NVIDIA working on 1700Hz display for low-latency VR

One of the issues of virtual reality is that users can feel nauseous if there's too much lag. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets use low-persistence displays running at 90Hz, which seems to be sufficient for a comfortable VR experience, but NVIDIA wants to push things even further and is working on high-refresh rate screens with a refresh rate of 1700Hz! Full details at Road to VR.

At GTC 2016 this week, Luebke demonstrated an experimental display with a refresh rate that’s almost 20 times faster what we see in current consumer head mounted displays. Running at a whopping 1,7000Hz, the display was mounted on a rail system which allowed it to be rapidly moved back and forth. When shaken vigorously, the image on the display stayed locked in place to an impressive degree. Even when magnified closely, the image on the screen seemed entirely fixed in place.

A 90Hz display shows an image every 11 milliseconds, while this 1,700Hz display shows an image every 0.58 milliseconds.

“…if you can apply this to a VR display, that kind of ultra-low latency would help things stay rock-solid in the environment, to the point that the display would no longer be a source of latency. So this is effectively a zero latency display,” said Luebke.