A true virtual reality machine is a lot longer away than many believe, warns AMD.
AMD’s chief gaming scientist Richard Huddy said that getting photorealism in games is impossible in the current virtual reality hardware.
Talking to Develop, Huddy said that virtual reality was a staggeringly exciting field.
“But hardware companies need to produce something 100 or 200 times more powerful than current hardware if we’re going to get to the stage where we have complete photorealism in virtual reality headsets. It starts with the facts that, for a person with 20:20 vision, they will need a screen with a resolution of about 8k-by-6k to enjoy photorealism.”
This sort of statement flies in the face of many of the claims of the tech press who have been looking at the current generations of virtual headset.
Huddy predicts about 35 million pixels per eye should suffice for VR photorealism. That’s still 75 million pixels, taking us to a 35-fold increase compared to a standard 1080p monitor.
To get an indication about how far you have to go to get close to that Huddy you will need to get a 400x-to-1000x increase in horsepower to engender true, convincing VR photorealism that is indistinguishable from the real world.
