We have been hearing about Virtual Reality for a long time and the truth is that it has never taken off completely, it has become the eternal promise and with the passage of time it has been seen what reality is. It is none other than the king is naked and it is that the interest of the players in VR has been diluted over time. What has caused developers to lose interest in implementing natively and, therefore, in the game code, the integration of their game with virtual reality.
And yes, we are going to add the bucket of cold water at the entrance. To this day, Chris Roberts has no interest in applying Virtual Reality to Star Citizen. That is, it is not a native feature of the game and this is achieved through external applications. Which does not mean that it is impossible to do it, let’s see how.
Is Star Citzen compatible with VR?
The first thing we have to take into account is that on a Virtual Reality screen two simultaneous images are generated that represent the vision of each eye and that they will be retransmitted to the virtual reality helmet at the same time. So it means that we need to render two scenes at the same time. Current graphics cards are intended to render only one image at a time, but have support for virtualizing and adding an additional display list. This gives them the ability to generate the image in stereo.
However, the game must be prepared for it and this is not the case with Star Citizen without a VR version. Therefore, it is necessary for us to use an external driver called vorpX, which unfortunately has to be paid for, but is used to adapt different games to be used in virtual reality headsets. Of course, we have to take into account that the program is an additional load for the main processor. The application will allow you to play Star Citizen without problems with any VR headset, but you will have to make some adjustments before anything else in the application, in the game settings and on the PC.
What Virtual Reality headset do I need?
Right from the start and you’re going to need a relatively powerful PC. VR requires not only rendering in stereo, but also rendering it very quickly and in total time of less than 20 milliseconds and therefore we tell you to first make sure that your graphics card can render smoothly at 90 FPS or plus. Therefore, before opting for a specific HMD unit, you should make sure that your computer has enough power to run the game in optimal conditions.
Here the important thing is not the graphics, but their speed, so be prepared to cut graphic options in order to achieve the expected speed. Once you’ve seen that the game renders internally at 90 FPS at a certain resolution, it’s time to go find the Oculus or HTC Vive that runs at that resolution and go for them. But we remember, this is not a game designed for VR and that clouds the experience when playing it. And yes, it is something long awaited by fans of the game, unfortunately virtual reality has not yet taken off and has remained a promise.
