Morpheus’ 120Hz Reprojection Costs Very Little, Will Be On All The Time
Sony Computer Entertainment‘s GDC 2015 was all about Project Morpheus. The company demonstrated the new near-final prototype with improved specs, and the first impressions from those who tried it were very positive, as we reported earlier this week.
Along with the new prototype, SCE unveiled a technique called reprojection which allows 60Hz (60FPS) games to feel like they actually run at 120Hz; this is done by creating an additional frame between two given frames, with the goal to reduce judder and the resulting motion sickness, the archenemy of Virtual Reality devices. What’s more interesting is that according to Shuhei Yoshida (President of Sony Worldwide Studios) reprojection will be on all the time, even if the game already runs at 120Hz (120FPS), with the goal to always get the latest data as explained in an interview with Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry:
Yeah, our native 120 demo from Japan Studio runs like that. The programmer who did it explained to me that’s good to have reprojection all the time, even if you’re running at native 120. Sometimes a frame will be dropped, but using reprojection it’s still very smooth, and it’s always taking the latest data.
Reprojection is also very light on the overall PlayStation 4 system performance, said Yoshida.
It’s very short. It’s done in the system software we have, a version that just does it for you. It runs right at the very end, just before the frame is going to be displayed. It interrupts the GPU and does this little bit of work. I don’t know the exact timing of it, but it’s very small. The impact of adding that in is not something that our people are worried about.
The programmer who did the Japan Studio game said that this system doesn’t take much power away from the game. He said it’s easy.
This is going to be very important, as VR is already taxing due to the necessity of rendering two images for stereoscopy. Project Morpheus is currently slated to be released in the first half of 2016, but more games will be announced at E3 2015, so stay tuned.