Epic’s high fidelity Showdown demo was only barely able to hold framerate on one of the most powerful GPUs in the world when it debuted last September. But now, after optimizations for Unreal Engine 4 on PS4, the demo runs on Morpheus at Sony’s 60 FPS VR target framerate—not bad for a game console that’s approaching its two year anniversary.
Showdown made its debut last September at Oculus Connect alongside the Rift ‘Crescent Bay’ prototype. The demo, built by Epic and designed to show the cutting edge of VR-capable graphics, has viewers moving through a slow motion action scene where futuristic soldiers are battling a giant robot; bullets, rockets, and debris fly passed the viewer as explosions rock the scene.
Epic painstakingly optimized Showdown to run at Oculus’ 90 FPS VR target framerate on the powerful Nvidia GTX 980 GPU.
See Also: Epic Games Share Insights: Optimizing ‘Showdown’ for 90 FPS on Oculus Rift Crescent Bay Prototype
But now Showdown can run flawlessly at 60 FPS on Sony’s Morpheus headset for PS4, says J.J. Hoesing, Senior Engine Programmer on Epic’s VR Team. The demo of course takes advantage of Sony’s ‘asynchronous reprojection’ technique to ultimately output at 120 FPS.
The great news about this? The enabling factor is general optimizations to UE4 on PS4, rather than specific optimizations to the Showdown demo, Hoesing tells me. That means an increase across the board for UE4’s performance on the PS4. This will be a boon for VR developers that hope to deploy UE4 projects cross-platform between Morpheus and other VR headsets.
Granted, Showdown on Morpheus does run at 60 FPS at 1920×1080 compared to 90 FPS at 2160×1200 on the Oculus Rift, but color us impressed for the capabilities of UE4 on a console approaching its second anniversary. To further put this into perspective, the Nvidia GTX 980 GPU alone costs around $200 more than an entire PlayStation 4.
