I wonder what makes you and some others so confident in this - from my experience in the past 20-30 years native resolution generally is the best, unless you have proper ratios like ideally 4:1 more resolution. But 15% more resolution wouldn’t seem to help, rather potentially decrease the visible quality depending on how smart the upscaling algo’s are. (I am assuming here that we are not talking about SDE, because that is no longer a greater concern anyhow)
Am I missing something ?
Because you’re thinking of pancake monitors, not VR displays. The higher the resolution the better the clarity, even with lower rendered resolution (obviously at some point the lower the resolution it stops mattering how high the resolution of the panel), SDE still matters too (for some G2 level is enough but for others it’s still not enough, VR is extremely subjective). Also if you’re rendering 1:1 on a vr panel, it’s not going to be 1:1 like a traditional monitor due to barrel distortion and other details (discussed well here and explained better by other people than me: https://community.openmr.ai/t/new-to-vr-and-pimax-lost-and-confused/39157/3 )
What you’re saying is true for traditional monitors but displaying an image on a VR headset is a whole different ballpark.
That said, for the cambria case that we are talking about there probably would be fairly little difference, but we’re also talking about standalone. My main concern is with PCVR so the panel would be run at full res anyway.
Exactly.
The specific reason why is the scaling post process step. Whenever you perform a scaling operation on bitmaps, you are losing fidelity because you’re mapping pixels from one grid onto misaligned pixels on another grid. This can only ever be an approximation. That approximation gets better by oversampling so that you’re losing less of the original information during the translation.
On a conventional monitor, rendering at exactly native resolution avoids this post process step altogether. So it avoids the quality loss associated with this step. And it avoids the computational cost, too. So on a conventional monitor, there are strong reasons to favor rendering at exactly 1:1 with the physical panel (or at least an exact multiple of the physical panel resolution so that the grids are not misaligned during scaling which reduces the quality loss). These effects mean that you want to avoid buying a panel which has higher physical resolution than your GPU can handle at 1:1. Higher resolution panels can actually be detrimental to overall performance.
None of that applies to VR displays because the scaling post process step is present no matter what. The reason why is because the image always needs to be distorted to counteract lens distortions and chromatic aberration. Scaling and distortions are applied together during this same post process step so that you’re only suffering the fidelity loss of translating from one bitmap to another bitmap one time per frame.
That is to say that performing scaling at the same time doesn’t make the quality degradation any worse. It’s essentially a zero cost operation while you’re having to distort the whole image anyway.
It is necessary to unlearn the wisdom we’ve learned from decades of experience with conventional monitors which are changed by this. There are no special resolutions in VR. There is nothing special about 1:1 native panel resolution or getting at least close to it or anything like that. All of those effects do not apply anymore.
Given that we can’t avoid this post process step in VR, then there are two ways to reduce the quality loss. One way is increasing the resolution of the input bitmap (ie. oversampling). In that case, the pixels are still misaligned with the output bitmap pixels, but they are smaller and there are more of them, so the approximation will be more accurate.
The other way is increasing the resolution of the output bitmap which helps for similar reasons. The more and smaller pixels you have to work with on either the input or output bitmaps, the more accurate the approximation becomes. In fact, if your output bitmap could have infinite resolution, then there would be no quality loss from the scaling operation.
This is why the 6K resolution panels on the Pimax 12K will inherently produce a higher quality image regardless of the input resolution. The closer you get to that infinite output resolution, the better. From the display quality and performance perspective, there are no inherent downsides to the higher resolution panel like there would be for a conventional monitor.
Similarly with the Cambria, a small increase in physical resolution of the panels is always going to produce a small improvement in display quality, not worsen it in any case like can happen with a conventional monitor when you go only a little above 1:1 native resolution. Since there are no special resolutions in VR, increasing either the rendering resolution or the physical panel resolution always produces better quality in all cases.
Ok, fair enough, I had forgotten about the barrel distortion effect so it will probably help a bit.
Let‘s see, if that is noticeable in the Cambria.
Its confirmed to release this october 2022 !
Nice! Hopefully review models go out early. I have gotten every Oculus headset ever made, have them on display actually haha, but I think seeing as this is a “meta” headset and not that appealing to me in general then I’ll be giving this one a miss. I think my days with meta are over unless this ends up really being something way better than we had expected with properly good software. I do want a headset as a monitor replacement device but the PPD on this is going to be too low (unless the leaks are wrong) so likely will be skipping this headset entirely.
Still, very interested to see reviews and possibly test it etc. The comfort is likely the most appealing aspect of it.
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