You cannot use the index controllers without lighthouses
Comment on Steam Frame Teardown: We’re Fans. Except of the Fan - iFixit
artyom@piefed.social 1 day ago
I maintain that it always should have been a streaming-only headset. Without controllers. Everyone seems to agree the older Index controllers are better.
nialv7@lemmy.world 1 day ago
scallisto@retrofed.com 1 day ago
VR headsets effectively need to run two 4K displays, one for each eye, and you have all the processing for controller tracking too. You also have eye tracking, they’re doing the whole foveated streaming thing everybody has been gushing over about (it’s really cool tech!). The mobile chip they used is nothing special, it’s a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a 3 year old smartphone processor (certainly powerful enough to run lighter PC games, but nothing more than that. It’s kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!)
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 1 day ago
It’s kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!
This is what also makes me very sure that being able to play offline will never go away regardless of how hard they try to push gaming into the cloud. Local processing power of common devices is more than enough for the decades of pc games that have been released sans the last decade or so, and they are also good enough to emulate a whole host of gaming devices.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
The mobile chip they used is nothing special, it’s a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a 3 year old smartphone processor (certainly powerful enough to run lighter PC games, but nothing more than that. It’s kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!)
Actually, you can totally run some more demanding PC games on it without any issues. A Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, so slightly weaker, is able to run The Witcher 3 at 720p, Steam Deck preset, in 30+ fps.
And that’s with several compatibility layers in between the SoC and the game.
Mobile ARM chips have come so far we might as well be using them for laptops instead of Intel or AMD (just like the recent MacBook Neo using an iPhone chip). More than good enough performance, especially in case of 8 Elite, at a fraction of the power draw.
artyom@piefed.social 1 day ago
It’s 2x2k, not 4k
scallisto@retrofed.com 1 day ago
It’s 2160x2160, so less than 4K (which is 3840x2160) horizontally, since it’s a different aspect ratio but it’s still more pixels. About 8 million for a standard 4K display, while it’s 9 million for the Frame. Even streaming games on such a high resolution display is performance intensive, plus you have the controller + eye tracking
KickMeElmo@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
If it was, it would have been of no interest to me. I quite like what they made.
artyom@piefed.social 1 day ago
That’s fine but it would have been way way cheaper, less noisy, lighter, more comfortable, more efficient, longer battery, etc. and they could have sold it to way more people. And you’re not running much of anything natively on that Qualcomm processor anyway.
charles@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
There’s a whole lot of assumptions in that statement.
artyom@piefed.social 12 hours ago
No, just one with many implications.
Natanael@infosec.pub 7 hours ago
If you’re using it for streaming games it already does better than any cheaper chip on older larger nodes in efficiency, therefore it is automatically the less noisy and longer lasting variant. Could drop a few grams maybe, a smaller fan maybe, but people already say it’s the most comfortable VR headset out-of-the-box ever. And that’s before the ergonomics kit.
tacosanonymous@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I obviously havent tried the the frame controllers but the Index controllers are amazing.
bilb@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
Mine completely fell apart. I wasn’t smacking them into things, but maybe I was gripping too tight?
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They mention that the compute required to support streaming was also already enough to run standalone games. Removing the ability to run games on the headset wouldn’t have changed the design much anyway.
artyom@piefed.social 1 day ago
How doed that even work? You can stream games from a Raspberry Pi. That’s why there’s an entire industry dedicated to exactly that.
SatyrSack@quokk.au 1 day ago
The point they are getting at is that in order to stream games to a VR headset, that headset needs to have a certain amount of compute power in order to interpret the stream while also handling tracking, connecting to controllers, etc. That amount of compute power is also capable of running games in standalone, so they may as well support that option as well.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 23 hours ago
But that isn’t true at all, and I’ve still seen no one from valve actually claim it is true.
artyom@piefed.social 1 day ago
That makes no sense. It requires more compute to run a whole-ass game along with tracking controllers than it does just tracking controllers.
Natanael@infosec.pub 1 day ago
There’s a fair bit of difference between streaming pre-recorded large frame video versus low latency live streaming with small frames and a bit less size efficient but more CPU efficient encoding, etc…
And because of how SoC chips are binned (what components are offered together, economy of scale, etc), once you pick a SoC with a GPU with enough power to accelerate this decoding, you also have enough power total to do other stuff like on-device gaming simply because if you ask for a cheaper CPU it will cost you more for them to make a custom assembly (unless you ask for a large enough volume of custom chips).
And don’t forget foveated rendering. Most of the magic making it capable of gaming with high quality comes from that. They didn’t put the highest tier chip in, they reduced the work it has to do instead
Damarus@feddit.org 1 day ago
VR streaming is a lot more demanding. You need ultra low latency decoding of much higher resolution and frame rate than 4k60.
Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 1 day ago
Where does the Raspberry Pi fit inside of that headset?
artyom@piefed.social 1 day ago
Why would you think this headset uses a Raspberry Pi?
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Where do they say this? I don’t know why that much ram and processing and storage would be required for just the streaming and fov stuff.
recklessengagement@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve heard it in a few places, one that comes to mind being an interview with some engineers that PC Gamer did. The RAM was originally half (on par with the Quest 3) but once they realized how much the potential library would expand, they bumped the RAM to 16GB.
This decision was made pre RAM crisis, of course.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 23 hours ago
But that would have been in response to non streaming, where the headset handles everything. I’m talking about non streaming.
Several people around here keep claiming valve said the hardware in it was pretty much the same hardware needed for a streaming only design, but no one has actually been able to provide a source of them saying it, and it sounds like BS in a rumor mill at this point. Especially because it doesn’t make any sense.