VR any better with higher res smartphone?

[jtvang125]

So I picked up one of these cheap vr goggles to try with my phone. It has a screen res of 1440x2560 so basically it becomes 1280x720 to each eye in landscape mode. At this res it's just too pixelated as the goggles must magnify it to fill your fov. The immersion just isn't there and kind of ruins the experience.

Would it be a better experience once 4k smartphones start coming out? What about the vr systems that have their own screens, which look to be atleast 1080?

 

[Red Hawk]

The graphical detail, frame rate, and overall smoothness of the experience is going to be much better with a well specced gaming PC and a dedicated headset like Oculus Rift or HTC Vive than in a smartphone.

Smartphones with 4K screens won't really make a difference because at this point smartphone SoCs aren't remotely close to being able to render games natively at 4K with acceptable frame rates. You have to buy $300+ graphics cards on PC to really even start to get to that level.

 

[antihelten]

It has a screen res of 1440x2560 so basically it becomes 1280x720 to each eye in landscape mode. At this res it's just too pixelated as the goggles must magnify it to fill your fov. The immersion just isn't there and kind of ruins the experience.

Just a slight correction here, but it's not 1280x720 per eye, it's 1280x1440. You only divide one side by 2.

Would it be a better experience once 4k smartphones start coming out? What about the vr systems that have their own screens, which look to be atleast 1080?

4K will only be a better experience if there are actual 4K VR experiences available, also as Red Hawk mentioned above that smartphones wont be able to run 4K games anyway, now not all VR experience are games, but the non-game experiences probably aren't available in much more than 1080P.

Regarding that VR systems with their own screens (Rift, Vive, PSVR etc.), those are either 1080x1200 per eye (Rift or Vive), or 960x1080 per eye (PSVR), so in other words they are actually lower than a what you already have. The reason why they will generally look better anyway, is down to better optics, which plays a huge role in the quality of the image.

 

[Valantar]

I'd say that in terms of "how good can this possibly look?", 4k screens will improve things - an increase in resolution will lessen the "screen door effect". But as noted above, this needs to be accompanied by increased source material quality and rendering capacity of the phone.

Better headsets like the Rift, Vive and PSVR have far better render quality, but more screen door effect.

Alrhough if your phone has an AMOLED display, note that the PenTile subpixel arrangement effectively lowers your resolution by (very roughly) 1/3rd. This is especially noticeable in VR - a QHD HTC 10 looks noticeably better in VR than a Samsung S7.

 

[bystander36]

Correction, 2560x1440 in VR would be 1280x1440 per eye in landscape mode. The height does not get cut in half, only the width. You could lose some pixels at the divide point though, so it might be slightly smaller.

As far as performance goes, a smart phone is not going to be as capable as any laptop or desktop. It might look good for very basic smartphone type games, but it's no substitute for a PC gaming experience.