HiGame

As VR headsets like the Oculus Rift tip-toe towards launch day, we’re starting to hear more about the types of VR content you’ll actually be able to buy. Last week, CCP Games and Oculus jointly announced that the new headset would ship with a copy of Eve: Valkyrie. Now, Crytek has announced its own VR title: The Climb.

As the name implies, the point of The Climb is to climb mountains. Players will navigate a series of hand-and-footholds, either by using motion controllers or a gamepad. You aim at new ledges by looking at them — you can jump if you can’t reach a new area just by aiming. Despite the simple premise, Polygon’s review of the early code came back quite positive.
One thing Crytek’s developers are highlighting, even at this early stage, is that playing on VR is fundamentally different from playing on a PC.

“It’s been a bit of transformative experience having those restrictions placed on us,” he says. “VR also places a lot of restrictions on performance. CryEngine games are known for pushing the boundaries but not necessarily running great across all hardware. Here, we have to pull that in to guarantee a frame rate on a particular hardware set. It’s running at a perfect 90Hz on the target machines we’re working with.”



They really nailed the hand. I’ll let myself out.

According to Crytek, the game is running at a steady 90 FPS at a resolution of 2160×1200. While the pixel count of 2160×1200 is only slightly higher than 1920×1080, the higher frame rate and the absolute necessity of steady delivery make this a tougher challenge. As detailed on the Oculus Rift blog, video cards need to be able to push at least 233 million pixels per second for smooth Oculus gaming, as compared to 123 million pixels to play at 60Hz in 1920×1080. Of course, smooth frame rates are about more than raw frame rate, but the different figures still illustrates the gap. At the “default eye-target scale,” Oculus thinks you’ll need to be able to push at least 400 million pixels per second.
The Climb demo that’s shown below seems conceptually quite similar to the Back to Dinosaur Island 2 demo that I saw at AMD’s E3 event this past summer. In both cases, you’re a nameless climber using motion controllers or a gamepad to haul yourself up a sheer rock face. The primary difference is that Crytek has removed the extraneous bits of content to focus solely on building a top-notch climbing simulator.


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