Responsive and Timely Virtual Reality Gaming: Which Frame Rate Should One Choose?

Hitting a high frame rate is the holy grail of virtual reality (VR). Indeed, a high frame rate offers an amazing experience, but also pushes current technology to its limits. This is particularly true for networked VR gaming systems which rely on split rendering between a client and a server. In this paper, we investigate the impact of frame rate on such systems in terms of responsiveness and timeliness, using both experiments and simulations. Responsiveness refers to how quickly the information is exchanged, while timeliness refers to the frequency of updates. In terms of responsiveness, we show that 90 fps and 120 fps may tolerate up to 6 ms network delay. In terms of timeliness, we show that the best choices are 120 fps when network delay is low and 60 fps when network delay is high.