OK... Been using the Vive for a couple a days now...
I have had to set ED down to "VR Low" preset. What I'm noticing is that even with the reduced graphic quality of this low preset - in-cockpit text is still significantly clearer than it was for me on DK2 at higher settings. Unfortunately the lack of ATW means judder at sometimes although it's just about bearable.
I'm not really seeing the low res graphics people are talking about?
Steam navigation with the Vive is broken.
It takes maybe 10 tries before I can get to "my games" using the steamvr controllers. Steam doesn't respond to the triggers on the controllers most of the time. When I do get to a game via the steamvr big picture menu it doesn't respond when I try to run it. If I go to the Vive art gallery home it works perfectly with the controllers.
Just recently go my Vive a few days back as well. Unfort I don't have time in a Rift to compare vs the Vive directly. I think the Vive works quite well, at least for me, for Elite.. though I do think I understand what the main complains are. Seems the Vive has more shimmer/jaggies (aliasing) in comparison. Basically the clarity/fidelity in the Vive may not be quite as good. As for other VR games, its fine with the Vive. I tried a lot of other VR games these past few days and they do seem far more clear. The only way I can explain this is it feels like Elite renders the game at a lower resolution than the Vive is capable of. Whether this is true, I have no idea. Some complain that it is unplayable.. its perfectly playable to me. Maybe different people are seeing different behavior? I'm not sure. We could also be seeing shock from users accustomed to playing on huge 4k monitors that suddenly dropping down to VR res.
Yes, Steam navigation is broken with the Vive with Elite running. With Elite shut down it seems to work. It behaves almost like its getting a constant series of keypresses, which blocks out any imputs attempted.
Also for me.. if SteamVR bluetooth is enabled, tracking becomes terrible. Disabled it is fine. So I leave it off when playing ED... on at other times, where it seems to behave itself.
fyi - I run at VR high/1.0x supersampling with the hardware mentioned in my signature. Seems to run ok so far, but I haven't tried driving around planets yet. Flight over a planet seems to perform well. But I have yet to get into anything intense with a lot of activity.