A VR Frame’s Life
developer.oculus.com
developer.oculus.com
Slow loading times, frustrating though they can be, close to the absolute lowest priority issues you will have in gamedev. You only get to fix them (and trust me, game devs find them way more annoying than you do!) once all of the higher priority issues are fixed.
If you can optimise game loading and reduce it by 1 minute, or increase FPS by 0.01%, would you still choose the latter?
Trite example obviously but the gta v loading issue was so bad. Decades of human time unnecessarily spent on loading screens.
Substantial revenue opportunity missed because you can't buy microtransactions during a loading screen.
Back to the question. If there is a limited amount of time before release and I have to choose between fixing load time and fixing framerate. It’s definitely going to be framerate, some console platforms will reject your title if you frame drop multiple times within certain duration. Frame drop is also a deal breaker for most players especially for VR games. Stuttering can cause serious motion sickness in VR and make people throw up.
Overall I think the constraints of game projects are different to other domains like web and business. So we game developers tend to think differently. Like bugs are bad, but as long as not game breaking/save corrupting or happening way too often, players are kind of ok with that. People even found bugs in game entertaining and compiled a weekly reel of bugs https://kotaku.com/c/video/highlight-reel. On the other hand, performance is critical to us, if a game plays sluggish then no one can enjoy it. Compared to the web where users have more tolerance about rending speed.
impact = severity_factor * frequency * age_factor
severity_factor = 1 (minor cosmetic/performance issue)
= 3 (major cosmetic/performance issue)
= 5 (annoying gameplay bug)
= 50 (avoidable crash/gamebreaking bug)
= 100 (unavoidable crash/gamebreaking bug)
frequency = times_occurred / hours_of_gameplay
age_factor = 1 + age_in_monthsI never figured out graphics cards. They are absurdly powerful and absurdly complex. The lack of documentation and open source drivers also does not help. As featured on HN a bit ago, AMD's drivers for Linux make up 10+% of the entire kernel codebase now!
I have no idea how the developers at Unity or Unreal stay sane. The amount of work that has gone into these base platforms we all take advantage of is...unreal.
I think at this point a GPU card is more like a second computer inside your computer. I wonder if we could get rid of the regular computer and use a GPU only... are there any OS for a GPUs?
https://andybrown.me.uk/wk/2014/06/01/ase/
At a high level it showcases the idea of offloading expensive graphics computations to a separate chip. A modern window manager uses the graphics device in a similar way to avoid redrawing the contents of windows as you move them around the screen.
Nvidia drivers may be closed source, but it just works.
Wrench with RTX
It's more on the game devs than the graphics card devs, but getting the game devs on to these modern features feels like pulling teeth.
There are a lot of games coming out, but I really don't think Flight VR games are it's major selling point right now. Just as Fight Sims haven't been the top sellers for anything expect their own equipment. If you want it added for Microsoft Fight Simulator, check the forums and I'm sure theres post you could boost with your opinion.
But I really never see X-Plane integrating DLSS into their product. They have to focus on realism in all aspects, and are more focused on appeasing the FAA for their flight sim accreditation then benefiting users.
This dislike of X-Plane started after the Spyware incident, even if they have doubled back, I really doubt X-Plane will be advancing anything this generation.
To circle back to your initial statement: >DLSS is so irritatingly restricted right now
Its just not true.
Its a new technology out for less than a year at this point. It takes more than 2 months to incorporate a completely new graphics stack unless you're already using an engine like Unreal 4. The comment just feels bloated with pretentiousness, and isn't fitting of this forum. I don't use DLSS because I don't really see the benefit without heavy raytracing, and I can't imagine what it for do for me in a game where I am flying 40k feet off the ground.