Video of the Week: Nerd³ Plays... Nvidia VR Funhouse - Push It To The Limit (by OfficialNerdCubed)

When it comes to technology and games, I’m constantly wondering whether game companies are playing catch up. A new, powerful graphics card is released. If you have that card installed in your system, no current game will be able to make your computer lag. With a new and powerful graphics card on the market, game companies can increase the graphics, the amount of stuff that’s on the screen at any one time, how powerful the A.I. is at any one time – when a new piece of hardware is released, it opens up a so many doors. What happens next is, after the game companies have explored what can be achieved, they go about achieving it and soon there is one, two, or more games on the market that can push the latest graphics card to the limit.

More powerful pieces of hardware are not being released just to keep ahead of the latest games, they are developing these powerful pieces of hardware just to keep things moving forward. Nvidia’s latest instalment in the GTX category, the 1080 blows all its predecessors’ out of the water, including all the Titan’s that has come before it. The processing power is beyond all that Nvidia has ever done before, and with 8GB of memory, no game will be able to push it to the limit – not for a while at least… or that’s what I thought when it was first announced. A good few weeks later, Nvidia shows us just what can be achieved by pushing their own graphics card to the limit.

The HTC Vive has revolutionised gaming as a whole. Virtual reality transports you to a new world, and the level of immersion adds to the believability that you are actually standing within that world. The HTC Vive hasn’t been out long enough for any game company to make full games at the moment – they’ve been focusing on testing what can be ultimately achieved and what has already been released has been met with incredible response. People across the world has picked up a headset and experienced a new level of gaming that has never been made possible before.

The GTX 1080 is fully capable of handling the HTC Vive without any problems. In the video above, one of my favourite YouTubers, OfficialNerdCubed showcases exactly what can be ultimately achieved with the combination of an extremely powerful graphics card and virtual reality. Again, it’s not a full game, it’s only to test and show you the future essentially. Nvidia VR Funhouse is designed by the creators of the graphics card and therefore knows exactly what the limits are. In the video, NerdCubed shows off a series of mini-games, each one with a different element, such as confetti, paint, and hair, plus more. In order to run the game, you have at least a 1060, but if you want to run the game on the highest of settings, you have to have 2 1080s, which is mindboggling. The 1080 is an extremely powerful piece of technology, and a game requiring the need to have 2 of the things says a lot about what can really be achieved in gaming nowadays.

Seeing the testing progress over the past weeks and continue does make me curious as to what will actually be done. Universe Sandbox² made the transition to VR and that is truly staggering. NerdCubed did a video and he said that it was a scary experience, but on an enjoyable level. I love to mess around in Universe Sandbox² but it’s not a game such as GTA V or Battlefield, or Just Cause 2. You could argue that those types of games shouldn’t be made for the virtual reality, because it might be too complicated to make the transition, which is why they’ve created games that are designed to test and or just be a mini-game whilst the company is working on something big. Now that the technology has leapt forward by a massive amount, it’s time for the game developers to start playing catch up again and really show us what can be achieved. With all this great hardware out there, we want something that will truly blow our minds and make us know that we’ve entered a new era of gaming and that there’s no going back.

Now that virtual reality has hit the mainstream market, and even though we all know that it will be some years before anything more advanced is even teased, but it is interesting to see where it goes from here. How real can the virtual world become? Will we want it to become more real? Is this as far as technology will go and it cannot become any more advanced? OK, the last question is probably a false statement. Technology will forever become more powerful, evolve and revolutionise all industries, but it has to be asked: What will it evolve into?

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)