[Tom's Hardware] Futuremark's VRMark: First Look

[Mondozei]

Read it all here

 

[Noctifer616]

Liquid VR gives AMD an edge in VR. If the benchmark does not support it, you are not going to see much difference between AMD and NVidia. Also, no GCN 1.2 in the tests.

 

[Udgnim]

curious if it's DX11 or DX12 base

looked at the VRMark page and learned there's a lot of VR headsets being worked on

http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/vrmark

 

[Stuka87]

What a joke of a tool. A VR Testing tool that doesn't support any VR technologies. And then the test is a joke, as there was no Fury tested? They made sure to have a 980Ti, but no Fury.

To FutureMark's defense, they are adding support for other headsets, but they really need to add the VR technology that is going to be used.

 

[gorobei]

since some are too lazy to read or have their self confirmation bias challenged.

Futuremark’s VRMark utility is being developed for release in 2016, but not all of it will be released to the public. You can break VRMark down into several different parts, and your access to the various levels will depend very much on what you do for a living. The reason for this is that much of the testing for VR is actually done with extra equipment.

Take latency for example. In a virtual reality situation, there are a number of different actions that would have latency. Futuremark said VRMark is able to measure four different latency events:

Time from physical event to API event (Step 1 to Step 2)
Time from API event to draw call (Step 2 to Step 3)
Time from draw call to image on display (Step 3 to Step 4)
Total latency (time from Step 1 to Step 4)

The first step, the physical movement, can’t be measured accurately without a device that can consistently perform the same action and do it on command. This sort of test will therefore be limited to hardware manufacturers and other groups that have access to this kind of specialized equipment and a laboratory environment. Step 2, the time from API event to draw call, is measured by software as part of the latency test. It does not require extra hardware.

The test that Tom’s Hardware has been privy to is the third step: time from draw call to image on display. Futuremark said this test won’t be available to the general public either, because it also requires some specialized equipment to perform. It will be accessible to members of the press for VR headset reviews, though.

We’ve been asked to not show the hardware that was sent to us and to avoid describing it in detail because it is still subject to changes, but what I can tell you is that it involves an external sensor that takes tens of thousands of samples per second to detect when the display draws the image. It then compares that result against when the benchmark initiated the draw call. This test gives us three results measured in milliseconds: Photon Latency, Photon Persistence and Total Latency.

Photon Latency is the time it takes for the screen to react to a draw call. Photon Persistence, also known as ghosting, is the time it takes for the screen to transition from light to dark. VRMark also measures the total latency, which is the time from the physical event to when the image displays on screen.

Although Futuremark supplied the experimental hardware and early VRMark build, we were on our own to get a headset for testing. For this reason, we are currently limited to one headset for the benchmark: an Oculus Rift DK2.

this vr test suite is for devs and reporters. given that you need special hardware for mechanical reproduction of hmd movement and sampling pixel change, no consumer should ever be touching this benchmark. also they used riftDK2, seriously?

 

[zlatan]

For a benchmark it is reasonable to not use the vendor specific VR runtimes. After all we want apple-to-apple comparison. Also there are a lot of fundamental difference between GameWorks VR and LiquidVR. For example the devs have the ability to not render a native resolution on the Geforce hardwares with multi-res shading, and the users don't able to inactivate this feature, if the application don't have the option for it. The Radeon users also has an option to reduce latency a lot with latest data latch, and this is also active by default.

 

[stahlhart]

Thread cleaned. Stay on topic.
-- stahlhart

 

[poofyhairguy]

Wow, gen one VR games will look like upscaled PS2 games. Look at this compared to real 2D Firestrike:

 

[mysticjbyrd]

The furyx2 will be released alongside the VR tech.

 

[Grubbernaught]

Wow, gen one VR games will look like upscaled PS2 games. Look at this compared to real 2D Firestrike:

According to the article the scene you are using is a minature inside a glass cabinet within a museum along with other scenes from past 3dmarks.

Not representative of anything and misleading. Look at elite dangerous (before the latest rift runtimes broke compatibility) for a better example of "first gen" vr.