Well the G2 arrived today no drama's, I don't know what all the fuss was about with trying to get hold of them.
Think I'll order a 3080ti tonight
Think I'll order a 3080ti tonight
Thinking about upgrading from Rift S to Reverb G2 - stupid idea?
- Thread starter Helmut Grokenberger
- Start date
Systemactive.co.uk
Looks like they are out of stock now
I've had some time to tinker around a bit more with my G2. The image quality of the G2 is still amazing, but I ran into a few issues - no real surprise, I kind of expected that.
The first couple of issues have nothing to do with the G2, but with the switch from oculus to the SteamVR ecosystem. I hate the fact that I need external tools to pin windows (I usually have a browser window to my left or below the scanner when watching a stream or youtube video, and the EDMC window to my right). After they finally fixed the grey window bug it was much more painless to do so with the Rift S. With SteamVR I have tested OVR toolkit which is nice but unpredictable - it tends to move windows from their position at random and sometimes changes their content. Also I think it takes up quite a bit of performance. Having to use both controllers to operate is also a PITA - more on the controllers below. I haven't really found an alternative to it, every web search ended with "use OVR Toolkit".
Also, since the move to SteamVR ED Runner started crashing randomly (and, annoyingly, silently too). Almost crashed into a star multiple times . I have found a replacement for it though (a script for AHK called AHK joystick focus, but there is a compiled version so you don't really need AHK), will see if it works better.
The controllers are a bit annoying, too. After setting up my session I usually put them on the floor next to my "pilot seat" (an IKEA Poäng lounge chair), where they are of course out of sight of the headset. This was no problem with my Rift S, but the Reverb's controllers start acting weird after a few seconds. They seem to keep disconnecting an immediately reconnecting when out of sight of the headset. I keep hearing the device disconnect sound of Windows which then is followed by a short "jerking" of the headset display, and then I hear the reconnect and get another jerk. Happens for both controllers repeatedly every minute or so until they go to standby. So, I have to turn them off if I don't need them, and if I want to change something in OVR Toolkit or quickly check something on the desktop I have to go through the whole pain to turn them on again, do my stuff and turn them back off. This is REALLY annoying.
Issues with the HMD itself: For me it gets uncomfortable after a while. For one the face gasket is too curved and too slim for my bucket head - that's also why my glasses don't fit under the HMD. To get a good fit and FOV I have to have the velcro straps on the side pretty tight, and as the headband of the G2 fits rather tight around my head I feel pretty pressured around my head after a while. I would really wish for a looser fit of the headset. I have found a promising replacement gasket on thingieverse that I ordered to print which is less curved and also less deep, hopefully resulting in less pressure on my temples and whole head as well as improved FOV. Cost me 15 Euros to have it printed, I'm curios if it works out.
Lastly, there's some performance issues with ED. For the most part, being out exploring or doing some pew pew I'm running fine on 70% SS. I get some reprojection, but the artefacting is tolerable. I have found 50 to 60% to be a good sweetspot with nice visuals and minimal reprojection.
If I go planetside near settlements or bases I have major issues though - the GPU usage really spikes, I get contstant reprojection but also major sturrering when rotating. Driving the SRV is near impossible. If I disable reprojection I see that I am indeed GPU bound, as the usage goes to 95% and I get framrates around 65 to 70 frames/second. No matter how low I go with Elite's quality settings, there is little change. Driving around bases and settlements only gets tolerable once I reduce the SS to 30%, which kind of defeats the purpose of the high res display.
Not really sure what to to there. It definitely is connected to the settlement assets; as soon as they are out of view I get stable 90 fps even with higher quality settings, SteamVR's SS at 60-70% and with a bunch of other assets like ships around or mountains and craters throwing shadows and such. Dropping the environment quality to low, which, according to the game's context help reduces the complexity of world assets, doesn't do anything. Got to figure that one out.
Sooo... not exactly a drag-and-drop-replacement... but I didn't really expect it . I'll keep you up to date with my ongoing experiences.
The first couple of issues have nothing to do with the G2, but with the switch from oculus to the SteamVR ecosystem. I hate the fact that I need external tools to pin windows (I usually have a browser window to my left or below the scanner when watching a stream or youtube video, and the EDMC window to my right). After they finally fixed the grey window bug it was much more painless to do so with the Rift S. With SteamVR I have tested OVR toolkit which is nice but unpredictable - it tends to move windows from their position at random and sometimes changes their content. Also I think it takes up quite a bit of performance. Having to use both controllers to operate is also a PITA - more on the controllers below. I haven't really found an alternative to it, every web search ended with "use OVR Toolkit".
Also, since the move to SteamVR ED Runner started crashing randomly (and, annoyingly, silently too). Almost crashed into a star multiple times
. I have found a replacement for it though (a script for AHK called AHK joystick focus, but there is a compiled version so you don't really need AHK), will see if it works better.The controllers are a bit annoying, too. After setting up my session I usually put them on the floor next to my "pilot seat" (an IKEA Poäng lounge chair), where they are of course out of sight of the headset. This was no problem with my Rift S, but the Reverb's controllers start acting weird after a few seconds. They seem to keep disconnecting an immediately reconnecting when out of sight of the headset. I keep hearing the device disconnect sound of Windows which then is followed by a short "jerking" of the headset display, and then I hear the reconnect and get another jerk. Happens for both controllers repeatedly every minute or so until they go to standby. So, I have to turn them off if I don't need them, and if I want to change something in OVR Toolkit or quickly check something on the desktop I have to go through the whole pain to turn them on again, do my stuff and turn them back off. This is REALLY annoying.
Issues with the HMD itself: For me it gets uncomfortable after a while. For one the face gasket is too curved and too slim for my bucket head - that's also why my glasses don't fit under the HMD. To get a good fit and FOV I have to have the velcro straps on the side pretty tight, and as the headband of the G2 fits rather tight around my head I feel pretty pressured around my head after a while. I would really wish for a looser fit of the headset. I have found a promising replacement gasket on thingieverse that I ordered to print which is less curved and also less deep, hopefully resulting in less pressure on my temples and whole head as well as improved FOV. Cost me 15 Euros to have it printed, I'm curios if it works out.
Lastly, there's some performance issues with ED. For the most part, being out exploring or doing some pew pew I'm running fine on 70% SS. I get some reprojection, but the artefacting is tolerable. I have found 50 to 60% to be a good sweetspot with nice visuals and minimal reprojection.
If I go planetside near settlements or bases I have major issues though - the GPU usage really spikes, I get contstant reprojection but also major sturrering when rotating. Driving the SRV is near impossible. If I disable reprojection I see that I am indeed GPU bound, as the usage goes to 95% and I get framrates around 65 to 70 frames/second. No matter how low I go with Elite's quality settings, there is little change. Driving around bases and settlements only gets tolerable once I reduce the SS to 30%, which kind of defeats the purpose of the high res display
. Not really sure what to to there. It definitely is connected to the settlement assets; as soon as they are out of view I get stable 90 fps even with higher quality settings, SteamVR's SS at 60-70% and with a bunch of other assets like ships around or mountains and craters throwing shadows and such. Dropping the environment quality to low, which, according to the game's context help reduces the complexity of world assets, doesn't do anything. Got to figure that one out.
Sooo... not exactly a drag-and-drop-replacement... but I didn't really expect it
. I'll keep you up to date with my ongoing experiences.Don't use the SteamVR ecosystem, the whole point of WMR is that all the bolt on stuff of SteamVR and Oculus, is already built into WMR. You can pin anything from Windows into anything VR related. No bloatware from Steam or Oculus required.
You're running at a much higher resolution headset. More pixels need better hardware. I have a G1 ( same resolution ) with no artefacts at 100% SS on a 1080Ti and a 4790K.
If I go planetside near settlements or bases I have major issues though - the GPU usage really spikes, I get contstant reprojection but also major sturrering when rotating. Driving the SRV is near impossible. If I disable reprojection I see that I am indeed GPU bound, as the usage goes to 95% and I get framrates around 65 to 70 frames/second. No matter how low I go with Elite's quality settings, there is little change. Driving around bases and settlements only gets tolerable once I reduce the SS to 30%, which kind of defeats the purpose of the high res display
Something really wrong here, I don't see the same visual problems. I can't think what settings you need to change but rest assured, what you describe is not normal in my experience.
Yeah, I know about the "follow me" thing for windows in WMR, but no, it does not work as I require it. For one, not all applications can be opened in a virtual window; EDMC for instance simply does not open in WMR. I can see it launches to the desktop, but the window in WMR stays blank / black. Firefox has a weird scaling issues. Kind of like the window it is opened in is way too small. And it annoys the hell out of me that I can only open one Desktop window, and that I manually have to turn off automatic desktop switching every time I launch a session.
Then there is window sizing. While I love the fact that I can use the mouse in WMR, grabbing and resizing the windows with BOTH controllers, which is kind of essential for correct placement, is a pain. And then there is the minimum window size which is way too big. I don't need the browser or the EDMC window to fill 1/6 of my viewport. Plus you can't get rid of the blue top bar and frame. And I only can pin one window anyway.
And of course SteamVR is needed to actually run the game. As much as it pains me I must admit, scores for the window pinning go to Facebook - they really got it figured out, hands down (ugh, I feel dirty now, need to go wash....). OVR Toolkit has a nice feature set, but so far it proved kind of unreliable
.I wouldn't completely rule I missed another pinning feature or did something wrong though... but the "follow me" feature is useless for a virtual cockpit. Thumbs up for the mouse implementation though!
Yeah, no big surprise here. You cannot compare the G1's and the G2's SS factors in SteamVR though. Be aware that different headsets have different upsampling ratios in SteamVR. On the Rift S, 100% SS means a factor of around 1.23 times the native panel resolution (1648x1772 per eye). On the G1, SteamVR 100% SS means around 100% panel resolution (2160x2160 per eye). 100% on the Reverb G2 (as well as the Valve Index) means 1.4 times upsampling even though it's the same panel resolution, which would be 3164x3092 per eye or 6328x3092 for both
. My guess would be they defaulted to a lower resolution on the G1 because graphics cards that would have been able to run any upsampled resolution weren't even thinkable two years ago .I'm not very fussy on desktop games, but in VR I can't stand the slightest bit of microstutters. I'm fine with the 45 fps, but microstutters - no. And, keeping in mind what I wrote above: I've tinkered and tested a bit more. When I'm running SteamVR near the panel's native pixel resolution (which comes down to around 45% SS), everything is fine and dandy, with minimal, tolerable reprojection and microstutters even planetside and in the SRV. But of course not as sharp as the headset could do. So yeah, running at the same resolution as you do, my 2080 Super performs compareable to a 1080 Ti, which would be expected.
And by the way, yesterday I launched my free Epic CMDR, and, of course, Elite launched from the Epic Client happily ignores the SteamVR per-app resolution settings. So it launched in glorious 100% SS or 3164x3092 per eye. What a treat. But still unplayable
. Good thing new graphics cards are rarer than unicorns, I'd be endangered to buy one if I came across one .
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