PC VR wizard is gearing up to weave his magic on Ubisoft's 2023 open-world adventure
In the absence of publishers doing what is right and porting their finest games to VR, we have Luke Ross. The modder has taken it upon himself to convert some of the biggest PC games into VR over the years—Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 4-6, Marvel's Spider-Man, and Star Wars Outlaws, to name a few—and he's now revealed that the next game to get his special VR treatment is Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Ubisoft's open-world adventure, set in James Cameron's universe of colonial metaphors, has been a tad divisive here at PCG—some of us loved it, others really didn't—but there's no question that its alien landscapes of floating mountains, bioluminescent flora, and dense jungles looks beautiful, and would be a joy to wander around in, even in the game's dedicated Exploration Mode. "The game looks incredible in VR, while at the same time being very resource-intensive," Ross told PC Gamer. "So we think that it will be a great showcase for the new improvements to the framework."
That brings us to the other big development with Ross' VR mod, which is the drastic improvements in image quality and performance. "Lately I introduced radical optimizations to my conversion framework that have made it possible to squeeze out about 55-60% more performance from the same hardware, with no perceivable loss in image quality," said Ross, referring to his FOV optimisations update that he released in September.
Without getting too technical, non-VR games (so all the games he ports to VR) have symmetrical, constant fields of view, while VR headsets tend to have different degrees of asymmetrical, variable fields of view. This meant that tons of pixels were getting wasted due to this dissonance between the games' and VR's fields of view. Now that he's updated the mod however, the performance gains are huge, as you can see below:
To top it off, alongside the upcoming release of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora VR, Ross will be launching a new version of his mod that he says "will drastically improve image quality, without any measurable loss in performance."
If you're interested in Ross' VR mod, you need to sign up to his Patreon for $10 (£8.50) a month. Once you're in there, you only need to download the one ZIP file, which contains the VR framework and, at the time of writing, conversions of 26 PC games into VR.