Why are VR games so hard to run compared to normal games?
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The game essentially has to render to two hi-resolution monitors simultaneously, from slightly different viewpoints to create the stereoscopic illusion, both of them at a frame rate double that of your average monitor, while maintaining millisecond latency to avoid input tracking lag, with enough performance headroom to guarantee there will be no frame stuttering, and it has to do all of this perfectly to minimise the risk of causing nausea to the user.
Nausea is one of the biggest hurdles that VR headset designers have to take into account. When you are sat in front of a monitor on a desk , you can tolerate the odd drop in performance, but when the game world is your only frame of reference for spatial awareness and balance, any sort of interruption is incredibly jarring.
I was using my phone with a cheap AliExpress headset and Vridge for a while just to get a taste of what VR is like, and while it’s fine to just experiment with, the moment the video feed starts to glitch, it’s like having your head ripped off your shoulders and then shaken about as if someone’s trying to make a frappe out of your brain matter.
That said, there is nothing technically stopping you from running VR on lower spec hardware, it’s more of a case that the developers of the games would rather wash their hands of any responsibility for you having to hire a carpet cleaner.
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