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'Shadow Of Mordor' Benchmark Running In VR With Vireio Perception Drivers

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In October 2015, a video previewing the Vireio Perception driver functioning with Bioshock Infinite, a Direct X 11 title, was released. The people behind the free, open-source driver said it was actively working on implementing DX11 support into the drivers. And then they went silent, giving no indication of the status of the project for over three months.

Today, the silence surrounding the project has ended with another preview video of a DX11 title operating in VR. This time, we see Middle Earth: Shaddow Of Mordor running through the in-game benchmark, and performance numbers at the end.

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Vireio Perception said the game was tested with an AMD FX 8350 CPU paired with an R9 390 series graphics card. The benchmark test was run with all of the graphics settings at their lowest presets. Without the Vireio Perception driver, the average frame rate was 60 fps. With the driver switched on, the performance dropped significantly. The average frame was reported as 44 fps, but if you pay attention to the graph during the test, you’ll notice the frame rate drops well below the average.

The test was also performed with the graphics settings set to the highest presets. Again, without the Vireio Perception driver, the game reported 60 fps, but with it enabled there was an even bigger performance hit. The benchmark reported an average of 33 fps, but it dipped below 20 fps at some points in the test.

Work still continues on DX11 support for Vireio Perception, but judging from the performance results, you’ll need a very powerful computer to use it, unless the volunteers working on this project manage some impressive performance optimizations.

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Kevin Carbotte

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years. 

17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dstarr3
    Such a shame for VR. It really is very necessary to have really high resolution displays, and really high framerates, and really good detail rendered. VR is awesome tech, but it really is going to demand just the highest-spec hardware to give the best experience.
    Reply
  • hannibal
    Well, this just proof, that VR is best suited to DX12 and above. But we all also know that VR needs hefty strong hardware also in DX12. Why would you need for example double Fury aka Gemini to run VR... Just because it is so hard to do!
    Reply
  • lyricyst2000
    Bummer...good luck convincing the masses that the ever popular i5 + 390/970 combo probably isnt going to cut it.
    Reply
  • photonboy
    Good news for the PC world!
    You want a great VR experience, the current minimum is GTX970 and that will increase as higher resolution displays come out (remember it's not total pixel count of the screen but pixels per eye, though some of its optimized a bit different).

    Even if you don't buy into VR it's always a good thing to have money dumped into an ecosystem you want kept around.

    I'm curious what titles for the current consoles will look like in VR due to the processing power required to do it right (i.e. 90FPS, low refresh to avoid feeling nauseous). I know PS4 is getting Eve Valkyrie but don't know any specs on that.
    Reply
  • kcarbotte
    17428391 said:
    Bummer...good luck convincing the masses that the ever popular i5 + 390/970 combo probably isnt going to cut it.

    Any game that is made specifically for VR will be fine with that combo.
    Shadow of Mordor in particular is a super demanding game already, and never optimized for 90fps playback.
    This is par for the course when converting existing games to VR, but shouldn't be expected for regular VR titles.
    Reply
  • Enterfrize
    Hi everyone,

    It's Neil Schneider from MTBS (from the Vireio team).

    I just wanted to put these numbers in perspective. These results are actually very, very good, and there are more optimizations to come. In practice, true stereoscopic 3D games lose about 50% of their performance because a unique left and right camera view is being rendered where there used to only be one. Existing VR games face the exact same challenge, and they compensate for this loss of performance by scraping away a lot of the processor-intensive eye candy and use other techniques like asynchronous timewarp (ATW) to try and pad the frame count with guesstimates of what the intermediary frames should look like.

    Vireio Perception users will choose the in-game graphics settings that are right for them and what their equipment can handle. This benchmark was based on either the bare minimum or the absolute maximum game settings choices for this title, and it proved that the performance loss maxes out at less than 50% for true stereoscopic 3D rendering on this hardware - this is a good thing and is well within industry standard.

    Features like ATW will help with this, and we also have some other experimental ideas we will be playing with later that haven't been tried before. What matters most right now is DX11 is alive and kicking with true stereoscopic 3D rendering in Vireio Perception.

    Patience! :-)

    Regards,
    Neil
    Reply
  • gofasterstripes
    It's pretty cool you came here to write that :)
    Reply
  • Symple
    This benchmark was based on either the bare minimum or the absolute maximum game settings choices for this title, and it proved that the performance loss maxes out at less than 50% for true stereoscopic 3D rendering on this hardware - this is a good thing and is well within industry standard.
    I find it rather odd that the benchmarks for mono are identical whether running the lowest or highest settings. What is the explanation for this? Was this test performed with V-Sync turned on, thereby artificially capping the FPS, or is the FX8350 very accurately bottlenecking the GPU at this point?
    Reply
  • loki1944
    I have not found the SoM benchmark to be anywhere close to a good representation of how the game actually performs (i.e., performance in-game significantly less and/or stuttering involved). I'd be more interested if they bench-marked in-game.
    Reply
  • Enterfrize
    This benchmark was based on either the bare minimum or the absolute maximum game settings choices for this title, and it proved that the performance loss maxes out at less than 50% for true stereoscopic 3D rendering on this hardware - this is a good thing and is well within industry standard.
    I find it rather odd that the benchmarks for mono are identical whether running the lowest or highest settings. What is the explanation for this? Was this test performed with V-Sync turned on, thereby artificially capping the FPS, or is the FX8350 very accurately bottlenecking the GPU at this point?
    Reply