Am i VR ready?

Maybe it would be a good thing to look at the Pimax 4k instead of a Rift. It has only 3 axis rotation support and while your GPU should manage the resolution, your processor should not take that much of hit. There is a Pimax thread here in the VR section. Just a suggestion.
 
Seems like Occulus explicitly warns to use the product if minimal specs are not met, and there are several reddit threats where users report bad performance with older CPUs (which are still better than my). So, sadly, i guess thats no VR for me this generation. There simply is no other reason than VR for me now to upgrade, because all games run flawlessly in 3840x1600 ultra wide.


On the other hand:


Damn you :p

Is positional tracking different from head tracking?

Yes, basically:

(a) Head tracking - tracks head movement just with the HMD i.e. Pitch (look up or down), yaw (look left or right) and roll (tilt head left or right).

(b) Positional tracking - tracks whole body movement using beacon i.e. move body left or right (step left or right), up or down (jump/stand or squat), back or forward (step forward or back).

In ED head tracking is sufficient to play as sitting down (no legs ATM) and just moving head.
 
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VR is not here yet., but keep on supporting them. Someday soon it will work.

I dare say somebody said something similar about the early TV's.

3pVVl5J.png


Personally, I think VR is very much here.
 
It irks me when people say VR is dead, not here, etc etc. Of course the VR we all want isn't quite here yet, but it's a lot closer than it ever was. Things take time to evolve, and while the Rift/Vive are certainly not perfect, they absolutely offer a convincing VR experience - given the right software.

Elite Dangerous is, sadly, lacking in the VR experience department. It's mainly an aesthetics issue - the cockpit is too small, things are too close to your eyes, focusing isn't really well done, popup huds are too awkward to use (turning your head almost 70° is just uncomfortable), headless avatars that don't move, graphics are not suited to lowres VR... A lot of these things could have been fixed during development, but they were not a high priority. The game is advertised as 'Made for VR', but I don't think that's quite true.

However, if you can ignore all that, it is still the best way of experiencing the feeling of being in a spaceship cockpit. And the views out of the windows are always impressive.

VR is still new, and it's still looking for an economic solution. Flatscreen TV's used to cost insane amounts of money. Now they're cheaper than any TV tech ever was in the past. VR will likely go the same way.

And I can't wait.
 
One thing to consider also is that if you were to buy the Oculus Rift by itself (without the Touch controllers), you'll have just the headset and one sensor to plug in. The CPU usage is a lot higher with multiple sensors, which are basically high framerate IR cameras. For just the headset and one sensor, you can probably get away with a lot less CPU than with the full setup.

Also, lots of tracking problems are due to the USB controllers and over-saturation of those by plugging the sensors in right next to each other. I suspect a lot of the problems people are having could be solved by buying a multi-controller PCIe USB card, rather than plugging everything into the motherboard's USB ports on the back.

Still, the i7-870 is pretty darn old by today's standards. I just don't know how low you can go and still have it work well.
 
Well I figured that I just get it an try, and if it doesn't work I can still return it.
So, I guess it works. Started ED and picked VR Ultra, and it works. Tracking is seamless. When I increased HMD Quality to 1.5 it started to jitter.
First impression: WOW, holy crap! Everything is so huge!
Second impression: Man, I feel sick. I did the usual dancing between some asteroids, and it didn't go so well. Does the sickness go away?

I also realized that I only have USB 2.0, so I could get a USB 3.0 Pcie card. But first I have to figure out the sickness issue.
 
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Well I figured that I just get it an try, and if it doesn't work I can still return it.
So, I guess it works. Started ED and picked VR Ultra, and it works. Tracking is seamless. When I increased HMD Quality to 1.5 it started to jitter.
First impression: WOW, holy crap! Everything is so huge!
Second impression: Man, I feel sick. I did the usual dancing between some asteroids, and it didn't go so well. Does the sickness go away?

I also realized that I only have USB 2.0, so I could get a USB 3.0 Pcie card. But first I have to figure out the sickness issue.

Good to hear, that it works.

I had serious problems, when i started using VR. If you feel dizzy or get nausea, stop immediately, have a long break, like an hour or two and try again. If you don´t feel well after an hour or two, next day is the best time to try again. Do not rush it, regardless how much you want to play.
Half or a three quarters of an hour is enough for the first two or three days. Increase the time if you can, but don´t go over the edge of feeling dizzy. Just stop. After a week or two, i was able to play for 2 hours and now after a few months, i can play as long as i like without problems.

And one more word on motion sickness. If your frame rate is too low, or the Rift constantly switches between asynchronous time-/space-warp, nausea intensifies a lot. Looking at your graphic card, it might be a good idea to step back to VR high and increase the HMD quality in the graphic settings of Elite, to increase the sharpness of the image. 1.25 to 1.5 is a good setting for a 1070, i guess. Check if that helps with your playing comfort.
 
Thanks for the advice. I guess i shouldn't have started dancing, boosting, and 180 FaOff flipping in a asteroid field. Will have to wait for tomorrow, but tomorrow i will check the options in more detail and have a look at my actual FPS. I guess the most important thung ist that the tracking seems absolutely ok, definitely faster than my TrackIR. Also coming from a almost 4k screen the resolution is something i have to get used to. But, man, the scale!
 
Thanks for the advice. I guess i shouldn't have started dancing, boosting, and 180 FaOff flipping in a asteroid field. Will have to wait for tomorrow, but tomorrow i will check the options in more detail and have a look at my actual FPS. I guess the most important thung ist that the tracking seems absolutely ok, definitely faster than my TrackIR. Also coming from a almost 4k screen the resolution is something i have to get used to. But, man, the scale!

Good to see you got it going :)

Regarding your settings, VR does take some getting used to (your eyes are giving you messages that don't match your body movement), but the dizziness should go away if you allow time to adjust by keeping the game sessions short at the beginning. A low framerate will also make dizziness worse, so important to get your settings right so the movement is smooth.

Like you, I have a GTX 1070 (slightly OC).These settings worked best for me:

Model Draw Distance: 25%
Texture Quality: Max
Shadow Quality: Low
Bloom: On
Anti-Aliasing: FXAA (SMAA and MSAA use a lot of resources and can cause judder. FXAA uses less resources.)
Super-sampling: 1.5X (if too high can causes judder and you will have to lower other settings)
Ambient Occlusion: Off (some players have this on, but I don't see any change with it on)
Environmental Quality: Max
FX Quality: High
Depth of Field: Off (VR gives good DOF anyway)
Reflections Quality: High
Material Quality: Max
HMD Image Quality: 1.5 (or higher but only if no judder)
Galaxy Map Quality: Low or medium
Terrain Quality: Max
Terrain Work: Minimum (This seems to cause judder on high settings)
Terrain Material Quality: Max
Terrain Sample Quality: Max
Field of View: Max.

Also check the 3D settings in your Nvidia control panel. Make sure that all settings are "application controlled". However, in the anti-aliasing section you can choose "enhance application settings" and try x2 or x4. This sometimes helps with aliasing which is very noticeable in ED. If you are using Steam, don't have super-sampling ramped up in Steam and ED. Use one or the other and set the one not being used to "1").

Restart the game. Have the loading shaders option on to make sure the changes take effect. Go to the start menu (with the SRV and hanger). Look left and right a few times. Should be smooth. If there is juddering or lag, you will need to exit to the desktop and turn some settings down. Leave super-sampling, anti-aliasing and HMD image quality the same and change some of other settings from max to high. This may take a few attempts. Exit the game to the desktop each time. If you can't get rid of the juddering or lag, then you will need to reduce super-sampling or HMD image quality slightly (e.g. by .25). In that case, you may be able revert to max on the other settings that you turned down. Just trial and error and a matter of being methodical, but you should find the sweet spot for your rig i.e. nice and smooth.

With the aliasing, check under the ship in the hanger. There will be some aliasing on the floor. You then can try between FXAA and SMAA and changing the 3d settings in your Nvidia control panel to see what anti-aliasing works best for you. Again, exit the game and restart it to see the effect of any changes.

Note that you won't get the text in-game totally clear or remove all aliasing. There will be pixilation ("screen door") and aliasing regardless. Just trying to minimise these.

Hope this helps, o7
 
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VR is not here yet., but keep on supporting them. Someday soon it will work.

I totally disagree. Not only is VR here, you would have to rip my CV1 from my rotting corpse. For over a year, I have been playing in VR. I have not played outside VR period. This is a sentiment mostly share by the vast majority as far as I have read it on many forums like this. As one who has visited this VR thread daily for over a year, I have only read a couple of posts where the OP sent there hmd back. Due to not being able to handle the vr sickness, if I recall properly. Sure it will only get better but what we have today I would not have wanted to miss. Having a blast.
 
A D mentioned terrain works in his post. This is an important factor, as it shifts the workload of the terrain engine between CPU and GPU. As your processor is at the low end, you should consider increasing the setting as far as possible (i use maximum settings on a 1080ti). Better reduce other features, so you have your framerate high at all time, which is the most important factor to keeps nausea away.

-----

I totally disagree. Not only is VR here, you would have to rip my CV1 from my rotting corpse. For over a year, I have been playing in VR. I have not played outside VR period. This is a sentiment mostly share by the vast majority as far as I have read it on many forums like this. As one who has visited this VR thread daily for over a year, I have only read a couple of posts where the OP sent there hmd back. Due to not being able to handle the vr sickness, if I recall properly. Sure it will only get better but what we have today I would not have wanted to miss. Having a blast.

I totally agree. VR is here and yes, from my rotting corpse they have to rip the CV1 :D
Elite, Project CARS, RoboRecall... Once you have wittnessed games and especially simulator like games in VR, there is no going back. For me, it was the death of monitor gaming. I havent touched my PS4 for other things than watching BluRays and my Mac hasnt seen a game except Kerbal Space Programm, since i have VR...
 
Well I figured that I just get it an try, and if it doesn't work I can still return it.
So, I guess it works. Started ED and picked VR Ultra, and it works. Tracking is seamless. When I increased HMD Quality to 1.5 it started to jitter.
First impression: WOW, holy crap! Everything is so huge!
Second impression: Man, I feel sick. I did the usual dancing between some asteroids, and it didn't go so well. Does the sickness go away?

I also realized that I only have USB 2.0, so I could get a USB 3.0 Pcie card. But first I have to figure out the sickness issue.

1st off ditch VR ultra for a while... it MAY be that whilst it looks ok it is actually a little less than optimal. with your GPU you will probably be fine but best start at the start. VR high is way less demanding and TBH looks similar. forget supersampling etc for now, primary goal is to get your VR legs sorted then you can fiddle later.

for the SRV there is a VR friendly mode which keeps the horizon level. you will want that on for sure... but not sure if this does anything in the ship.

you CAN build VR legs over time, dont rush it, as soon as you feel rough have a breather. most oculus titles on the store have a vr rating, just for now stick with the easy ones. there are a lot of free experiences which are nice and easy on you. will give you an idea what VR is about at the same time as building your VR legs

PS mountain goat mountain is great :) and its free.

i love VR, do stick with it for a while.
 
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Knightshark;5564222 I also realized that I only have USB 2.0 said:
Unlike motion sickness where the inner ear handles balance. VR sickness seems to be associated to a disagreement between what he eyes see and the brain should be confirming as balance as it has been conditioned to expect it. For those of us who have been doing flight aerobatics since Flight Unlimited first allowed us to experience ground closure in a dive, this incongruity has not been an issue. Go slow and you should be able to build up a tolerance. At the first sign of nausea take a break for a while. I only had a tinge of VR sickness the first time I tried it (DCS helo) and stopped, took a gravol and 15 mins later went back at it. After that I was good.
Also, I ran on usb2 with no apparent tracking issue. When I went to usb3 though, I did notice a small but observable improvement in tracking smoothness I had apparently been missing. This smoothness may help your adjusting to VR as well.

I had a buddy who had motion sickness if he tried to write in a car. He bought his son a projector with a 120" throw on the wall for his Xbox and while the kid was playing a flying game he could not stay in the room for more than a couple of minutes. When he told me of this I said "I got to get me one of those"
 
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I find all this talk about minimum/recommended CPU model for the VR whether its i5 or i7 for the most part totally b......t.

If you own a 4 core i5 or a i7 and it is able to achieve a clock speed of 4 MHz in overclock then regardless of its age it will more than cope with VR.
GPU is where its at once you can get your 4 core i5/i7 up to at least 4 mhz.
If your CPU cannot get anywhere near the 4 MHz range then you may well struggle with high visual settings.
Below 3.5 MHz you will probably suffer some issues.
Game developers never release recommended data based on a CPU's ability to overclock so a lot of confusion will occur on what is suitable.
 
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So it seems USB 3.0 != USB 3.0. In fact, there are many USB 3.0 controllers incompatible with the Rift, cf https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3zrtgs/psa_your_usb_30_ports_may_not_be_compatible_with/

and of course, i got one of those. So i have to wait another day until the compatible replacement arrives.

But seriously, what the frack. I thought USB 3.0 was a standard? But apparently there are some chipsets that support multiple transaction translation, which the rift needs and some don't. http://www.cypress.com/knowledge-ba...orstt-and-multiple-transaction-translator-mtt

Anyway, as some of you suggested i looked into overclocking. Fortunately i got a true gamer MoBo ten years ago which has all the fancy OC option and a "Auto Tune" mode. I set it to Max/Turbo/GimmeAll an voila, 1GHz more. I ran Prime95 for 15 minutes and the core temp went to 92C max. Idle is ~55C. I guess that's ok. It just need to survive another 6-12 months, then i will get an upgrade.
 
So it seems USB 3.0 != USB 3.0. In fact, there are many USB 3.0 controllers incompatible with the Rift, cf https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3zrtgs/psa_your_usb_30_ports_may_not_be_compatible_with/

and of course, i got one of those. So i have to wait another day until the compatible replacement arrives.

But seriously, what the frack. I thought USB 3.0 was a standard? But apparently there are some chipsets that support multiple transaction translation, which the rift needs and some don't. http://www.cypress.com/knowledge-ba...orstt-and-multiple-transaction-translator-mtt

Anyway, as some of you suggested i looked into overclocking. Fortunately i got a true gamer MoBo ten years ago which has all the fancy OC option and a "Auto Tune" mode. I set it to Max/Turbo/GimmeAll an voila, 1GHz more. I ran Prime95 for 15 minutes and the core temp went to 92C max. Idle is ~55C. I guess that's ok. It just need to survive another 6-12 months, then i will get an upgrade.

92C....... i dont know that chip but, that sounds pretty toasty to me... still, a game will not push it as far as prime will.... good overclock tho, free cpu cycles are always good.

does it have the factory cooler on it? if so it is rubbish.... a small investment will get you a far better cooler. not 100% certain but you can probably get one which you can take with you to your next build too.

btw it does seem your chip is happy to run hot but even so you are right at the top of the temps going on this thread

http://www.overclock.net/t/857248/normal-maximum-temp-for-i7-870
 
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92C....... i dont know that chip but, that sounds pretty toasty to me... still, a game will not push it as far as prime will.... good overclock tho, free cpu cycles are always good.

does it have the factory cooler on it? if so it is rubbish.... a small investment will get you a far better cooler. not 100% certain but you can probably get one which you can take with you to your next build too.

That's what i am telling myself. Unfortunately the lower auto setting ("Better" instead of "Turbo") just pushes the CPU to 3.15GHz. Probably i should manually set the voltages, multipliers, and clocks to get somewhere around 3.5-3.7 GHz. But i think i will first run some CPU heavy gaming benchmarks like Ashes of the Singularity to see it 92C is reached in reality.
 
That's what i am telling myself. Unfortunately the lower auto setting ("Better" instead of "Turbo") just pushes the CPU to 3.15GHz. Probably i should manually set the voltages, multipliers, and clocks to get somewhere around 3.5-3.7 GHz. But i think i will first run some CPU heavy gaming benchmarks like Ashes of the Singularity to see it 92C is reached in reality.

assuming it uses a similar design cooler to the sandybridge onwards chips.. those coolers are simply not up to overclocking.....

my I5 2500k was hitting the wrong side of 85 degrees when i overclocked on the stock cooler
http://imgur.com/Q4mN4xd

but when i put this on at a cost of under 20 quid
https://uk.hardware.info/product/198437/cooler-master-hyper-103

it took off nearly 20 degrees under load!.

obviously suck it and see, try you cpu at stock and try it over clocked with your rift... if it is the difference between needing to upgrade and NOT needing to upgrade, a 20 quid investment may be worth it (just make sure that cooler fits i am not 100% sure if the mount changed for sandybridge)
 
assuming it uses a similar design cooler to the sandybridge onwards chips.. those coolers are simply not up to overclocking.....

my I5 2500k was hitting the wrong side of 85 degrees when i overclocked on the stock cooler
http://imgur.com/Q4mN4xd

but when i put this on at a cost of under 20 quid
https://uk.hardware.info/product/198437/cooler-master-hyper-103

it took off nearly 20 degrees under load!.

obviously suck it and see, try you cpu at stock and try it over clocked with your rift... if it is the difference between needing to upgrade and NOT needing to upgrade, a 20 quid investment may be worth it (just make sure that cooler fits i am not 100% sure if the mount changed for sandybridge)

I'd rather buy a new PC than mounting one more CPU cooler! (*"Push! Push!" "OMG, the mainboard is gonna break!" "Now DON'T let this screwdriver slide to the side and puncture your mainboard!" "How the hell am i supposed to mount this cooler with the RAM in the way?" "How the hell am i supposed to install the RAM with this cooler blocking access to all slots?")

But i should be fine. I have a nice big german quality cooler (by Silentmaxx).
Frostbite_Pro.jpg
 
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