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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

The obvious comparison to the GPU arms race is the VR hardware arms race. Same number of companies rising and falling in about the same period. Carmack is at the forefront of both, too.

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You cannot be serious. VR headsets have not been evolving at the pace of hardware back then. The resolution of headsets does not double every year or something and VR today is not much better than one year ago. Nothing comparable.

Linear resolution maybe not, but pixel count is roughly doubling. Vive and Rift are both ~1k x 1k pixels per eye, first gen Windows Mixed Reality headsets came out a year or two later and are 1440 x 1600, and the just-announced HP Reverb is ~2k x 2k. The teased Valve Index is likely to be 2k x 2k as well, with a field-of-view bump from 110° to 135°.

They talk about a 4 year timespan. The Oculus Kickstarter was in 2012. DK1 was released in 2013, DK2 in 2014, and the final Rift in 2016. The Rift-S is rumored to be released in 2019. None of those have had quite the leaps 3d did back in the late 90s.

For contrast, id went from Doom to Quake III Arena in six years (Dec 1993 -> Dec 1999). Thanks to the rapid pace of graphics card improvement and the engineers writing the software engines to keep up with it (Carmack, Sweeney, etc).

VR has been a wet fart compared to 3d graphics. Tons of hype but very little progress and almost no broader impact on the technology or games industry.

Not sure why you've been so heavily downvoted, perhaps there are a lot of people here working in the field. It definitely seems the case that the average consumer couldn't care less about it, however.

VR is the new 3D TV.

I don't think VR utopia is going to start anytime soon (that will be a slow generational shift), but VR already has sparked the interest of a lot of consumers, that are holding of for now. I wouldn't be surprised though, if one of the next headsets, i.e. Valve Index, if prices reasonably, suddenly showed unexpected high demand and sold out. There are tons of people, who want to try it, even if its just a gimmick for now. We've seen things like the Nintendo Wii selling tens of millions of units based on a gimmick. At that point the average consumer might become more aware of VR, and things might start picking up on the software-side.

People were already trying to play Doom on the first iteractions of VR headsets during the mid-90's.

I don't believe it ever become a real thing.

AR on the other hand, has quite a few interesting industrial applications.

VR is a high friction/opportunity cost setup clutch and not a casual setup and interaction thing as TV.

The biggest issue with VR is that it's by nature not a passive/low energy thing in it's default mode, it's way closer to sports and work than TV, so more niche as a recreational time activity.

In essence VR competes with activites like soccer, badminton, shooting ranges, lasertag, trampolin parks etc. not general purpose home use TV. If you benchmark it against them VR, on it's current trajectory has a place to exist in garages and arcades.

If VR/MR/AR gets away from being marketed as high energy activity there is a future there, if there is found a way to make headset's superficial or significantly lighter and easy to handle at resolution better than TV screens at the equivalent distance. Powerful wireless (standalone) headsets and couch compatible VR might take off.

In the Wolfenstein 3D black book, written by the author of this article actually, there's even mention of a company trying to do this with Wolfenstein 3D

I remember a million years ago at an arcade, seeing stand-up pods where you wore a VR headset and could play Duke3D

The problem is that VR performance is tightly coupled to GPU performance. Currently, adding more pixels requires an equivalent increase in GPU performance to maintain quality.

I'm prepared to believe that e.g. foveal rendering will give step-wise improvements without more GPU power, but it's not the same as the years of continual process improvements were for GPUs.

The VR adoption got slowed down quite signifanctly by the artficial price inflation through the cryptomining boom happening in the same period over the last 3-4 years. Before that high-mid to high end GPUs were in a range of USD 200 to 500, inbetween they tripled in price and are now slowly going back. When FOVeated rendering and the equivalent of 2x4k at 90FPS+ are doable significantly below USD 500, i'm sure things will look different quite soon again.

Before that, you could double GPU performance for same price every two years or so, now its about 5 or more years, when looking at GTX 970 vs RTX 2070 for example. In my opinion GPUs speed are at least three years behind trajectory because of this market anomaly. Just hope AI isn't throwing stupid money at GPUs again.

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