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Comment by yayr | Hacker News Reader

I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior. One of the major issues with the Quest is the lack of graphics quality that can be brought to the virtual environments. Unless you run it via Link to a PC with a top end GPU it is just a toy. Having VR experiences like the recent Unreal Engine provides is simply orders of magnitude away for Quest in the current state... Thats one major reason that this thing does not take off for FB

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I don't think casual users care at all about graphic quality. Just look at how the Switch or Wii exploded over every other game console. Same thing for games like Roblox. Graphic quality is purely an enthusiast niche target. If you want mass adoption you need to fix comfort and nausea.

it is something different if your screen is only a few square centimeters or if you are in a virtual environment. At least I do not agree to your point of view. For example running something like MS Flight Sim with decent realistic visuals is absolutely impossible, forget any other sims that require high quality characters, nature or anything else with a high polygon count or AI rendering

Microsoft Flight Simulator is 40 years old by now. Despite massive improvements in computer graphics, it still seems to essentially be the niche product it always was. Which is consistent with the "graphics don't matter much" theory.

The far bigger problem for VR is simply crispness of text and objects at a distance. High poly counts are relatively unimportant, there's a new Zelda game out with graphics that wouldn't have been amazing ten years ago doing pretty well that would probably run just fine on a quest.

You need a PPD of about 35 - 40 for reading comfortably. 50 is retina quality.

Even with the Meta Quest Pro, it only gets to about 24. The same goes for the HP reverb g2. For $1999, the Varjo Aero PCVR headset comes at 35 PPD, but at that price it doesn’t include the $3000 -$4000 PC to run it or the $600 base stations and controllers. It’s also wired to the PC

At $3000, i am guessing that the Apple headset will be 35 or higher PPD

The original Game Boy did sell quite well despite low resolution and ghosting. There were other devices with better screens and higher price. People chose the lower price and the worse screen. Is this also plausible for VR? The success of the Quest suggests: yes.

but at the time the market was different and the product at the time was an improvement over single purpose game toys by allowing changing games. Totally different story. Of course there is a low price market for lower resolution and compute... But there is a reason that retina displays on all device types are a thing too, usually at higher price points, at least initially. And economies of scale, manufacturing hardware depreciation etc. will bring these devices also to lower price points sooner or later.

> 50 is retina quality.

Something must be off here. My 4k 40″ screen at 30 inches distance gives 70 ppd. It works well for reading, but I don't think it fits "retina quality". Retina would be above 100.

BTW, half of that (35ppd) would be an uncomfortable 1080p on 40″. Which makes Quest Pro even worse.

The only thing I think might make it better is that unlike on static screens head motion could add a nice smoothing effect to the picture, which might potentially lower the required PPD.

Graphics quality was the biggest punch line for Zuck's Metaverse demo

Not if you are rendering the Zuck - he is quite lo-poly in real life.

Problem is: Apple mostly ruined their relationship with Epic, Meta and even Valve. Whatever excellent VR tech they come up with will be mostly ignored by the game industry. Good part of iPhone / iPad success was due to the excellent apps ecosystem. Who gonna make VR experiences for Apple new VR ecosystem?

F2P game companies? I guess they won't be interested either because Apple will try to bite off a lot of profits from their ads by not letting anyone but themself to run targeted ads.

Let's see. Unreal Engine can build for Apple Silicon. So any game dev can make his choice himself. Unity and others are also there as good frameworks.

More importantly, Apple did not ruin relationsships with Media companies. I'd love to see some more VR concerts or other events. Meta totally failed at scaling this.

Majority of game development companies don't build their own tooling. Option to build a binary for ARM Mac is not sufficient to bring high quality experience to whatever proprietary tech Apple will put out there. And it's quite certain it's gonna be incompatible with Meta's offerings, wont integrate with other platforms, etc.

I not saying like Apple have no chances at all here, but building own gaming ecosystem is extremely prohibitive expensive even for large corporations. Both Microsoft and Sony spent a decades on building their console ecosystems as well as tens of billions of dollars.

Google and Meta both tried an failed miserably. Both Microsoft and Epic tried to compete with Valve on PC, spent billions and 5 years later their store is still dont have any real marketshare.

Most importantly Apple just can't really go out and buy some companies simply because Microsoft, Tencent and few other giants already own half of big players out there. So it's gonna be really really hard for them to create mass market product that can compete.

PS: I won't even start on fact that it's gonna be impossible to do it "in secret" for them this time. Competitors will be on them immediately.

> Google and Meta both tried an failed miserably.

Did Google really try?

The only way they could have convinced me it actually might be around 18 months after launch is if Alphabet spun out an entirely new company for it.

Launching it as Google Stadia was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy of cancellation. Few wanted to pay good money for product that was going to dissolve in a year or two.

The most important thing is frameworks. No joke, nothing is currently stopping Apple from making a headset that ships with support for Half Life: Alyx. If they support DXVK at a protocol level and ship a Wine runtime like the Steam Deck does, they could support Beat Saber, Tabletop Sim and VRChat without their developers even knowing.

But they won't. As-is, Apple's insistence on iron-fisting their ecosystem is hurting them greatly. It's the reason gaming on Mac died, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the reason inferior headsets outsell the Apple one 10:1.

They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx (a Steam exclusive designed for the Valve Index) or Beat Saber (by Meta-owned Beat Games).

> It's the reason gaming on Mac died

Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles on one side and custom-built gaming rigs on the other. The majority of their sold systems are battery-powered, and your first chance at a GPU power envelope of even 150W is the Mac Pro. Which, coincidentally, is also the only Mac left that has a dGPU option.

The real question is why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.

> They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx

Nope. The user can license it, as long as the client is supported. And good news too, recent Steam updates have added support for ARM64 clients on Unix systems.

> Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles

I mean, most gaming on Mac died because of inconvenient 32-bit lib depreciation and Apple's coincidentally unfortunate refusal to support a standardized graphics API. With Proton, Macs are a Steam Deck. Without them, they're a Steam Machine. They're not mega-powerful machines in the first place, but neither is my Thinkpad and it still plays nice with Wine.

> why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.

Now that is a head-scratcher. My best guess is that the market is thin, and the carrot at the end of the stick isn't big. It's much easier than porting a DirectX or Vulkan title from scratch though, that's for certain.

Valve has only made one VR game to date

I’m not aware of Epic making any VR games

Meta doesn’t make new games for other platforms even now. They’ve culled many od their own game studios. The only issue would be Beat Saber. Imo it’s still VR’s killer app. Still, there are plenty of passable clones and similar games that are good enough

The bigger issue is that Apple doesn’t like games. They never did. They only tolerate games now because of the revenue it brings in. Apple Arcade is a good start, but it still doesn’t convince me that they’re serious about catering to anyone beyond casual gamers

The other big issue is that market for VR and AR pre-Apple remains small. Because of that, there are barely any AAA games. I can count them on one hand. It’s also arguable if they’re actually AAA games when many of them are really dated games.

> Apple Arcade is a good start, but it still doesn’t convince me that they’re serious about catering to anyone beyond casual gamers

To be fair, a huge portion of the gaming market is casual gamers, and Apple does incredibly well there on iPhone.

Apple isn't going to make a huge dent in the console market because games have to be restructured to deal with touch controls vs controllers, and to have a revenue model that doesn't start out with a $60 purchase. For all the power of an iPhone, it also still lags a generation behind in graphics performance (because batteries, size, and heat)

There isn't a PC gaming rig market that Apple would make a dent in either. The baseline price of a modular Mac that could have a top-of-line dGPU is too high, and they won't sell enough of them to convince developers to port and support their titles.

There was never a big chance that Valve would port Alyx, or Meta would allow Beat Saber to be on another platform.

It would take an epically _good_ relationship to convince hardware platforms to port their platform exclusive titles over - just count all the Mario and Zelda games that have shipped for Xbox and Playstation.

Alyx works well on Meta Quest 2 and other non-Valve headsets.

Beat Saber is available on Steam and any standartized VR headset.

Even if not officially Nintendo games work on PC / SteamDeck and even Xbox via emulation. But that will never ever happen on Apple platform because it's gonna be proprietary, incompatible with anything and locked.

> I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior.

They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.

Running unreal requires a 300watt graphics card, plus ~60watt CPU. even assuming apple can quarter that, its still 90 watts. and not 90 watts of 37 degrees, its 90 watts at 65c. you can't keep that kind of heat next to your face.

> I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior.

Running unreal re

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