In Conclusion and To be Continued …

Remember, VorpX is still in Beta so my time with the VorpX has been parts wonder, rediscovery and occasionally frustration. But I’ve been almost universally impressed by the product’s maturity and Author Ralf Ostertag’s drive for the best User Experience possible. Features like the slick in-Rift menu system and the massively useful ‘Edge Peek’ are there to try to ensure you have to leave your game experience as little as possible in order to tailor your VR experience.

Game compatibility with the default Z-Buffer mode is excellent and the list of officially supported games (currently around 80 with Stereo 3D) is growing with many more not on the list just ‘working’ as I tried them. We’ll try to cover more games in the next article which will also explore VorpX’s extensive menu system in more detail.

Oculus Rift owners should count themselves very lucky indeed. It’s been less than 3 months since Backers started receiving their Dev Kits and already we have a raft of Tech Demos, Concept Games and Full Triple-A titles to play with. 3D Drivers like VorpX and Vireio help plug the gap between the promise of future, dedicated VR titles and classic gaming experiences from the past.

My aim with this article was to temper my views with detailed videos and images so that you can judge for yourselves as to what your opinions on VorpX’s capabilities are. Hopefully I’ve achieved this for the most part. The comments section and forum are open for feedback and questions which I’ll try to answer

SEE ALSO
Formula 1 Racing Game 'F1 24' Revealed, Offering PC VR Support at Launch Next Month

Release Date and Price

Ralf is a self-confessed perfectionist and is continually tweaking and refining the product it seems so won’t be drawn on exact release dates, but he confirms that initial introductory pricing for the driver will be around $45 / 35EUR. We also understand that there will indeed be a trial version of the product available, so those wishing to try before they buy can do so.

Thanks to Ralf Ostertag for enduring my endless barrage of questions and to my wife for putting up with me lost in other worlds whilst  I put this article together. We’ll be back with a follow-up article based on feedback and questions and we’ll also be covering the open-source and free Vireio drivers very soon.

Feedback can be added as comments to this page or over in a dedicated thread in our forums here.
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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • Roger

    Aside from Mega being a pain to download from (since when does Firefox need some sort of special permission to download a large file, while asking you to click on a none existent icon to give it permission) the Bioshock mp4 link is downloading the Dear Esther video.

    • Paul James

      Thank you. Now fixed.

  • Covariant

    The FOV seems a bit low. Most of the demos out there (and Half-Life 2) seem to be setting the FOV in the 110-120 range. When watching your videos in my Rift, things seem a bit…zoomed-in. Also, when looking straight ahead I can see the edges of the displayed game region, which slightly lessens the FOV and immersion. Does the vorpX driver offer a way to adjust this?

    • Ralf Ostertag

      How far one can see into the periphery of the screen differs depending on inividual eyesight and other factors. Generally I’d like to have as less twaekable settings as possible for the sake of better usability, but in this case it seems useful to make it adjustable. Seems to be only way to ensure that everyone gets the best possible FOV.

  • Covariant

    Thanks for the quick response. That’s great news. I definitely noticed that the visibility of the periphery depended on how close my eyes were to the lenses. To be fair, even as is I was only losing a tiny, tiny bit, but it’s nice to hear that will be adjustable, as every little bit of FOV helps with immersion.

  • Alexander

    I’ve heard people talk about the perfomance loss several times, 5-10% for z-Buffer, 50% for geometrical.
    But no one ever said what the base performance was about.
    Is it the performance I get when running the game in 1280×800, oder the performance I would get when rendering it in 640×800?

    • xxxyyy

      I’d like to know that too… but it seems nobody is answering.
      What test should we do to understand if our PC will be good for the Rift?
      What’s the base performance we have to add that extra load of 5-10% or 50% to?
      Run the specific game at 1280×800 or 640×800 (with vsync on I suppose)? Or what else?

    • Paul James

      With V-Sync engaged, for all games in Z-Buffer mode all games ran at 60FPS (so therefore plenty of headroom with my machine’s spec. You calculate Geometry from there – but in reality, without a length set of benchmark runs I can’t give you a definitive answer.

      It was a challenging article to get live as it was without getting in to the nitty-gritty of benchmarking. Perhaps we’ll revisit in the future, but I’d suggest you’ll be better off waiting for the trial version and seeing for yourself.