At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) 2018 Oculus talked about their upcoming standalone virtual reality (VR) headset the Oculus Go and showed it off for the first time.
The all-in-one VR head-mounted display (HMD) was announced last November and offers a new way for users to experience immersive VR content without the need for a computer or mobile device. Oculus Go offers full three degrees of freedom (3DoF) complete with an orientation-tracked controller, packed with exciting new technology that like Fixed Foveated Rendering and Dynamic Throttling.
Fixed Foveated Rendering is a new feature developed in partnership with Qualcomm, allowing developers to render the edges of the VR eye texture at a lower resolution than the center. This is a significant performance optimization for titles that render to high-resolution buffers or for those that have a complex fragment shader. The impact this will have on the performance of titles, along with the reduction on resource usage will be a significant improvement allowing content creators to optimize more effectively.
The new Dynamic Throttling will see a long available features to developers made automatic. Until now, developers were able to adjust the clock the speed of the CPU and/or GPU up or down in Gear VR to control heat and battery consumption. Dynamic Throttling will make this completely automatic, meaning developers need only specify a baseline performance requirement and Oculus Go will detect if it is necessary to clock the CPU and/or GPU up or down. This will work to help avoid the dropping of frame rate while still building complex scenes when needed.
Speaking of framerates Oculus Go will also support a new 72Hz Mode. This mode will allow developers to choose to run the display at 72 frames-per-second (FPS) instead of the normal 60 FPS. Though not always required it will be a welcome feature to many content creators who want to make use of it on the Oculus Go platform.
The proprietary software stack provides significant advantages to developers, lessening the time they need to spend optimizing and tuning the performance of their title. According to Oculus, with the Oculus Go, users and content creators will be able to enjoy stunning entertainment and immersive experience with more freedom then before.
GDC 2018 is running all week and VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest from the show.