Virtual & Augmented Reality and 3D News - Page 131

The VRAM controversy over NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 continues, where class action lawsuits have now been filed late last week. You might remember this only happened a few weeks ago, with NVIDIA quick to jump and admit it falsely advertised the GTX 970 and quickly refreshed the official specifications of the Maxwell-powered GPU.

There are two lawsuits at the moment, one for NVIDIA and the other targeting GIGABYTE. The plaintiff is suing NVIDIA and GIGABYTE on behalf of all GeForce GTX 970 owners, making this a class action lawsuit. This means that any GeForce GTX 970 owner can jump into this class action lawsuit. There are four major complaints for which the plaintiff is asking for damages over, including:

It seems GIGABYTE is being sucked into this lawsuit by Andrew Ostrowski, the plaintiff, as he purchased two of GIGABYTE's GeForce GTX 970 video cards. We will eventually see most of NVIDIA's other add-in-board (AIB) partners enter the class action lawsuit, as more and more people jump on board.

With Sony pulling out of most of its markets and concentrating on mostly camera sensors and its PlayStation console, it should come as no surprise that the company is set to focus on its PS4-based VR headset, Project Morpheus, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015.

Sony will be giving hands-on demos of its system, as well as more details on its plans for its VR headset. We don't know what Sony will be showing off exactly, as the company could surprise the world with an updated version of Project Morpheus, which is what I want to see. Almost like the DK2 to the DK1 from Oculus VR, as Oculus has even passed that with the latest Crescent Bay prototype.

We will be reporting about all things GDC 2015 as the event kicks off early next month in San Francisco.

Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games and the brain behind the Unreal Engine, has said that there are some insane things going on with VR right now, but a lot of them aren't being shown to the public.

Sweeney was interviewed recently, where he said that he expects VR hardware and headsets to double in quality every few years for the next decade. He added that it will reach a point in around 10 years from now, that it will be hard to tell the difference between the VR world, and the real-world that surrounds you right now.

Oculus VR is expected to launch its first consumer-ready version of the Oculus Rift sometime this year, which I'm sure we're going to hear more about at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) which kicks off in just a couple of weeks time.

The United States Patent & Trademark Office has granted Apple a patent that the iDevice maker filed all the way back in 2008 for a headset design that would see you use your iPhone as a VR headset.

The design resembles the Galaxy Note 4-powered Gear VR, where you slot your iPhone into a device that sits on your face, where you use an external controller that helps you navigate through menus and more when motion tracking doesn't cut it. This is just a patent that Apple has filed, so we don't know if it'll turn into something just yet.

But judging by the amazing things Oculus VR has been able to do, all without a consumer VR product on the market, we don't think it'll be long before Apple unveils its own VR or AR headset.

It looks like Crytek is ready to push into the world of VR gaming, as the studio will be showing off a new VR experience on the Oculus Rift at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015 next month.

VRFocus is reporting that Crytek has confirmed with the site that it will be showing off a "a brand new experience" for VR, especially when compared to what it was showing off at last year's GDC. Last year, Crytek was showing off a VR technology demo running in CryEngine on the Oculus Rift DK2 at 100FPS.

Crytek will be showing off its CryEngine running on Android, too. GDC takes place between March 2-6 in San Francisco, California. You can be sure we'll be reporting about any and all things from the event.

The last couple of weeks have been filled with, well I guess you'd call it "controversy" over the VRAM on the GeForce GTX 970. If you haven't read up on it just yet, you can play catch up here.

But how are the return rates on them? Well, according to analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, not many. Jon Peddie from JPR has said: "I have heard as many as 5 per cent of the buyers are demanding a refund from the AIB suppliers". Retailers are reporting just 1-2%, with two of the UK's biggest retailers offering refunds for the GPU, where they have until the end of this month to box up their GTX 970 and return it.

So why are people up in arms over this? Well, the GTX 970 technically features 4GB of VRAM, with the final 512MB part of this running at a far slower rate than the first 3.5GB. So when a game fills up the first 3.5GB and spills into the remaining 0.5GB, it can cause slowdowns and stuttering in games. But it's not just the VRAM, as the ROPs (Raster Operating Pipelines) have been cut from the previous official specification of 64 ROPs, to 56, as well as the L2 cache being dropped from 2048KB to 1792KB.

Sure, your flashy new GeForce GTX 980 has 4GB of VRAM, and so does the one next to it in SLI. But while you have a total of 8GB of VRAM between two cards, only one set of VRAM is being used, it's not being combined. That is, for now. Things could change according to a recent tweet from AMD's Robert Hallock.

Hallock teased that with the upcoming APIs in Mantle and DirectX 12, two GPUs in SLI or Crossfire could possibly act as 'one big' GPU. Hallock said: "Mantle is the first graphics API to transcend this behavior and allow that much-needed explicit control. For example, you could do split-frame rendering with each GPU ad its respective framebuffer handling 1/2 of the screen. In this way, the GPUs have extremely minimal information, allowing both GPUs to effectively behave as a single large/faster GPU with a correspondingly large pool of memory".

"Ultimately the point is that gamers believe that two 4GB cards can't possibly give you the 8GB of useful memory", he continued. He added: "That may have been true for the last 25 years of PC gaming, but thats not true with Mantle and its not true with the low overhead APIs that follow in Mantle's footsteps". This isn't confirmation that memory stacking is going to happen, but it's a much better direction to be heading in, that's for sure. Especially with 4K and beyond gaming, VRAM is more important than ever and wasting 4-8GB of VRAM on SLI/Crossfire setups is just silly.

By now I'm sure you've read about the VRAM issues surrounding the GeForce GTX 970, and AMD taking a stab at NVIDIA because of it, but now the former is offering gamers special discounts if they return their GTX 970s and pick up a Radeon card.

AMD's Roy Taylor has taken to Twitter, offering GTX 970 owners who return their cards special discounts if they swap them out for Radeon cards, including the R9 290 and R9 290X. Taylor tweeted "Anyone returning their GTX970 and wanting a great deal on a Radeon with a full 4GB please let us know" and even tagged the @NVIDIAGeForce Twitter account at the time.

Are you a GeForce GTX 970 owner? Will you be trading in your GTX 970 for the Radeon R9 290X?

Count Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as a fan of the HoloLens technology Microsoft recently showed off, though said it will take a few years of development. Speaking during a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" chat, this marked the first public statement Gates had regarding the emerging technology.

"The HoloLens is pretty amazing," Gates recently said. "Microsoft has put a lot into the chips and the software. It is the start of virtual reality. Making the device so you don't get dizzy or nauseous is really hard - the speed of the alignment has to be super, super fast. It will take a few years of software applications being built to realize the full promise of this."

Both augmented reality and virtual reality have seen numerous breakthroughs in recent years, but there are a number of challenges both technologies face. Microsoft says there is nothing like HoloLens currently available, and the headset won't directly compete with Oculus Rift, Project Morpheus or other VR headsets being developed.

Microsoft clearly is excited about the potential for its HoloLens platform to succeed in gaming, with Xbox boss Phil Spencer and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella both promoting how augmented reality can boost the gaming experience. Microsoft hasn't disclosed gaming projects for its HoloLens platform, but gaming is expected to be a major effort to help push AR mainstream.

"It's also getting clearer how the games people love today will evolve to mind-blowing experiences in the future when designed for the mixed reality that Windows 10 and HoloLens create," Nadella said during a Microsoft financial call. "Just imagine what is possible with Minecraft. Gaming truly is a valuable part of millions of people's lives and Microsoft will excel and increase our lead."

The HoloLens headset and Windows Holographic platform can be paired with video games to provide a unique environment - while Microsoft and Mojang have already created two HoloLens demonstrations that they look forward to launching.