Super Stardust Ultra: VR, Review & More
Two words stealthily made their way into the factsheet that Sony provided to reviewers for the outstanding Super Stardust Ultra, generating a great deal of excitement here at Digital Foundry: “Morpheus Ready.” With the platform holder known to be unveiling more of its virtual reality plans at the Game Developers Conference in a couple of weeks, we reached out to the PR, seeking more details and perhaps an early hands-on opportunity.
Clarification emerged this afternoon regarding the happenings at Housemarque’s Helsinki headquarters:
“Housemarque is fortunate enough to have gained access to Morpheus development kits and has been conducting experiments with the technology using their latest title, Super Stardust Ultra,” a Sony statement said.
“At this point, the technical tests are ongoing, and it is premature to determine whether Super Stardust Ultra will become compatible with Morpheus at some stage, or whether the team will apply the technical knowledge to future projects.”
Our perspective? Based on the technical composition of Super Stardust Ultra, there is a highly persuasive argument for making this brilliant shooter one of the first wave of Sony’s VR titles. From a technological standpoint, Morpheus VR titles need to meet several criteria to create a feasible VR experience.
- Resolution: VR titles require native resolution rendering – in the current Morpheus kits distributed to developers, that is 1080p.
- Frame-rate: Titles must operate at a minimum of 60fps (it is unknown whether the display in the final kit will settle on a higher refresh rate).
- Stereo 3D: Games also need to render individual viewpoints for each eye, meaning that the geometry setup is processed twice.
- Anti-aliasing: With the player’s eyes right in front of the display, jaggies and pixel-pop are somewhat magnified. VR titles demand extremely good anti-aliasing.
Additional analysis: Super Stardust Ultra: two-player/four-player split-screen performance
Super Stardust Ultra holds significance as one of the few PlayStation 4 titles that convincingly meets every single one of those requirements. It runs at 1080p60, it already has stereoscopic 3D support, and although the effect is rather subtle and sometimes challenging to discern on a standard HDTV, we are fairly certain that the title also features 4x multi-sampling anti-aliasing. Some might consider this excessive, but if the game was developed with VR in mind, its inclusion makes sense.
Most people view VR titles and primarily consider the first-person perspective applications of the technology. However, there is a strong case to be made for immersion in other game types as well – as demonstrated by the integration of Oculus Rift DK2 support into a demo of Jeff Minter’s TxK. In the case of Super Stardust, envision playing the game in your own personal IMAX theater – it’s an enticing proposition, made even more tantalizing when you consider that both the PS3 and PS4 versions of the game already offer an unforgettable experience for those with stereo 3D displays.
We examined Super Stardust Ultra on PS4 last week and discovered a release that is essentially an enhanced version of an already brilliant game, with a moderate selection of feature upgrades. But from our testing, it is evident that all the technological building blocks are in place to enable an exceptional VR experience – something we hope to witness emerging from Housemarque’s labs in due course.
