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  • Cariboo - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    " it is safe to say that the new headset uses something that belongs to the ultra-high-end of the SoC space."
    What? Oculus has already disclosed that the Quest is powered by a shitty Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (2 years old SoC).
  • mode_13h - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    Did any devices actually *ship* with the 835, in 2016? I think it's an exaggeration to say it's 2 years old, but definitely more than 1.

    And is the previous generation of their high-end SoC *really* so bad? What more can one realistically expect, in a $400 product that also needs a good screen, optics, and sensors for inside-out tracking?
  • SL4KR - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    Plus using slightly older hardware let's you have the time to optimize code, I would suspect.
  • Jon Tseng - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    Also bear in mind it should be less thermally constrained in the headset than in a smartphone, so you probably get better clocks and performance than stock.

    Although still some way behind a proper PC CPU/GPU combo, for sure.
  • qlum - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    less thermaly constrained yes but you still don't want to use to big a battery or heatsinks and its use case resolves around a constant heavy load upon the soc so don't expect a bog improvement
  • PeachNCream - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    As others have pointed out, Facebook needed time to integrate the SoC into the design. This isn't phone hardware running on a standard Google operating system so there was probably a lot more work involved. Atop that, Facebook is an advertising company not a cellular phone manufacturer so they don't have the background in quickly bringing a new SoC to market. They have to nail an awful lot down to get the monetization of the platform into place so we ought to give them credit where its due that a new Oculus even got released with a Snapdragon 835 instead of some older SoC.
  • 29a - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    I am able to run a game on my computer and wirelessly stream it to a laptop connected to my tv and I think nvidia sheild tv can do the same thing. All of the work is done on my gaming computer, and sent to the laptop all it does is display the game on the tv and handle controller input. Why is there not a VR headset that does all the work on the computer and send it to the headset wirelessly, greatly reducing the computing power required in the headset, while greatly expanding the power of the headset?
  • mode_13h - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    There's now an official wireless kit for the Vive Pro.

    I wonder if Rift v2 will be wireless out-of-the-box, although Nvidia probably added that USB-C port to their new FE card for a good reason...

    Anyway, it needs to be a purpose-built wireless link, due to the bandwidth and latency requirements. You wouldn't want to use standard wifi.

    That said, you might almost get away with it by putting some motion-compensation in the HMD, that would warp the image to match the change in HMD pose, between when the image was rendered and when the HMD received it. There'd probably be some artifacts, not least because you'd have to use something like H.264 compression, which would add further latency.
  • Diji1 - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    >it needs to be a purpose-built wireless link

    No it doesn't, the HTC Vive wireless solution uses Wigig.
  • Diji1 - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    And that, if we are to believe hands on reviews at the moment, works flawlessly.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link

    Eh, good luck. That adds a lot of bulk (if not also weight) and its battery lasts only 2 hours. And let's hope you don't have congestion on your network.

    And we haven't even touched on cost - that wireless kit costs 75% as much as an entire Oculus Quest!

    So, you're going to add all that cost, bulk, and weight just so a few of your users can do double-duty with this HMD for standalone + PC usage? A much better approach would be to make the Rift 2.0 wireless, and keep the Quest as a pure, inexpensive standalone unit.
  • Kamus - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    >I wonder if Rift v2 will be wireless out-of-the-box, although Nvidia probably added that USB-C port to their new FE card for a good reason...

    By the time Rift 2 comes along, 7nm will have taken over the videocard market.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link

    Really? When is Rift v2 arriving?
  • 29a - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    The connection between my desktop and laptop is wireless N and seems to work fine.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link

    Latency requirements for VR are like 1/10th of what's tolerable for gaming.
  • timecop1818 - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    latency
  • boeush - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    I think the bandwidth demands would be untenable for even the best wireless-streaming solutions. VR requires super-high framerates to avoid vertigo/nausea in the user, and uses display resolutions quite above those of a typical HDTV.

    Consider: you need to stream 3600x1440 at 23 bits per pixel (RGB), and at 100 FPS. This amounts to 12.442 gigabits per second of raw bandwidth. Allowing for an additional 20% margin to handle transmission protocol overhead and interference losses, you're at ~15 Gbps. There's no wireless streaming solution capable of such bit rates, as of yet.
  • boeush - Thursday, September 27, 2018 - link

    ^^ erm, I meant to write "24 bits per pixel", of course. Stupid typos + no way to edit posts = typical comment on Anandtech...
  • Zingam - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    Why wouldn't that be possible. You are supposed to be within a few steps away from the emitter? It is neither a WiFi connection or mobile phone.
  • Diji1 - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    >I think the bandwidth demands would be untenable for even the best wireless-streaming solutions

    Nope, the Wigig based HTC Vive Pro solution that exists now works flawlessly if we are to believe hands on reviews. It might be an issue for higher resolution headsets presumably but they don't exist yet.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    Isn't there a certain amount of compression to consider too. Like Steam wraps up a game in H.264 so it can push a relatively high quality video transmission over a rather slow link. Also, there's nothing stopping anyone from just running at 1800x720 to reduce bandwidth without dealing with interpolation losses when sending a video stream to a VR headset that has a panel resolution of 3600x1440. It wasn't that long ago that we were all terribly impressed at the image quality and realism of Freespace and it was locked at 640x480. Cutting the resolution would also open up a large number of more power efficient and cost effective graphics processors, even putting VR within the reach of some modern iGPUs. There's nothing better than getting your game on, but doing so without the 250W TDP graphics card to force you into a high cost, outdated form factor like a full ATX desktop.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link

    Indeed HTC's wigig-based link *does* use compression.

    The idea of sending downsampled frames is pretty questionable. I think there's only so much blurriness that VR users would tolerate. If you wear corrective lenses, imagine walking around without them.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link

    I should add that it's probably not viable to use a common technology like H.264 compression, as that requires the entire frame as input, and will add non-trivial latency.

    The amount of compression that's achievable without unacceptable latency, power, or quality compromises is probably much less than what you can use for normal game or video streaming.
  • WorldWithoutMadness - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    Latency, bandwidth, and power consumption. As you can notice, they don't even put battery life info. I'm guessing it's very limited. There'll be a lot of health problem due to weight if it has long battery life.
  • Diji1 - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    I imagine battery life is one to two hours with demanding applications based on current mobile devices.

    Hopefully they'll have hotswapping so you can charge and play at the same time, not that I intend on buying this device.
  • nevcairiel - Friday, September 28, 2018 - link

    VR needs ultra-low latency, much more so then gaming on a big screen. Without quite specialized tech, both on software and hardware, this would definitely introduce a growing latency in comparison to cabled headsets.

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