Google reveals 4800 × 3840 120Hz per eye VR display at 150 degrees FoV, just about able to fully replace 1440p displays

View through lens: https://wol-prod-cdn.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/4844b048-be28-4a66-9a9e-53c316c733f4/jsid658-fig-0013-m.jpg

Paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jsid.658

This is huge news. 14x more pixels than current headsets. Powered by foveated rendering making it runnable on today's GPUs. They even got this beast working in a mobile SoC.

This will be the end of triple monitor setups for those willing to wear headgear. It's not super far off from allowing you to sit in an IMAX theater that beats the visual quality of the real thing. Just needs another 2.5x resolution increase and it will be at that level. And this is to say nothing of how incredible and crisp VR games are going to look on this display.

Oculus were aiming for 4000 x 4000 per eye by 2021 (back in 2016) and things have moved quicker than they anticipated. I wouldn't be surprised if Oculus aim for a higher resolution panel than that for 2020 in Oculus Rift 2.

I love this progress

Higher res is great but we don't have systems to push that level of resolutions at 90fps. Computers are struggling with 4k at 60 fps.

Cool

Good luck powering that up.

This uses foveated rendering. In the paper they say it's the equivalent of rendering the same pixels as 1280 × 1922, however your eyes will of course perceive the full resolution only. Current headsets render pretty much the same amount of pixels as 1280 × 1922. Only difference is 120Hz vs 90Hz.

Current headsets use a GTX 970 / 1060 as a base requirement.

This means these displays will work natively at 120Hz on a GTX 1070 or a GTX 1160.

pretty exciting, but the wait is gonna be painful

I would expect this to appear in headsets by 2020, so about 2 years. In the meantime, software is what will fill the gap. We'll get a bunch of AAA VR exclusives this year or next.

@Pedro: you don't have to render at that resolution to see the benefits. The primary reason for these ultra resolution HMDs is to reduce screen door effect. You get that benefit no matter what resolution you render at

Resolution is the most immediate feature that needs improving and the sooner VR can mimic the clarity of one’s eyesight, the closer it will be to mainstream adoption.

Still not into wearing a helmet to game tho.

Well this is intended to be run at the native resolution using foveated rendering. Technically only a small amount of pixels will be rendered at the full resolution, but this will only be around your fovea, so it will be perceptually impossible to tell the difference. It will be exactly the same as rendering all pixels at all times. Which is different to checkerboard rendering for example where it's not as good as the real thing, while this is the real thing.

@blueberry_bandit: my point is the physical DPI increase yields benefits, regardless of rendering approach or resolution

Yes, that's very true. This is ideal if Apple's rumored 8000 x 8000 per eye AR / VR hybrid headset is really going to be released in 2020, though that's all speculation.

And standalones in particular will mostly want to run at a lower resolution with panels like these, for the time being anyway.

@blueberry_bandit: Aha never head of that rendering method kinda interesting.

It gets better because as well as cutting out most pixels from the rendering equation, it can be used in a raytraced rendering approach to cut a similar amount of rays needing to be sampled per frame.

Eventually we'll be seeing a performance increase of more than 200x in a high-resolution raytraced photorealistic VR game compared to having foveated rendering turned off.

This is why Gabe Newell said the VR situation will reverse over time. As of now, graphical fidelity on VR isn't on par with non-VR. But as time goes on, VR will be where the most photorealistic games running at the highest resolutions and framerates will be.

16K per eye at 240 FPS will be about as difficult as rendering 4K at 120 FPS in non-VR thanks to foveated rendering. (But this will take 7-10 years to really show those kind of numbers)

Yes, so excited to see VR taking off.

Cool. I'm waiting for VR to become better, and the headsets to become smaller than huge before I jump in.

@blueberry_bandit: thank you for clarifying. people were all commenting non stop about it