Motion-to-Photon Latency: VR Render Pipeline

Render Pipeline

Motion-to-photon latency 40 ms

Display refresh rate 90 Hz

Peak head-turn speed 120°/s

Live Readouts

World-lock error

0.0°

Frame interval

11.1 ms

Simulator-sickness risk

Good

true θ = 0.0° render θ = 0.0°

How it works

A VR headset must redraw the world fast enough that the image always matches where your head actually is. The delay between a real head movement and the corresponding photons hitting your eye is the motion-to-photon latency. Oculus/Meta's own guidance puts the comfort ceiling at roughly 20 ms — above that, the visual and vestibular (inner-ear) senses disagree and cause simulator sickness.

world-lock error(t) = true θ(t) − rendered θ(t)
rendered θ(t) = θ(t − L)                    [no prediction]
rendered θ(t) = θ(t − L) + ω(t − L)·L        [with prediction]
frame interval = 1000 / refresh rate (Hz)

Latency slider — total pipeline delay L: pose sampling + render + scan-out, in milliseconds.
Refresh rate slider — how often the display can actually present a new frame; a low rate holds the same rendered pose for longer, adding judder on top of latency.
Pose Prediction — real engines don't render the last known pose; they extrapolate forward using the measured angular velocity ω, which is why production headsets stay usable well above 20 ms of raw pipeline latency.
Inset viewport — the small picture-in-picture is what the headset lens would actually show right now: the delayed, quantized render. The main view is a third-person observer showing the true head direction (cyan) against the rendered direction (magenta) diverging.

This is the exact budget VR engine developers profile against on every project: sensor sampling, application render time, compositor/timewarp, and display scan-out all eat into the same latency number.

Headset view

True head direction Rendered direction

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