For some context, I've been making games across console/mobile/VR for about 12 years so I can provide (hopefully) some educated responses.
For 1)
- Their SDK implements this rendering strategy, so either they haven't been able to justify the effort for additional optimization, or (much more likely) there isn't a tenable general purpose solution that doesn't fall apart horribly in many circumstances. This latter point is true of many optimizations in games, they work because you can very narrowly scope them to what you are doing.
- Frustum and occlusion culling are used, like you mention, to avoid rendering meshes that are off-screen. This isn't a panacea though, there can be significant CPU cost to doing so to the point where it can be more performant to disable it. Case in point, I used Umbra occlusion culling in my VR game in only a few scenes because my CPU budget for 90 FPS was so small that the PS4 couldn't keep up.
- Those 45 planes are a series of slices that are very closely projected in space, so the odds that there isn't any work to do is almost nil. Even more true when you consider dynamic scene elements, such as lighting and shadow casting.
For 2)
- All of the challenges present for 3D content creation are unchanged with this device, it just adds more on top (limited FOV, depth blur, and fringe blur). You can't wizard away seeing color separation at the border of the screen, it's just fundamentally the hardware's limitations.
Another example, the PSVR headset's OLED panels cause a purple blur to happen on edges that have too much light/dark contrast. The solution? Call an API and change a floating point "base brightness" level for the headset, or change your lighting -- for each level (this is Sony's recommendation!). Entirely game and scene dependent, and not something that an automatic solution could accomplish.
- Some of the "magic" techniques invented for VR performance may have the possibility to be applicable (skipped frame re-projection, foveated rendering), but those are based on the math between two camera projections not 45.
- Any improvements that could be created by a Carmack-level person are going to be market driven. The population of people that fit in that category would have the opportunity to work on whatever they want, and VR was compelling to many of them because of how damned cool it is (was?). By comparison, this tech is a novelty that a regular consumer will probably never see.
Comments
For some context, I've been making games across console/mobile/VR for about 12 years so I can provide (hopefully) some educated responses.
For 1)
- Their SDK implements this rendering strategy, so either they haven't been able to justify the effort for additional optimization, or (much more likely) there isn't a tenable general purpose solution that doesn't fall apart horribly in many circumstances. This latter point is true of many optimizations in games, they work because you can very narrowly scope them to what you are doing.
- Frustum and occlusion culling are used, like you mention, to avoid rendering meshes that are off-screen. This isn't a panacea though, there can be significant CPU cost to doing so to the point where it can be more performant to disable it. Case in point, I used Umbra occlusion culling in my VR game in only a few scenes because my CPU budget for 90 FPS was so small that the PS4 couldn't keep up.
- Those 45 planes are a series of slices that are very closely projected in space, so the odds that there isn't any work to do is almost nil. Even more true when you consider dynamic scene elements, such as lighting and shadow casting.
For 2)
- All of the challenges present for 3D content creation are unchanged with this device, it just adds more on top (limited FOV, depth blur, and fringe blur). You can't wizard away seeing color separation at the border of the screen, it's just fundamentally the hardware's limitations.
Another example, the PSVR headset's OLED panels cause a purple blur to happen on edges that have too much light/dark contrast. The solution? Call an API and change a floating point "base brightness" level for the headset, or change your lighting -- for each level (this is Sony's recommendation!). Entirely game and scene dependent, and not something that an automatic solution could accomplish.
- Some of the "magic" techniques invented for VR performance may have the possibility to be applicable (skipped frame re-projection, foveated rendering), but those are based on the math between two camera projections not 45.
- Any improvements that could be created by a Carmack-level person are going to be market driven. The population of people that fit in that category would have the opportunity to work on whatever they want, and VR was compelling to many of them because of how damned cool it is (was?). By comparison, this tech is a novelty that a regular consumer will probably never see.