You're absolutely right... But by rendering separately the high resolution and low resolution views (each at 1k, but one 4x upscaled) we could do 60Hz today. It only requires 2 FHD renders (which is less than a 4k 2eye view at UHD) so 60Hz is very reasonable... possibly 90-120Hz. It also cuts the bandwidth by 8x (2/16) without compression.

There are so many new rendering tricks popping up all the time... new APIs also give less overhead, which is nice.

Either way...

580 gtx gflops: 1581

1080 gtx gflops: 8228

7 years. 420% increase in float calc perf.

And you only need high resolution and high color at the fovea. Eye tracking will be the key to making VR/AR low-power and high-quality.

It won't, no worries. Eye tracking in an HMD, whether AR or VR is hugely complicated from engineering point of view. There is a reason why an HMD eye tracking kit costs several thousands of USD.

Moreover, from the rendering point of view, foveated rendering is a fairly complex thing to integrate into a 3D engine too. It is definitelly not "free".

Foveated rendering is certainly no panacea.

No panacea but another important piece of the puzzle. The software part may be complex - but it is just software, and once done, we all benefit from 10x battery life. Eye tracking hardware is complex but Lots of ongoing R&D - the outcome of which will be sensor chips which can be added to HMDs.

Only 6.5 years :)

Assuming that it's feasible to do ~1080p per eye at 120hz today, 8k per eye is only 16 times more pixels. And considering that increasing the pixel size is embarrassingly parallel, I don't see that as a problem to be able to do in 10 years.

Looks like current technology is 1000x1000 per eye at 90Hz: http://www.digitaltrends.com/virtual-reality/oculus-rift-vs-...

8k x 8k per eye at 120Hz is 64x more pixels at 1/3rd increase in frequency ~= 85x more processing power. Making the (maybe faulty) assumption of doubling processing power every 2 years and that current setup is processor limited, this sort of processing power is ~13 years away.

Same computation but with 4k x 4k per eye predicts ~9 years of progress needed.

I guess I misspoke about being 1920x1080 which is a "2K" screen split in two. An 8K screen split in two would be ~4000x4000 per eye which is still 16x as many pixels as I said, plus the 33% increase in frame rate which I didn't include which matches your second one. Although with how embarrasingly parallel it is, I don't think it's as far off as it seems. Especially considering that it's the previous generation graphics cards that can handle current day VR fine so we're 1-2 years into the 9 years we have to wait, and with so many pixels anti-aliasing can probably be turned off completely. You could probably build something today that could do it, it just would be very expensive and I don't think 8K panels at cell-phone size exist yet.

Also, eye-tracking + foveated rendering will severely reduce the load. Once that works reliably, you just need the cheap, super-high PPI, low-latency screens (which might almost exist today, though at high cost due to lack of a mass-market).