John Carmack’s First Reactions To Sony’s VR: PS4 Great Platform, Don’t Get Your Expectations Too High


Yesterday, Sony revealed its VR device for PS4 called Project Morpheus. Naturally, we’ve been waiting to see what Oculus Rift’s reactions would be to that announcement and today John Carmack shared his first thoughts about it.

According to Carmack, console gamers should expect a game that ran 60 fps on PS3 to be done in VR on PS4.

As Carmack said:

“Calibrate PS4 VR expectations: a game that ran 60 fps on PS3 could be done in VR (stereo 1080 MSAA low latency 60 fps) on PS4.”

The reason Carmack suggests 60fps is pretty obvious. While running a game in stereo mode, your framerate gets halved. This means that 60fps feels like 30fps in stereo mode (as a 60fps game runs at 30fps in both of the dual VR screens). This also explains why most 3D monitors are running at 120Hz (thus giving gamers the ability to run games at 60fps in stereo mode).

Naturally, fans of Sony’s console got slightly annoyed by Carmack’s claims and when a fan told Carmack to stop snipping PS4 and focus with the Oculus Rift team in their own VR device, Carmack replied and said:

“That wasn’t sniping; I think PS4 is a great platform, sufficient to drive VR. People just need to understand the demands.”

PS4 already has a number of games running at 60fps, meaning that they could work on Project Morpheus. Yes, the experience will be less enjoyable than the one of Oculus Rift running on high-end PCs, but that’s irrelevant at this point.

Enjoy and stay tuned for more!