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Oculus’ Asynchronous Spacewarp technology vastly lowers the requirement for VR-ready PCs

By Koh Wanzi - on 7 Oct 2016, 11:01am

Oculus’ Asynchronous Spacewarp technology vastly lowers the requirement for VR-ready PCs

Asynchronous Spacewarp generates a synthetic frame by analyzing differences between the previous two frames. (Image Source: Oculus)

VR-ready PCs will no longer cost you as much as before. At Oculus Connect 3, CEO Brendan Iribe announced a new technology called Asynchronous Spacewarp, which would allow the Rift to work with cheaper, less powerful machines.

VR has thus far been caught in a sort of chicken-and-egg conundrum. In order to really catch on, it needs to have a sufficient spread of games and applications. But before developers will even hop on board, there needs to be a large enough user base to provide the incentive for them to invest the time and effort in VR projects.

The problem is that Rift-ready machines (you needed an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 at minimum) – and the accompanying headset – have always been rather expensive, making the cost a huge limiting factor in VR adoption.

But to even certify cards like the GeForce GTX 970 and Radeon R9 290 for VR, Oculus had to rely on Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW), without which apps would reportedly lose over 11 per cent of their frames. And frames are everything in VR, where 90fps is considered the bare minimum for a smooth, comfortable experience without annoyances like nausea.

Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) is an evolution of ATW, and came about partly because of the necessity to account for the additional positional movements introduced when users move their hands around with the new Touch controllers. While ATW prevents frame drops by replicating the previous frame with updated head position data from the current frame, it cannot work properly with positional changes introduced by the Oculus Touch.

That’s where ASW comes in. It prevents judder caused by both head movement and positional changes, essentially analyzing the difference between the app’s two previous frames and calculating the spatial transformation to “extrapolate and generate a new synthetic frame”.

This means it can estimate the position of your hands and scenery so you don’t experience judder of moving objects. But the best part is that it actually reduces the application frame rate to just 45fps, and adds a synthetic frame between every other frame to free up system resources for positional calculation.

These synthetic frames help keep your frame rates up and ensure you always get 90fps, thus lightening the load on the render pipeline. Ultimately, the reduced workload means you don’t need as much graphics heft for a good VR experience.

ASW allows games to run at just 45fps, thus reducing the rendering workload. (Image Source: Oculus)

Here are the new minimum specifications for the Oculus Rift (an entry-level VR-ready PC also costs as low as US$499 now, compared to US$1,000 before):

  • Intel Core i3-6100/ AMD FX-4350
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960/ AMD Radeon R7 470
  • 8GB of RAM

Of course, there's still the US$599 Rift and US$199 Touch controllers to contend with, but this is still a small but significant step toward truly affordable and accessible VR experiences.

Source: Oculus

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