Until now, Deckard has been viewed as a long-awaited successor to the Valve Index, which debuted almost six months ago
Time flies…
I can’t believe that Half Life: Alyx was more than 3 weeks ago
Since the industry VR push six years ago we have had an astounding list of amazing titles:
- Half Life Alyx
What a run for this exciting technology.
They (the industry) keep fiddling with trying to make the hardware better and more accessible even though it’s already in a good spot there, instead of making killer apps that warrant getting the hardware in the first place. It’s a fucking insane catch 22.
Consumers aren’t buying the hardware even though there are affordable options mostly because there isn’t anything to really use it for (along with a probably non-negligible number of users who won’t get certain products over privacy concerns).
Game makers aren’t making games for VR because the saturation of the hardware isn’t high enough.
Paradiddle is extremely good, you can play percussion just like that, at home, with your fav songs. Why does nobody talk about this.
Simracing, obviously, is amazing, and Phasmophobia is great
I use my headset every single day and it’s the best entertainment thing I’ve bought in the last 10 years. Before that it was the PC.
I use my headset nearly everyday for three things. VR pinball simulation, Beat Saber for cardio, VR porn/camgirls for beating my saber.
I do sim racing and flight simming, while not VR exclusive games, once you try it in VR you can’t go back. Besides that, walkabout mini golf is probably one of my favorites, blade and sorcery, hotdogs horseshoes hand grenades (though, not much of a story to that one), vertigo 2, Boneworks, there’s plenty of great games for VR, and that’s ignoring some of the stuff like using it for workouts when it’s freezing outside and getting cardio in with beat saber
“1200€” what the- I always thought it would be a cheaper option than the Index…
We’ll see then… 🤷
I think there’s been a lot of inflation since the Index was released. As a very crude comparison, the Index was released roughly in between Nvidia’s 20- and 30-series, and it seems like launch MSRPs have gone up 30-40% for the current 40- and 50-series. So if Valve only increases their VR headsets by 10% in the same time period, it could be seen as having become relatively cheaper :)
Well yeah But I always imagined the deckard to be a VR-steamdeck pricewise, Meaning: a relatively cheap VR headset for the masses! (Not excpecting 200€, but somewhere around 600)
I know oculus make cheap headsets, but they don’t really feel like a first class citizen on PC… Plus facebook bad, you know 😅
I haven’t looked into it so I’m just speculating, but I assumed Meta is selling their headsets at a loss to get users into their ecosystem, while Valve would want to make some profit from each sale. Looking at other high end PC VR headsets from Pimax, Varjo and HTC they also tend to be on the pricier side. The Deck was IMO surprisingly cheap, but I guess Valve probably thinks that it’ll lead to more games sold on Steam, even though it isn’t locked into the platform. Of course it would have been nice if Deckard was cheaper but I think €1200 is reasonable in this day and age. Though personally I think I would’ve preferred if it didn’t have standalone capabilities, if that had made it a few hundred cheaper…
If this headset ends up using LCD it is going to be dead on arrival.
So this won’t be a standalone headset and will still require a PC?
It’ll likely be both.
Having on-headset compute is useful and you can do some neat processing tricks to increase image quality like eye tracking for foveated rendering or between frame image translation to account for headset motion without waiting on the GPU to render a new frame.
…And also expand your install base to users who do not own a firebreathing gaming PC, or at best only have a Steam Deck.
It’s a shame that they seem to have moved to ARM instead of the earlier rumors of using an AMD APU like the Steam Deck. But then again, maybe they integrated Box86 since there were rumors about that as well.
This is a successor to the Valve Index. Not the Steam Deck.
If they’re using ARM that tells me they intend for this thing to be a wireless headset, or at least partially.
What it should be at that price is a VR steam deck that you can optionally connect to your PC.
I’m aware. The Deckard was originally rumored to be based on an AMD chip.
I thought this for a long time. The AI 395, with a 40-CU GPU, seemed easily powerful enough. Unfortunately, that’s also the issue–it runs at 55W by default. That’s too much heat to strap to your face, and it’ll drain a 100Wh battery in less than two hours anyway. (That’s the maximum size of battery you can take on a plane in the US, so exceeding that would be a very bold choice.)
The Steam Deck gets away with less power (often 15W) because it’s running games at lower framerates and a lower resolution, but that’s not a good option for VR.
I’m definitely curious to see what they actually do with the Snapdragon, though. Maybe some kind of recompilation tech? Or maybe just partnerships with devs who have already released on Quest to start a new store for standalone stuff, along with the streaming tech they’ve already got. I really want it to be good.
Limiting the TDP of the chip is not really a problem considering the ARM chips are not more powerful either. If they can run Beat Saber and other slimmed down PCVR games, it’s sufficient.
Looking at how many revisions they went through it seems like they came to the conclusion that running x86 on ARM is better than running x86 directly with a TDP limited chip.
Hopefully we will find out later this year.
ETA Prime tried running the 395 at lower TDPs, and the result was that it lost most of its performance advantage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r8JpqfqBpvQ
Which really shouldn’t be too surprising, I guess–all those CUs need power.
I do think power requirements for this level of performance will keep dropping over the next several years, but it doesn’t seem like it’s quite within the necessary power envelope at this point.
It has to be. I had to sell my wireless kit for my valve as it doesn’t work with my new AMD CPU. I play tethered now and it’s awful.
I don’t care about the specs as long as it has a decent display and integrated well into steam.
Oh, and please have something akin to the knuckles controllers and it’s grip function. The reason I haven’t switched yet (besides meta being involved) is that I cannot use my knuckles anymore. Or without major hassle at least.
One of my knuckles is busted after my kid threw a tantrum and threw it >.> So I gotta get a new one
That’s harsh, but fair. I hope it can serve as a lesson to any other kids out there though.
But man, new kids are expensive these days. Good luck!
@domi @Alphane_Moon proton config mentions fexemu and arm64ec
Good to hear that they are still working on getting x86 games running on the Deckard.
