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Steam Frame

store.steampowered.com

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Re: Steam Frame

#541

Post by FeepingCreature »

Taterr wrote: post #495
pixelpoet wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a lover of ray/path tracing I'm obligated to point out: rasterisation gets its efficiency by amortising the cost of per-triangle setup over many pixels. This more or less forces you to do fixed-resolution rendering; it's very efficient at this, which is why even today with hardware RT, rasterisation remains the fastest and most power-efficient way to do visibility processing (under certain conditions). However, th…

I think you could do foveated rendering efficiently with rasterization if you "simply" render twice at 2 different resolutions. A low resolution render over the entire FOV, and a higher resolution render in the fovea region. You would have overlap but overall it should be less pixels rendered.

I believe the standard way is to downgrade the sampling density outside the area you're looking, see https://docs.vulkan.org/samples/latest/samples/extensions/fr... . Optimally you could attach multiple buffers with different resolutions covering different parts of clipspace, saving vram bandwidth. Sadly this is not supported currently to my knowledge, so you have to write to a single giant buffer with lower sample resolution outside the detail area, and then just downsample it for the coarse layer.

Re: Steam Frame

#542

Post by russelg »

thefz wrote: post #516
jsheard wrote: post #2

Frame is obviously the main headline here, but they've also launching a new SteamOS mini-PC and a new controller. https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamcontroller No prices listed for any of them yet, as far as I can tell.

> Frame is obviously the main headline here Why? VR headsets are a dying fad of the 2020s. Way more excited for SteamOS on ARM.

... which likely wouldn't have happened if they didn't want a computer inside their VR headset. The steam machine is x86 considering it's an AMD processor.

Re: Steam Frame

#543

Post by pcchristie »

month13 wrote: post #433
seabombs wrote: post #310

Brilliant, I'm anxiously awaiting Australian pricing details (and release dates...) but could definitely seeing myself getting one of these as my first VR device, and the controller looks great too. Being able to run games on device (and on ARM) is very cool, but I wonder if there is a cheaper/lighter/longer-battery-life version of this that is stream only? That's probably a better fit for me personally, I can't imag…

I really hope it's not going to take years to be sold in Australia, like the Steam Deck took.

I'm fairly sure/wishful thinking that the reason the last round of Valve hardware was very late/absent in Australia was because it was the time that the ACCC took Valve to court for its no refunds policy (and won). Now that Valve has rectified that and are in good standing in Australia, I'm hoping we see all this new hardware ASAP, alongside the rest of the world.

Re: Steam Frame

#544

Post by whstl »

m463 wrote: post #419
zeroq wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll share a childhood story as well. Somewhere between '93 and '95 my father took me abroad to Germany and we visited a gaming venue. It was packed with typical arcade machines, games where you sit in a cart holding a pistol and you shoot things on the screen while cart was moving all over the place simulating bumpy ride, etc. But the highlight was a full 3D experience shooter. You got yourself into a tiny ring, 3D…

Maybe something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) I think I played with the 1000CS or similar in a bar or arcade at some point in early 90's

Oh wow, I also played with this one in what might have been a COMDEX, in the 90s.

I remember the game was a commercially available shooter though, but the machine was exactly the same, with the blue highlights.

Re: Steam Frame

#545

Post by InsideOutSanta »

zeroq wrote: post #393
bigiain wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Foveated streaming! That's a great idea. Back when I was in Uni, so late 80s or early 90s, my dad was Project Manager on an Air Force project for a new F-111 flight simulator, when Australia upgraded the avionics on their F-111 fighter/bombers. The sim cockpit had a spherical dome screen and a pair of Silicon Graphics Reality Engines. One of them projected an image across the entire screen at a relatively low resol…

I'll share a childhood story as well. Somewhere between '93 and '95 my father took me abroad to Germany and we visited a gaming venue. It was packed with typical arcade machines, games where you sit in a cart holding a pistol and you shoot things on the screen while cart was moving all over the place simulating bumpy ride, etc. But the highlight was a full 3D experience shooter. You got yourself into a tiny ring, 3D…

I played that game in Berlin in the late 90s. There were four such pods, iirc, and you could see the other players. The frame rate was about 5 frames per second, so it was borderline unplayable, but it was fun nevertheless.

Later, I found out that it was a game called ”Dactyl Nightmare” that ran on Amiga hardware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)

Re: Steam Frame

#546

Post by elxr »

vunderba wrote: post #83
Insanity wrote: post #70

This is going to be an instant buy for me, and my first VR device ever. I've used the previous Steam VR headset over at a friends' place many times, but never bit the bullet to get one myself. The fact that this can run standalone, doesn't have a bunch of wires dangling from it, and is pretty much a fully working Linux box makes this am almost on-brainer for me. I do _hope_ the price is reasonable though, if it ends…

I can't imagine it exceeding ~1k USD - they've got to at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest which is around half that.

> at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest

Having the headset also be a PC (and not essentially a phone OS) is worth a premium of >$250 at least. You can build desktop apps/games on this thing, it can (hopefully) do just about anything a normal PC can.

The Quest is impressive in many ways, but it's a much narrower-use device. I don't think Valve's pricing needs to be in that same bracket to still sell.

Re: Steam Frame

#547

Post by nottorp »

Stupid links insist on opening in the steam app on mobile. I do have it installed but my login expired years ago and I’m not renewing it.

Guess I won’t find out what this is about any time soon…

Re: Steam Frame

#548

Post by gruturo »

JulesRosser wrote: post #116
AaronAPU wrote: post #51

The only really incredible VR experience I have had so far was Half-life Alyx. Is there anything that tier or even better these days?

Driving Sims, PavlovVR was a must play for a counterstrike shooter with great modding scene. Of course Skyrim VR, it's unplayable without mods but with voice recognition and QOL mods it's incredible,

I have close to 150 hours in Skyrim VR. What makes it unplayable without mods?

Re: Steam Frame

#549

Post by elxr »

lynndotpy wrote: post #165
vunderba wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine it exceeding ~1k USD - they've got to at least keep it reasonably competitive with the Meta Quest which is around half that.

I imagine there are a non-negligible amount of us here who looked at the Apple Vision Pro with interest, despite its $3,500+ price tag, only to find out it can't meaningfully be used as a standalone development device. Only question is if 2160px is enough.

If the lenses are good, it's enough. Just have to up the font size a bit and give up some information density compared to, say, a 16-17 inch laptop.

The Quest 3 is already close to good enough to spend decent chunks of time in reading text. Just have breaks every 30m to avoid mild strain.

To me, the sweaty face issue is the main annoyance with working in these types of headsets.

Re: Steam Frame

#550

Post by globular-toast »

pixelpoet wrote: post #54
Night_Thastus wrote: post #25

The whole "foveated streaming" sounds absolutely fascinating. If they can actually pull off doing it accurately in real time , that would be incredible. I can't even imagine the technical work behind the scenes to make it all work. I'd really like to know what the experience is like of using it, both for games and something like video.

There's an awesome shader on shadertoy that illustrates just how extreme the fovea focus is: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM Linus the shrill/yappy poodle and his channel are less than worthless IMO.

That's crazy. I feel dumb for initial thinking it was somehow doing eye tracking to achieve this, despite having no such hardware installed.

I would be curious to see a similar thing that includes flashing. Anecdotally, my peripheral vision seems to be highly sensitive to flashing/strobing even if it is evidently poor at seeing fine details. Make me think compression in the time domain (e.g. reducing frame rate) will be less effective. But I wonder if the flashing would "wake up" the peripheral vision to changes it can't normally detect.

Not sure what the random jab at Linus is about.

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