Google And LG Team Up To Develop 5500×3000 AMOLED VR Display

When HTC announced its Vive Pro at CES a couple of months ago, VR fans had reason to be excited. It’s clear that current solutions are great, but they leave a lot to be desired, and the same could even be argued about the Vive Pro – it’s a big leap, but it’s still not where we ultimately want it to be. Thanks to Google and LG, the point where we can truly be happy with our VR resolutions is coming.

The companies have revealed a drool-worthy AMOLED for future devices, sporting a huge 5500×3000 resolution, resulting in a dots-per-inch resolution of 1443, which is more than double the 600 dpi resolution of HTC’s still-unreleased Vive Pro.

Clearly, this is an awesome step forward, but we’d be ignorant to say that the screen has been the only thing holding back truly immersive VR. Even with today’s VR resolutions, top-end gaming rigs can struggle with the beefiest content, so to get playable framerates out of 5500×3000 is going to take a while.

Consider the fact that with its 2880×1600 resolution, the Vive Pro needs to render 4.6 million pixels every refresh, and that is going to push today’s rigs extremely hard. Now consider the fact that 5500×3000 is 16.5 million pixels.

To have a hope at running that kind of resolution at framerates that won’t be stressful on the eyes, you’d need at least a rig with four GTX 1080 Tis, and since SLI, and in particular, VR SLI, is supported so poorly right now, we may as well be fine with our wait for a display like this 5500×3000 behemoth to be released to market.

It’s sure fun to dream about, though.