Will Sony’s version be on the PC, if not it’s not competition.
you’re nuts. I’m a big Sony fan myself, but if you think the final version of Oculus running on a high end PC is not going to utterly wipe the floor with the PS4 counterpart, you’re delusional. It will be cool, doubtless, but it will be nothing compared to what will be achieved on PC. Between stuff like Oculus and Steambox and Star Citizen, PC’s are finally going to get the love they deserve. I don’t think Carmack is the least bit scared, he’s just honest, and he’s one of the most respected coders in the business, so he knows what he’s talking about.
no ps4 game right now is locked in 60 fps…im not talking indy, i mean there full feature games. So the article is wrong in that right.
Plus the big thing is you need the ps camera with this…as far as i can see, and we dont know the COST or the full SPECS, so its all just crazy to speculate when they left so much out
“PS4 already has a number of games running at 60fps, meaning that they
could work on Project Morpheus.”
No, the framerate would be halved by rendering for both eyes, so it would be 30fps. With VR framerate is more than bragging rights. It’s necessary for it to feel right.
“No, the framerate would be halved by rendering for both eyes, so it would be 30fps” I just wrote about this above – I don’t think it works in the same way as 3d monitors. The rift halves the screen space rather than giving a full frame per eye. By halving the screen-space the framerate should go up by a factor of 4 (roughly). Then by having two sets (one for each eye) the overall effect should even out. Just a theory though.
There’s still geometry and texture fill rate. They will have to draw nearly every object twice. So if a game was pushing the polys, it’s going to be doing it twice over
Fillrate in pixel dependent. Even if rendered in true stereoscopic, much of the work done per
frame is not required to be re-calculated (per eye) eg, physics, skeletal mesh animation, transforms, particles, post processing etc. Stereoscopic would mean rendering two sets of pixels but each at half res. Fillrate would be the same. Most heavy lifting is done in the pixel shaders and postfx which are entirely 2D screenspace based (resolution which in total is sub 1080p and not affected by split screen).
There could be interesting new ways of optimizing true stereo. Framestore just did some interesting optimizations to get both stereo shots rendered in one rendering pass (during production of Gravity). They switched to Arnold and it would have killed rendering time to have to re-render twice. Not sure if that tech could make its way across but i’m sure great progress will come.
You’re probably right about some of that. I haven’t kept up with all of the advances in stereoscopic rendering, but at least back when I was paying more attention (around doom3 era), I remember reading about much more naive implementations where the entire field of view was rendered twice. Carmack is usually ahead of the curb on all things graphics, so he’s probably right if he still believes it effectively halves the framerate.
Particles wouldn’t have to have their position calculated twice, but they would still have to be rendered twice, and if they were very pretty, alpha blended, expensive particles, they would probably have to reduce the total number on screen. Same thing with pretty/expensive shaders. Even if they could make it render only half of what was originally needed for each eye, the best looking exclusives usually take into account the camera angles the player can be at, and maximize particles/shaders/npc count based off that. So that would all be doubled since most of the screen in vr is taken up by the same objects and scenery, just seen from a slightly different perspective. It definitely doesn’t just cancel things out because of the half resolution of each eye.
Rendering two images is essentially requires rendering two offset viewports. It may be a single 1080p screen, but two separate viewports requires rendering the scene twice, albeit at half resolution. Performance is more dependent on rendering than the pixels themselves. Meaning, for example, two viewports at 640×720 requires greater processing time than a single 1280×720 render.
o_0 Carmack and… so what 😉 We have to see all VR in Actual action.
PS4 can run 1080p games at 60fps. If the panel inside Morpheus is similar to Oculus (I believe from what I’ve read that it is) then it renders both cam frustrums/eyes on the same 1080p panel. That obviously means that it is still only using 1080p split in two (as you see in youtube vids of the Rift). Surely that’s only a little more overhead than drawing one 1080p image? Also part of that screen space is always black/unused. So the PS3 60fps remark seems odd but it’s not an area I work in so maybe someone else can explain it?
“fans of Sony’s console got slightly annoyed”
when they are not ? they are even here and defending it right below my comment
yeah most butthurt hyporcites ever
x360 has triggers, triggers suck, ps4 hasm them ps4 is now awesome.
PSN was free on ps3, ahahahha now psn is paid on ps4, but hey sony is king, sony knows what they are doing.
They bash pc exlusives, now they are on ps4, they playing them.
They try to downplay titanfall sucess calling it a flop because its not a 90+ game. Lol last time i checked knack was a 50 game and shadowfall wasa 90 and not they mad turds are hyping infamous a series that barely got 2 million sales and was always a 80% game.
I guess when it comes out i can all it flop because its not a 90 game.
Seriously there are the most delusional hypocrites in the whole planet.
They attack everyone who doesnt suck sony’s D with em, they attacked Carmack for crying out loud.
Sony drones are the biggest damge control defence force on the planet, its pathetic. Double standards hypocrites.
exactly :))
“knack was a 50 game”
PS Fanboys: Knack was a great game, reviewers don’t know how to play it.
“shadowfall was a 90”
PS Fanboys: the game is the best game ever, just look at the reviews man.
“Indie Games on PC”
PS Fanboys: lol, so much graphics for the master race, lol, you never get AAA super hyper graphic games on you platform.
“Indie Games on PS4”
PS Fanboys: yeah man, sony is winning next-gen war, sony helps developers, sony dominating the whole industry.
“Graphics on PC”
PS Fanboys: yo dude, gameplay is the main focus. gameplay>graphics.
“Graphics on PS4”
PS Fanboys: did you see that ? man this is the best graphics, in your face xdrones and pc*ags.
“Downgrade on a PS4 title”
PS Fanboys: man this is still gorgeus and this game never meant to be the graphical phenomonal and the gameplay is the main focus (by gameplay they mean generic coridor shooter with lots of QTEs)
“Downgrage on an X1 title”
PS Fanboys: lol, they can’t handel the graphics bacuase X1 is not as powerfull as PS4 lol. etc etc…
“Oculus Rift”
PS Fanboys: meh, no one want to play a game with that thing over his/her head, it disqusting and old.
“Project Morpheus”
PS Fanboys: wow man this is a true innovation, carmack was F ed, Oculus who ?, if oculus has stocks it would’ve plummeted yesterday.
___
funny part is most of the times they start they comments on PC gaming site by this “i am a PC gamer BUT” yeah, the big BUT. lol.
This is soo true it’s downright hilarious, they were all complaining about our exclusives which are coming their way now, War Thunder, WarFrame, PlanetSide 2, this behavior sickens me, people need to stop the hate they’re friggin’ material objects made to generate money off of the masses, there’s more important things in life, stop defending these companies, all they’re doing is lining their pockets with your money
Dumb as a brick and wrong.
butthurt as a sonyf@g and mentally ill sony damage control drone.
I love pc and ps4, but to say damage control when they sold 25 million consoles in 18 months is a bit silly, plus your all talking about ps4 fanboys being pathetic, but if you read back your comments you’ll see your just as bad, you get dinlos on all fields pc, ps4, xbox all lavishing there chosen bit of plastic with golden spunk, or you can enjoy all 3 platforms exclusives, total war, uncharted, halo, h1z1, last of us, forza, arma, infamous, gears of war
yeah they are pathetic.
screw titanfall tis a flop despite shadowfall flopped harder.
thief runs like crap on xbone? its because its weak, runs like crap on ps4? its becasue its not optimized.
pc exlusives are crap, now that ps4 has them pc exlusives are ps4 exlusvies and they are amazing.
Same case with psn, i hope sony dies so they can STFU and die alraedy.
its like richie said in review tech usa. They got nothing better to do than defend a company that doesnt give a crap about them.
or like jim sterling said when he said that sony fanboys are the worst.
You seem mentally ill and accusing different people with different opinions of being the same person.
copy & paste ?
he is a troll and a stalker.
blah, blah blah, angry butthurt fanbot.
when you have nothing to say then just shut-up and leave kid 😀
someone else is butthurt and thats sony f@gs who waiting for greatness but it never came so all they do is inspect the industry for people who dont lick sonys d!ck with em and call them butthurt. Hows your papeweight station 4 hanging kiddo?
yeah so we are the graphics wh@res and now they got batsh!t crazy over the order.
Seriously biggest hypocrites ever, they dont see their own downgrades and like deep down and make excuses like “oh optimization was bad” when it happens on xbox they bash it.
Pathetic.
i thought vr was a gimmick but now they going crazy for having it too.
You seem mentally ill and accusing different people with different opinions of being the same person.
lol, console babies are all over the place
Yeah the crybabies are mad.
I love consoles but have a pc to what does that make me.
a gamer ?
and you seem to be a class A stalker who is gonna get pretty dissapointed at this horrible attempt at trolling.
Its ok i know you are a pathetic troll with no life.
blah, blah, blah, keep repeating yourself you nut. You’re getting crazier and angrier by the day. Have fun always being butthurt, you xbot.
i got 14 thumbs up and i am a pc gamer but you are a butthurt sony f@g with no life, enjoy your BUTTHURT you stupid arsewipe.
Speak English beyotch! And Xbot are always annoyed and defending the X1 you clown
lol, who the clown now ?
Nope try again, that still not proper english. Keep trying you F flunky. Btw, Im laughing at you.
laugh at your mom, you can’t even defend your $h$it, this is how i speak english, deal with it or die,lol.
ahahah you pwned the dum sony f@ggot.
he is a joke on those sites going around d1ck irding sony.
you cant even speak english you pathetic muppet.
oh look who it is, dumb and dumber. When you learn how you speak english then get back to me muppet. Hey btw, you still thinking of licking you know what?
ahahha you still mad about the fact no one likes you here and that ps4 doesnt even have one good game to play?
patheticstation 4.
A VR game has to run at 1080p 120 fps (split into two screens at 60 fps each) to feel more believable. PS4 can do that but with reduced visual effects.
That is not how oculus works. Oculus and Sony use just one screen – you render for both eyes in one screen update.
I love how the console wars of 2013 have become VR wars in 2014.
Mobiles are getting VR tech as well
The games wouldn’t be 1080p60 in “most cases.” For VR, the games would need to be a rock solid 1080p60 all the time. No dips. Ever.
I doubt the PS4 is really capable of that without some serious hits to quality. PC remains the only platform suited for VR gaming.
I agree, i dont think the PS4 is powerful enough to pull this off well. Damn, both of these companies went bare bottoms tech they could.
The Morpheus tech demos were reportedly decent.
Well after reading that the Sony VR will have only 90º of vision I don´t like it that much. Though have in mind that it will be made for the Play Station 4 not the PC as far as I can tell…so no problem for the Oculus Rift that will be made for the PC and also have way more wide vision compared to the Sony one.
As others said the frame rates will be important and in consoles that is limited as of now…if they want to give a proper experience (graphics quality/performance) it won´t be that easy to implement.
Let´s see how it works that Sony one…I still don´t own the PS4 (I will but I´ll upgrade my PC way before and get the Oculus Rift as well) so don´t care about it…
Still waiting for the Oculus.
Well this is but obvious!
You cannot compare PC to a console in terms of performance! PS4/XONE cannot even catch the dust left behind by a high-end PC….and since in VR, it truly is all about the base performance of the game, ofcourse Sony’s VR will not be as good as Oculus.
Now, Sony might do some smart hacking to make thing seem like they are awesome, but it never will be as good as a VR on a PC!
Carmack is the man, and whatever he says is the truth. But seriously Im not even slightly excited about VR at all, neithers Sony’s or OR.
Our lord and savior has spoken.
VR gaming will never take off. Too expensive and headaches. Another costly fad with its fair share of problems.
Exactly, which questions why did Sony go all in with the technology. It would have made sense to have a cooperate effort with the OculusVR team and see how things improve on an high end system and see if they can transmit that to console. Another fad device by Sony, they make quality products but lack in “purposeful creativity”.
But I like the effort at least in pushing VR to consoles, the earlier the better we’ll find innovations for next gen.
Not sure people understand what he’s saying. He’s talking about fidelity, which is why he mentions PS3.
He’s saying PS4 VR couldn’t handle much more than taking the equivalent of a 60fps PS3 game (presumably 720p) and increasing everything, to 120fps (60 per eye frame, although it could also be 60fps interleaved), 1080p per eye, adding AA and lowering the latency.
Meaning it probably isn’t going to be able to handle as many of the PS4 quality shaders, lighting, reflections, shadows, etc, that non-VR games are going to be showing off. Doesn’t mean they can’t still be beautiful and immersive though.
You don’t have to halve frame rate in order to create 3d image in stereoscopic screen. You doing that in like first technology. where left and right image were displayed alternately. in OR and Morpheus you have one screen and half of the screen is visible by one eye. So, u can render a scene normally, take two projections of the scene for both eyes and put them onto one frame, add effects on whole frame and display it in full speed.
http://files.tested.com/photos/2013/04/10/47396-ifixit-oculus-rift.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/OB3siLI.png
Two entirely distinct frames are being rendered, it doesn’t matter if they are displayed on the same screen or if they are half of the horizontal resolution.
More horsepower is required to render (2) 960×1080 frames then (1) 1920×1080 frame because they are distinct from each other, same content different angles.
No, not really. The scene is calculated and rendered only once, the whole wireframe is there already. All meshes, textures, lightning. This scene have to be projected to the 2 separate POV, and this is the point the separation starts. If you calculated already a few cubes and wireframed them, you know that in this frame they wont move. You take one ‘shot’, moves camera slightly, takes a second ‘shot’, and recalculate positions of cubes for next frame.
In the early version of 3d where you had ‘blinking’ glasses every image for left and right eye were separate frames, and there you had to do separate calculations. Here it is not the case.
I think you’re confusing loading into memory with rendering a frame on screen. The camera is moving in 3D space, not just in 1D, it’s a distinct frame anyway you slice it.
The 3D “blinking” glasses are called active shutter 3D, which shows 1 full frame to eye, then another full frame to the other eye. In “passive” 3D, which is what is currently more popular, there are still 2 frames, just like with active shutter, only they are both being displayed at the same time, forcing a loss in resolution to each eye.
What you call an “early” version of 3D is actually higher quality and still around but is dropping in popularity because people don’t like to wear chunky glasses that require a power source.
I’m saying (and I explaining at the end that actually I misread your first post) that all the calculation, objects positions, calculating reflection vertices, textures, shadows and so on are done only once. The scene is there, ready to be projected on left and right eye. And that is the next calculation – ‘flattening’ the 3d scene into 2d picture which eye will see. This fattening have to be done twice, but scene itself wont change at all whatever point ov view will you set. After flattening the effects are added, like AA, flares and similar – they can be done simultaneously on both images.
The Oculus technology is, what you said, a lower resolution version. You are getting 960×1080 image on each eye. So the framerate is preserved.
And I think I misread your first statement. I thought you said that it will require twice the power… sorry. I guess it will need around 10%-30% more power to render two images than to render on 1080p. And I think it will be fine in 2015, when programmers will learn more about optimization.
For every example of a success story you’ll find a dozen or more examples of failures. Look at Bebo if you want a Myspace/Facebook comparison. That’s the network I used all throughout middle school. Look where it is today.