Valve and HTC Push Wide Release Of Vive VR Headset To 2016
by Brandon Chester on August 28, 2015 2:10 PM EST
Valve isn't a stranger to product delays or discrepancies between promised launches and when a product actually launches. This is often joking referred to as Valve Time, and it seems that Valve's hardware endeavors are no safer from it than their video games are. Today they announced that the wide consumer release of their Vive VR headset is being pushed to Q1 2016, a slight delay from the originally promised launch by the end of 2015.
While the Vive will only begin to ship in volume in 2016, Valve and HTC will still be sending a limited number of units to developers and community members in the last quarter of this year. This means that they're technically fulfilling their promise to launch by the end of 2015, but not in the way most people were expecting.
With the Vive launching in Q1 2016, it's now in even deeper competition with the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus from Sony which will also be launching during that quarter. The price for the Vive is still unknown, but with a small launch still occurring this year we won't have to wait much longer to find out.
Source: Valve via Gamesindustry.biz
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therobotmaker - Friday, August 28, 2015 - link
It wouldn't be a Valve product without a delay or ten.ant6n - Saturday, August 29, 2015 - link
Some of the AMD fanboys claim that VR is gonna be much better with AMD rather than Nvidia, is there any truth to that? Like, is it worth switching back to AMD with the next graphics card?firewall597 - Monday, August 31, 2015 - link
While this relates to more than just VR, current gen Nvidia does not support DX12 Asynchronous Compute/shaders, which an important technology used to reduce latency. It basically allows the GPU to do more at once, reducing the time to frame. This is very important for both VR and DX12Not sure if AnandTech allows links in posts, but I'll try:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/3j1916/...
This isn't to say that Nvidia won't work, just that AMD currently benefits much more from DX12 optimizations, which will in turn improve your VR experience. And I would wager that Pascal next year will rectify this too. If you can be patient on an upgrade, it might be prudent to wait and see what next gen Nvidia has to offer.
firewall597 - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Hmm, someone posted a counter on the Nvidia reddit saying that NV does indeed have asynchronous compute/shading. So... *shrug*?https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/3j5e9b/an...
firewall597 - Tuesday, September 1, 2015 - link
Now there's a counter to the counter, disputing the results and testing methodology. It may indeed be true that NV doesn't have proper async compute, but I can't keep up with the argument anymore.