Hey all,

I've got a PSVR headed my way in the next couple weeks and one of the features I'm most excited for is the cinematic mode. I love the idea of having a huge screen to play all my games on/watch movies on. However, I've read that the resolution is pretty terrible. Has anyone actually experienced it? Is it really as bad as everyone says and should I just prepare myself to take it as not worth it?

Cheers!

@rentagosa

Yeah, I don't think you're going to want to use it. It is a nice option when you don't have access to a TV, but that's about it. The real draw of PSVR is feeling like you're inside of a game. That's absolutely worth a little lower resolution, but not if you're going to just be watching a virtual screen. I've used the cinematic mode, and I'd much rather just use my TV.

Sorry to disappoint, but at least the actual VR part is really cool. Welcome to the forum, btw.

Just get real close to your TV. It'll look sharper and be way more comfortable.

I tried my friends VR with Bloodborne and the resolution difference was very noticeable but he showed me a movie and it was like looking at an IMAX screen with no noticable jaggys.

General consensus across all the VR headsets seems to be that the cinematic modes aren't worth it at all so far.

Because you're basically sharing a single 1080p panel between both eyes, and not even using all of it to view the virtual screen (at least in the Medium screen size that seems like the right way to go as Large is far too big to even be able to play games - because you have to look round to see the different HUD elements in the screen corners, it's too big for most things) then the resolution takes a serious hit vs anything you're used to (TVs take up way less of your vision, even if you've got a big TV and cinemas generally have pretty high res projectors nowadays and film was always pretty high res in terms of detail). If you've ever used a 720p projector and gone for a big screen then you'll have an idea of what to expect. It's not quite as good as an actual 720p projector but it's that ballpark.

Would I want to use it as my normal screen? Not a chance I've got a nice small 1080p TV and will have a 4K TV soon, both of which offer far more density of pixels than the headset can manage. But is is usable to watch movies? Sure. Just make sure you get it adjusted just right for the maximum fidelity (no blur) and don't expect it to compete with a trip to the cinema. Any text (like credits) will look a bit soft/harder to read than it should be but it's not like you can't watch some Netflix on it. I'm planning on taking it with me to see the family over the holidays (where they have one TV, CRT SD 17" 4:3, no digital inputs) and grabbing some evening Netflix if no one is talkative.

Does anyone know if cinematic mode looks better with the ps4 pro?

The limits of cinematic mode is the pixel density in the headset. No level of extra processing power will do anything to change that.

If the game looks better (eg less aliasing) then it'll look somewhat better on a huge screen (where the jaggies are more visible) but fundamentally you only get so many final pixels in the final thing you're not getting the most out of the Pro's push towards a 4K internal render resolution as it's heavily downsampled (more than if you were using a 1080p TV) by the time you see it in a headset. For Netflix etc then it'll literally be identical to a base PS4 as that isn't real-time rendering so you don't get anti-aliasing from downsampling - you just get loss of fidelity (stuff recorded with a camera is effectively downsampled from a near infinite resolution as each sensor in the camera records all the light that hits it, sampling at every point and downsampling to the resolution of the sensor).

Here's my advice as someone who's been using a Rift for quite a while now. Use it for movies and tv shows; never with traditional non vr games. I don't know what the resolution or latency is on Psvr, but I tried it once with Overwatch on pc and the latency between my input and the result on screen was drastic. That's my real problem; not pixels or resolution. Watching stuff is great though. I know a lot of people dismiss it and say "Just use a regular tv/monitor, it looks better". Ok, but the point of Vr is being able to escape your reality for a little bit. For example, I use Virtual desktop quite a lot (I know this doesn't apply here, so sorry for the tangent) I am able to pretend I'm somewhere else other than my house. For some people that's a godsend. Don't feel bad watching fake screens in a vr headset, as it's a really cool tool to facilitate the whole Vr experience.

PSVR has the same low latency for non-VR games as anything else. It's always warping a HDMI input to allow you to view it (as seen by hooking non-PS4s up to the HDMI in on the box and that working in cinema mode) so you're playing a PS4 game just like any other on your virtual screen only without the ~30-150ms input lag of a TV (because the headset from box to eyes is aiming for minimised latency so it's generally going to be as low latency as possible and better than a TV or monitor).

I suspect that playing non-VR games on PC involves having to hook into the final output buffer and drag it back (from the game running) and then push that through the SteamVR API to transform and somewhere the lag creeps in. Basically that's not how it happens on PS VR because the ecosystem is all unified so there's no such thing as a 3rd party game (eg Overwatch and Steam have no official shared communications as Blizzard have no interest in hooked into a Valve ecosystem).

As for resolution, the Vive has more green subpixels but less red or blue ones (the PenTile is RG BG for two pixels, the PSVR counts two pixels as RGB RGB). If you count the total dots of light (sub-pixels) then the PS VR headset has about 20% more of them than the Vive of Rift. So it should be slightly ahead for viewing stuff in cinema mode.