We have been hearing about virtual reality for a long time and the truth is that it never fully took off, it became the eternal promise and over time we saw what reality is. It’s none other than the king is naked and it’s that gamers’ interest in VR has been diluted over time. This made the developers lose interest in implementing natively and therefore in the game code, the integration of their game with virtual reality.
And yes, we will add the bucket of cold water at the entrance. To date, Chris Roberts has no interest in applying virtual reality to Star Citizen. In other words, it is not a native functionality of the game and it is achieved through external applications. Which doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do, let’s see how.
Is Star Citizen compatible with virtual reality?
The first thing we must take into account is that on a virtual reality screen two simultaneous images are generated that represent the vision of each eye and they will be transmitted to the virtual reality headset at the same time. So that means we have to render two scenes at the same time. Current graphics cards are intended to render a single frame at a time, but support virtualization and adding an additional display list. This gives them the ability to generate the image in stereo.
However, the game must prepare for it and this is not the case for Star Citizen without a VR version. Therefore, it is necessary for us to use an external driver called vorpX, which is unfortunately chargeable, but is used to adapt different games for use in virtual reality headsets. Of course, we must take into account that the program is an additional load for the main processor. The app will allow you to play Star Citizen smoothly with any VR headset, but you’ll need to make some tweaks before anything else in the app, game settings, and on the PC.
Which virtual reality headset do I need?
Right off the bat and you’re going to need a relatively powerful PC. Virtual reality requires not only rendering in stereo, but also rendering very fast and in a total time of less than 20 milliseconds. So we tell you to first make sure your graphics card can render smoothly at 90 FPS or higher. Therefore, before opting for a specific HMD unit, you need to make sure that your computer has enough power to run the game in optimum conditions.
The important thing here is not the graphics, but their speed, so be prepared to reduce the graphics options in order to achieve the expected speed. Once you’ve seen that the game is internally rendering at 90 FPS at a certain resolution, it’s time to go find the Oculus or HTC Vive that runs at that resolution and use them. But let’s remember, this is not a game designed for VR and it obscures the experience when you play it. And yes, it is something highly anticipated by fans of the game, unfortunately virtual reality has not yet taken off and remained a promise.
