We finally get excited about VR thanks to Nvidia's booth, the HTC Vive, and Valve's demo. Also, Cooler Master had a lot going on at their booth.
This is what we think about the state of VR today. Check out the video and let us know what you think about our takes on the HTC Vive and Valve's experience. Thanks to Nvidia for setting up the demo. Also, check out all the goodies at the Cooler Master booth.
Also, thanks to Corsair for sponsoring our event coverage. Check out our contest, you could win a Scimitar MMO/MOBA gaming mouse (coming soon).
Once AMD releases it's Dual Fury X card, VR can rest easy (Well eaiser) It would be a real shame if that weren't to happen just because of corporate nonsense going by the amount of Nvidia branding at the demo in the video.
Great video guys. Wish I could've made it up to Seattle, but I would've been hobbling around on my bum toe.
VR arcades could be awesome. I remember possibly reading an article about one or seeing it on some tech show in the past. Are all the current VR options wired with an umbilical cord? I haven't payed too much attention to the VR scene yet as I've been waiting for it to become a bit more release ready.
The idea of the modular/upgradeable case is nice, but I'm not really digging the design. It appears to be a bit cheap looking too, but I'd like to see a more detailed in studio review of it or check it out in person.
As usual there's some quality discussion going on in the YT comments /s
Personally, not up for the arcade idea. The wait time alone would be agonizingly long and then you would feel too time constrained to actually enjoy it. I can see the VR room taking off if they can create something really compelling but I'm still far more interested in using it as an immersive head tracking device for simulations (car, plane, space ship).
The problem with the VR room is plentiful, mounting it on some sort of movable crane from the ceiling wouldn't work for me (ceiling fan). If the installation is too complex then you've just lowered your audience by a good degree more.
I'm not sure I'm willing to go wifi on such a device, the bandwidth requirements would undoubtedly mean exposing yourself to some high powered frequencies extremely close to your head for extended periods of time not to mention needing to wear a large battery pack somewhere on your body.
The case reminds me of Antec p182 series with the chambered power supply, they need to add proper dust filters to the front I refuse to buy a case without them as it cuts down on the number of times you need to do a complete cleaning of your system with an air compressor. I like the idea of having carry handles on top.
The problem i see with wireless implimentaations of VR headsets would be the latency between the movement of the user and the display actually keeping up. I think that if cordless VR was to be viable, at the moment, then you would need to utilize a gaming laptop. I could see people dedicating a room to Vive and then getting the latest Asus gaming laptop and putting it in a backpack and exploring some cool game, without being tethered.
Sadly not, in Jayztwocents latest benchmark with the 980ti Kingpin, where he compared it to a bunch of other high-end amd and nvidia Graphics cards, all of which he pushed as far as he could get them, the fury got completely thrashed by the gigabyte 980ti which wasn't much more expensive. In some cases, really badly, to the point where two of them would not be much better, which is sad.
And fury x was barely any better than the fury, the GCN architecture has some issues scaling, we saw this with the hawaii gpu (290 and 290x) and we saw this with the Fury and FuryX, we just don't see much more performance from those extra cores IRL. We also don't see as much extra performance from pushing the frequencies up as we should. IRL the fury should be a beast, on paper it should destroy the titan X, in reality it struggles, we don't see the performance we should from a card that has this computational power.
It sarts slower than their equivelantly priced nvidia parts, it overclocks less (comparatively). This is probably why AMDs market share in shipped GPUs has tanked.... At this point it is really hard to recommend anything AMD. They need to go back to the drawing board, and seriously redesign the GCN architecture, or create a completely new one.
I always thought that the fury was more competing with the 980 a card which it does rather well up against. I also see VR gaining more from HBM than anything else and if you have two fury cores there I think VR is still going to benefit. Sure, the fury might not be the greatest card for the best gaming rig right now but not only is it HBMs first real trial but it is for me at least hinting at the future. The nVidia cards have become too focused on just getting people those extra few fps in the games or working well with canned benchamarks (hell there's even some articles suggesting nVidia shenanagins to ensure the benchmarks favour their cards. The way I see it is that in a few years time the whole gpu market will be totally different with the days of GDDR and performance measured in ways other than just fps at certain resolutions. When it comes to what's down the line, IMO 4k and VR, AMD have made their roadmap for the future and I think it's much more believable than more of the same 6 month incremental slight performance boost cards we are seeing from nVidia.
Also imma have to disagree there, with today's pricing I'd recommend a r9 390 of a gtx 970 anyday.
HBM is a marketing gimmick, we haven't seen any real performance gains from it, your not going to see gains from it because your monitors are in a headset. When you compare apples to apples, and remember people aren't forking out this much cash to run their graphics cards at stock, you got to look at what you can get out of your product (when OCd). And frankly, the amd cards start with less performance, have significantly worse overclocking headroom, and don't scale as well with the over-clocked frequencies...
Its sad too see for as little as 30$ less the Fury X (which is an absoloute rip-off) can end up with as little as half the performance of a decent 980ti, and that is with all the nvidia propriety game-works crap turned off. And when it isn't half the performance, it's still substantially less, way less, by a large margin.
Check this out, this is how graphics cards should be reviewed, this is the performance you get when you pay ~600USD (and then OC as everyone spending that much does): www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHAIe-fOTyM
EDIT It's not by a small margin, its by a very, very, very large margin, the nvidia offerings are way better, when you compare the real performance from overclocking, most people are getting about 1,500mhz from their 970s, you look at the 390s you get maybe 1150mhz, when you push these frequencies, nvidia pulls way ahead.. If anything reviewers are making AMD cards look better than they really are by not OCing EDIT