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Comment by emcq | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it's only one 1920x1080 screen, so half that resolution per eye at 120hz. That's going to be some chunky pixels.

I'd rather have double the resolution at 90hz with a Vive or Rift :)

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PSVR uses 60Hz reprojected to 120Hz, so gets a 33% performance advantage over Vive and Rift which run at 90Hz.

It uses RGB-stripe instead of pentile, and actual has more subpixels than Vive or Rift, and it picks up some big performance advantages there (on Vive and Rift you more or less throw away 33% of the subpixels you spent time rendering). It won't quite be up to their quality because your eyes are more sensitive to green, but at current low HMD resolutions green sensitivity less significant than on phones.

With both factors combined, 33% lower framerate requirements 25% or so lower nominal res with much of the quality retained, it will have something like a 50% performance advantage over Vive and Rift. Putting it close to parity with Rift's GTX 970 recommended-spec.

So the 60Hz reprojected to 120 Hz is an option, but not the only one. Games can run at native 90 or 120 (perhaps with reprojection additionally)

The reprojection will necessarily introduce artifacts related to head movement in general. But particularly head movement in space rather than orientation. The PC HMD version of reprojection is called async timewarp. It only tracks and compensates for head orientation and not absolute position. The same will be true for PSVR's reprojection.

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-timewarp-exam...

More Rift than Vive applications have options to enable asynchronous timewarp but most applications on both sides don't bother.

Head positional movement is a lot slower than rotational so this is not so bad/noticeable. Especially if the underlying game is rendered at 60hz rather than 30.

I'd rather have a Tesla Model S, but it's twice the price of my car. PlayStation VR is much cheaper than Oculus or Vive and works with much more affordable hardware.

The absolute price difference is more important here than the multiple. Spending roughly $1k more for entertainment is certainly within the budget of many folks, versus $60k+ for a Tesla over a new Honda fit.

But you're right that the PlayStation VR appeals to the price conscious. Almost as much as not buying one ;)

> But you're right that the PlayStation VR appeals to the price conscious. Almost as much as not buying one ;)

The implication here, that there's no market for a $400 piece of video game hardware when more powerful hardware is available at higher price points, is pretty obviously wrong given the success of the PlayStation 4 itself.

The simple fact is, for the price of a Vive, you can get both a PS4 and a PSVR. And the $800 Vive requires a computer even more expensive than itself. This is not an insignificant difference.

That's fair. If you ask people outside the VR bubble if they would trust Facebook, some company called Valve, or Sony PlayStation to make a quality VR entertainment device most would put their money on PlayStation. Not only is the cost much less, you will probably get to try it out at your local Target.

But thats just the gateway drug to VR. From my perspective in the VR bubble I prefer more pixels.

I think the PSVR will have much better unit sales than Rift/Vive, but that the latter will provide tangible benefits to those that enjoy VR experiences.

"...some company named Valve" who's software, social network and content distribution are installed on nearly every gamer's computer.

Also don't forget their history as a game developer, which attributes an arguably Carmack-like reputation in 3D gaming.

Valve is indisputably an amazing company with kickass products! But if you're a mainstream consumer, perhaps someone voting for Trump, you've never heard of them. And like the name "Trump", Sony has turned the name "PlayStation" into a brand that appeals to the mass market, not just gamers.

The difference here is also barrier to "trying it out". I own a PS4, that is currently mostly collecting dust.. I got it last year for a specific game, I played it a lot, enjoyed it, don't regret the purchase, but since then nothing has come out that is interesting to me...

I'm also pretty interested in VR, and am curious to try it out. But my PC would require about $1,200 in upgrades (I checked) in order to properly support the Rift or Vive, not to mention the cost of the unit itself, so I'm looking at at least a $2,000 investment to try VR at home on my PC (I am not counting trying it out somewhere else, I mean owning it and using it on my own time and terms)..

On the other hand, I could spend 500$ to get the PSVR and potentially breathe new life into my PS4?

Even if it's not the top-of-the-line experience, it's a pretty easy choice for someone like me who qualifies as a casual gamer but is pretty curious about this new tech, and wants to give it a shot for the lowest amount of investment.

What would the $1200 upgrades entail? Seems that you could build a machine with enough power from scratch for around $1200.

I would essentially need a new PC yes. I could keep my case, PS and SSD but the rest has to go. And I actually just put about 600$ in upgrades into the machine last year, so it stings a bit.

I'm also not trying to match minimum spec, if I'm going to spend money upgrading for VR, I would want something that will last at least a few years, so I looked into (reasonably) top-of-the-line hardware.

$920USD in the US will get you a I5-6500, 16GB, 980TI, case, PSU, and hard drive. The 6700K wouldn't be enough of a bump to be worth it (I own one.)

970 is really not that much slower and then the whole machine is like $600 instead of $920.

Is a stable 120Hz frame rate realistic on a PS4? Can it achieve that kind of rate just in normal 1080p output? Or will this relegate the Playstation VR to rendering 5-10 year old graphics? Bearing in mind that VR is a lot more sensitive to frame rate jitter than a traditional screen.

Yes, but 5 to 10 year old graphics in VR look better than anything cutting-edge on a TV.

I believe (and I could be way off the mark here) there are two modes, one is a kind of frame smoothing to achieve a 'fake' 120Hz similar to what you see with modern LCD TVs, the other is actually 120FPS which is accomplished by dropping the graphics quality down.

You're not going to see Uncharted 4 doing 120FPS natively in PSVR.

FYI this slide from Sony explains a bit more about what I was talking about:

https://i.imgur.com/UijG9Qll.jpg

You're not wrong and the price reflects that.

    Screen Size: 5.7"

    Resolution: 1920x1080 (960x1080 per eye)

    Refresh Rate: 120Hz, 90Hz

    Latency: Less than 18ms

    Sensors: 360 Degree Tracking/9LEDS

    Field of View: Approximately 100 degress

    Controller: Dualshock 4 & PS Move

I worry about that too... I tried google goggle and even with galaxy's fairly high pixel density, individual pixels were too visible.

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