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Oculus Rift

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Re: Oculus Rift

#281

Post by fr0styMatt2 »

pinum wrote: post #61
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #17

Does anyone know of a list of PCs that meet (or exceed) the recommended hardware specs for the Rift? Not that I'm going to run out and buy one of these machines in anticipation of the Rift's release next year, but I'm interested in knowing roughly what a premium VR experience costs today (excluding the headset, obviously) Edit: To rephrase my question, can anyone point me to a list of PCs manufactured by companies li…

> To rephrase my question, can anyone point me to a list of PCs manufactured by companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. that meet or exceed these requirements? Buying a prebuild is a bad idea. Apart from being overpriced, they often have strange custom motherboards and cases which make upgrades complicated. There's always those places where you select the parts and they assemble the machine for you, but I can't recomme…

I had my last gaming rig built at a small PC store. Not a big chain or online or anything, just one where I could walk in, sit down and talk to the guy about general components, pick all the pieces I wanted and then have them order them in and build them.

Build quality was great, he did a really good job with the cabling, I got all the boxes/manuals/extra parts. Have no complaints.

I've done some upgrades to that machine myself over time (RAM, graphics card, PSU, a drive change). PC assembly has gotten incredibly easier than it was in the past. It's the little touches. I notice that tolerance on cases are a lot better these days (things tend to align much more easily than they used to). PCI-E slots are a lot easier to put cards into than the older ones. RAM sticks generally have heat-spreaders on them, so you don't have to worry as much about handling them as you used to. Drive cables are easier (cabling in general is easier as most things are keyed these days), thumbscrews are almost ubiquitous, as are easily removable drive bays.

The only thing I still get nervous about is CPUs and their heatsinks. I haven't fitted a CPU in a long time and a mate of mine did my heatsink replacement for me.

All that said, I'd still pay someone money to assemble my PC from scratch. Someone good that assembles PCs for a living is going to do it way better and way faster than I would. At least, I'd hope so :)

Re: Oculus Rift

#282

Post by lugg »

sbarre wrote: post #137
psychometry wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your use case is particularly apt for frequent fliers. I've almost had a tray table-supported laptop destroyed on more than one occasion by a reclining passenger in front of me. It would be amazing to just set up a small keyboard+trackpad on my lap and not have to even pull the computer out of its bag. If I could do this, I wouldn't even care how ridiculous I looked.

A podcast I listen to recently discussed the theoretical horror of flying while being stuck next to a passenger strapped into an Oculus Rift who is totally oblivious to how annoying they are being to their fellow passengers with their gestures and reactions to the VR experience that no one else is seeing. Please don't be that guy.. :-)

Won't be a problem if everyone has one.

Re: Oculus Rift

#283

Post by fr0styMatt2 »

ansible wrote: post #212
pinum wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>making a small-form-factor custom is super-hard Mini-ITX is easy enough. Micro-ATX is easy as pie. There are very nice cases for both. If you know of a sub-mITX OEM build that has 4690K+980Ti level performance, I'd like to see it. >compatibility is always frustrating Not really. A graphics card, for example, has two things to check to verify compatibility: * Will it physically fit in my case? (Check the length) * Is…

Every graphics card has been PCI-E for a decade. If it fits and has power, any card will work in any motherboard. You do want to pay attention to the mobo choice if the card itself requires PCI-E v3.0. There are still a lot of v2.0 mobos for sale. Most mobos have at least one 16x slot, which is the one you'll want to use. Things get a little more complicated with multi-GPU card builds.

Had a friend get burnt bad by this.

Specifically, he got two GTX 970s to run in SLI, but the motherboard didn't end up supporting SLI. Neither him, nor the PC shop that built the machine for him, picked up on that.

It didn't help that the motherboard was branded as a 'Pro Gamer' motherboard (Asus H97-Pro Gamer: https://www.asus.com/au/Motherboards/H97PRO_GAMER/). How can something be 'pro gamer' without SLI support?!?!

Fails all around, but yeah you definitely need to be careful about the motherboard you pick.

Re: Oculus Rift

#284

Post by dbbolton »

malandrew wrote: post #214
dbbolton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was equally surprised by the on-ear style headphones. I'm sure the design team thought about the choice in depth and has good reasons behind it, but I would have imagined over-ear to be better for immersion (personally I find them more comfortable as well).

The technical terms are supra-aural (on-ear) and circum-aural (around the ears). Both can be sound-wise excellent, but circum-aural is definitely more comfortable. I used to own a pair of Joe Grado HP-1 HP-1000 supra-aural headphones and they were excellent and did a great job with binaural recordings. Since selling those, I moved on to the Denon D7000 circum-aural headphones. Far more comfortable. Bar none the best…

I'm not arguing about sound quality though. When I said "immersion" I was thinking about over-ear headphones generally having better isolation than on-ear.

Re: Oculus Rift

#285

Post by dbbolton »

LesZedCB wrote: post #130
dbbolton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was equally surprised by the on-ear style headphones. I'm sure the design team thought about the choice in depth and has good reasons behind it, but I would have imagined over-ear to be better for immersion (personally I find them more comfortable as well).

Sounds quality isn't really dependent on circumaural vs supra-aural headphones. The major complaint I hear with supra-aural headphones is that they apply pressure on the ears, which can be unconfortable. Sound quality, however, is largely affected by the drivers.

I'm not arguing about sound quality though. When I said "immersion" I was thinking about over-ear headphones generally having better isolation than on-ear.

Re: Oculus Rift

#286

Post by lhl »

malandrew wrote: post #207
psychometry wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your use case is particularly apt for frequent fliers. I've almost had a tray table-supported laptop destroyed on more than one occasion by a reclining passenger in front of me. It would be amazing to just set up a small keyboard+trackpad on my lap and not have to even pull the computer out of its bag. If I could do this, I wouldn't even care how ridiculous I looked.

Besides resolution, you also have to deal with the fact that the oculus rift really only works well with a dedicated GPU. It's going to be a while before it's a legitimate "mobile" solution. I got a DK2 and have barely touched it because my Macbook Pro 13" just wasn't adequate enough.

While this may be true for high fidelity gaming, for moving some textured triangles around, mobile GPUs are fine. Also, they can (and do) perform much better clock-for-clock vs a PC (and especially a Mac) thanks to the ability to optimize drivers. For a fascinating discussion of the optimizations possible, Carmack's 2014 Oculus Connect keynote is well worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8

This talk was a slightly long but very informative discussion of the various challenges in reducing latency and dealing w/ PC rendering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoqV112Pwrs

Re: Oculus Rift

#287

Post by pantalaimon »

ErikRogneby wrote: post #150
sbarre wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A podcast I listen to recently discussed the theoretical horror of flying while being stuck next to a passenger strapped into an Oculus Rift who is totally oblivious to how annoying they are being to their fellow passengers with their gestures and reactions to the VR experience that no one else is seeing. Please don't be that guy.. :-)

Now we just need a catchy portmanteau like "glasshole" for that guy ? Vridiot?

Stephenson already described the Gargoyle in Snow Crash.

Re: Oculus Rift

#288

Post by pantalaimon »

cies wrote: post #105
0x0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since OR is under Facebook, and Facebook has been fairly Microsoft friendly in the past (opting for bing maps and some office docs stuff etc), it doesn't seem like a huge surprise, especially since Sony/PS4 has their own thing in development (Morpheus) I guess this also explains the earlier announcement dropping OSX and Linux support.

Dropping Linux support means dropping SteamBox support? Wow, I'm stunned.

SteamBox is Vaporware anyway

Re: Oculus Rift

#289

Post by fr0styMatt2 »

alexqgb wrote: post #125
sytelus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this will be a hot product among PC gamers but they are not the mainstream consumers. I wanted to buy the device for my mom and have her use it. I think the vision should be to bring VR mainstream that is usable by all without technological friction.

The mainstream experience will be on high-end smartphones, not PCs. When Carmack and Facebook talk about getting a billion users into VR, this is how they plan to do it.

Exactly. Gear VR is their 'VR for everyone' product. It's fantastic for that. They're already well on their way down that path.

Re: Oculus Rift

#290

Post by kup0 »

I'm just waiting for some internal fallout in the company between execs so I can make a well-timed "rift" joke... It's interesting to see these images now in comparison to the leaked ones that came out.
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