Got an old graphics card? That should be no problem for VR – soon

By Darren Allan

Many gamers without high-end rigs were disappointed to discover the relatively chunky GPU requirements for virtual reality (VR) gaming. But, the good news is that Valve is working to try and lower that threshold considerably.

The recommended spec for a VR-ready machine is set at a GeForce GTX 970 (or R9 290 on the AMD side), as a smooth frame rate is important when it comes to not making the gamer feel ill (one of the well-documented perils of VR).

But, Valve’s tech will allow cards as old as the GTX 680 to be good for gaming on the SteamVR platform (i.e. HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift).

Upload reports that Alex Vlachos, a graphics programmer at Valve, gave a talk at GDC 2016 in which he revealed that a rendering plugin for the Unity game engine is in the pipeline. And this plugin helps to more efficiently render scenes, therefore keeping frame rates up with low-power GPUs while not sacrificing anything noticeable in terms of image quality.

Well, at least that’s the idea.

Seamless shortcuts

Of course, there has to be some compromise, but Valve’s idea is to use something called “adaptive quality” that takes shortcuts with rendering the …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components