Oculus VR founder says virtual reality needs unlimited GPU power

Tom's Hardware had an interview with Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR about the future of virtual reality computing. Asked what he sees as the biggest challenge in VR, Luckey replied the one thing VR needs right now is probably unlimited GPU horsepower in everybody's computer. While the Oculust Rift headset pricing is still a mystery to the public, Luckey explained the PC capable of running a good VR experience will be the defining factor in the total cost.

Tom's Hardware: If there was one challenge in VR that you had to overcome that you really wish wasn't an issue, which would it be?

Palmer Luckey: Probably unlimited GPU horsepower. It is one of the issues in VR that cannot be solved at this time. We can make our hardware as good as we want, our optics as sharp as we can, but at the end of the day we are reliant on how many flops the GPU can push, how high a framerate can it push? Right now, to get 90 frames per second [the minimum target framerate for Oculus VR] and very low latencies we need heaps of power, and we need to bump the quality of the graphics way down.

If we had unlimited GPU horsepower in everybody's computer, that will make our lives very much easier. Of course, that's not something we can control, and it's a problem that will be solved in due time.

TH: Isn't it okay to deal with the limited power we have today, because we're still in the stepping stones of VR technology?

PL: It's not just about the graphics being simple. You can have lots of objects in the virtual environment, and it can still cripple the experience. Yes, we are able to make immersive games on VR with simpler graphics on this limited power, but the reality is that our ability to create what we are imagining is being limited by the limited GPU horsepower.