Nvidia at the Game Developers Conference this week announced a new frame capture analysis tool for virtual reality. Dubbed FCAT VR, the utility is designed to help VR developers, reviewers and enthusiasts analyze the quality and performance of a virtual reality experience.

Traditional benchmark utilities arent all that practical when it comes to virtual reality. Zvi Greenstein, general manager of Nvidias GeForce team who also leads business development for VR at the company, notes in a recent blog post that traditional measurement tools like FRAPS only measure whats happening on the desktop monitor instead of whats happening on the VR headset.

In other words, they focus squarely on frame rate and dont take other important metrics into account like latency, stutter and hitching all of which can have a big impact on the virtual reality experience. If stutter and latency fall below a certain threshold, for example, they can cause motion sickness not fun.

FCAT VR, which supports the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, is said to provide a comprehensive performance measurement for frame time and stutter on the headset without requiring special external capture equipment.

The tool captures four key performance metrics:

Nvidias new utility should be available to download by mid-March.

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Nvidia's new FCAT VR tool will help quantify virtual reality performance - TechSpot