Vive Pro Discussion Thread

[drkaii]

The black levels are really good! Much. much better than the Rift.

Yep agreed, VERY good. There is still some black smear from time to time, but otherwise it just feels like using a normal OLED monitor. BTW do the Gear VR lens mod, seriously. I am going to put a video up about doing it.

Makes a MASSIVE difference to immersion.

 

[TopCat160]

My mate has a Rift, I had a go in Elite, and was blown away initially, but after a few minutes, although the depth and sense of Being There was excellent, I came away feeling a little 'meh', like 'good but not yet good enough'.

I've been thinking of getting myself a Vive Pro and some new GFX goodness as a Christmas pressie, but I need a bit of convincing. Is it there yet? It's a big investment, and I don't want to come away feeling disappointed.

 

[Orvidius]

Yep agreed, VERY good. There is still some black smear from time to time, but otherwise it just feels like using a normal OLED monitor. BTW do the Gear VR lens mod, seriously. I am going to put a video up about doing it.

Makes a MASSIVE difference to immersion.

OK great. I'll have to look into the lens mod too. I've also ordered a set of WIDMO corrective lenses.

I made a photoshop mockup, which isn't super accurate, but it kinda gives the idea of the sharp edges and color distortion I see at the low end on both of the newer Rifts (not the older ones). This is what I'm trying to escape.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

All people considering vive pro purchase should at least read something about pimax 5k+, which apparently seems to be the new king of the hill in terms of immersion (fov), picture clarity and sweetspot. It is said to blow the VPro and rest headset out of the water in all but one thing. Pimax uses LCD panels, so galaxy will be grayish. That said people are trying it in elite and loving it. Thread is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/375203-PiMAX-8K-VR but this being an old thread, you might want to skip reading all but the last pages.

 

[Nagual]

Yep agreed, VERY good. There is still some black smear from time to time, but otherwise it just feels like using a normal OLED monitor. BTW do the Gear VR lens mod, seriously. I am going to put a video up about doing it.

Makes a MASSIVE difference to immersion.

This is something I've been considering to do with my non pro Vive, but have been uncertain. Watched plenty of 'How To' videos and know it's fairly simple, but the thing that's stopping me is the small number of people reporting distortion which can be apparently fixed with a software fix.

 

[drkaii]

when the pimax is out, I will see if I can afford it and if so, I will def try it out. LCD seems ok to me

This is something I've been considering to do with my non pro Vive, but have been uncertain. Watched plenty of 'How To' videos and know it's fairly simple, but the thing that's stopping me is the small number of people reporting distortion which can be apparently fixed with a software fix.

For me, I didn't need to. Not sure why I have no barrel distortion. Only thing I think different between me and others is I use one of my old CV1 interface replacement foam thingies, and because it's the wrong size, the lenses are basically touching my eye balls (which means I get an awesome FOV!). Maybe being so close cancels out the effect, but haven't bothered to look into it.

 

[CylonSurfer]

Yep agreed, VERY good. There is still some black smear from time to time, but otherwise it just feels like using a normal OLED monitor. BTW do the Gear VR lens mod, seriously. I am going to put a video up about doing it.

Makes a MASSIVE difference to immersion.

I have a set on the way

 

[CylonSurfer]

All people considering vive pro purchase should at least read something about pimax 5k+, which apparently seems to be the new king of the hill in terms of immersion (fov), picture clarity and sweetspot. It is said to blow the VPro and rest headset out of the water in all but one thing. Pimax uses LCD panels, so galaxy will be grayish. That said people are trying it in elite and loving it. Thread is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/375203-PiMAX-8K-VR but this being an old thread, you might want to skip reading all but the last pages.

Still waiting on indepth performance reviews of that device in Elite. There are lots of light weight reviews but nothing showing FPS using the various FOV options in the demanding areas of the game. My i7 8700K, 1080Ti and 32GB of DDR4 3000mhz takes a beating with the Vive Pro, I remain skeptical about the Pimax....

 

[soulman]

Orvidius, have you tried disabling spud on your new rift ? I had a similar issue with blacks in mine and disabling spud resolved it completely :
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp....t/why_you_may_need_to_disable_spud_oled_mura/

 

[VR StarLightPL]

My i7 8700K, 1080Ti and 32GB of DDR4 3000mhz takes a beating with the Vive Pro, I remain skeptical about the Pimax....

Hardware not being up to snuff doesn't make this headset suddenly worse than Vive Pro. All reviewers so far say that 5k+ blows "current gen" (vive pro included) out of the water, plain and simple. It has better fov, better clarity, larger sweetspot and less SDE than any headset on the market. So, to reiterate, we have a headset which seems better and is cheaper than Vive pro. Why would anyone buy Vive pro then without at least checking that out?

Also on the fps measurements, SweViver did some benchmarks of various VR games. [video=youtube;e7H-vBc1Lzo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7H-vBc1Lzo[/video]

...but sadly no Elite. I think there was another vid made before pitool update with a bit worse numbers. Even when accusing SweViver of pimax fanboism, the fps numbers on that vid don't lie.

When my friends receives his 5k+, I can do some fps measurements, could you suggest the problematic/demanding areas? I only know of frame drops inside stations with a 1070, and nothing that ever bothered me while using Vive. That said I'm pretty resistant to SDE, reprojection etc. YMMV.

PS: new SteamVR motion smoothing works wonders. Even DCS which is a performance hog looks way better. And I heard Pimax started working to use it in their software.

 

[drkaii]

Really no need to argue over this. Pimax looks amazing, Vive Pro is amazing, Pimax is probably way better.

One thing I will say about Vive Pro though is it is enough

Don't get me wrong, I would always love more, but Vive Pro is good enough already - there's easily enough clarity for any game, and the FOV is fine (as I said above, I have got a mod that presses the lenses practically to my eyeballs and I get fantastic FOV). So if you bought one, don't get down that there's potentially something better and cheaper out there.

Await the reviews, and if necessary, sell the Pro and buy the Pimax with a small difference

I will probably doing something like that eventually, but there's no rush.

As for the specs issue, turning down the sampling will help with that. I'd WAY prefer better physical resolution with downgraded super sampled resolution than the converse!

Also, for most games on the Vive Pro, I crank up the SS to 2x, so I can already handle a 4K headset if such a device were to exist. So I am not concerned about specs.

 

[CylonSurfer]

Hardware not being up to snuff doesn't make this headset suddenly worse than Vive Pro. All reviewers so far say that 5k+ blows "current gen" (vive pro included) out of the water, plain and simple. It has better fov, better clarity, larger sweetspot and less SDE than any headset on the market. So, to reiterate, we have a headset which seems better and is cheaper than Vive pro. Why would anyone buy Vive pro then without at least checking that out?

Also on the fps measurements, SweViver did some benchmarks of various VR games.

...but sadly no Elite. I think there was another vid made before pitool update with a bit worse numbers. Even when accusing SweViver of pimax fanboism, the fps numbers on that vid don't lie.

When my friends receives his 5k+, I can do some fps measurements, could you suggest the problematic/demanding areas? I only know of frame drops inside stations with a 1070, and nothing that ever bothered me while using Vive. That said I'm pretty resistant to SDE, reprojection etc. YMMV.

PS: new SteamVR motion smoothing works wonders. Even DCS which is a performance hog looks way better. And I heard Pimax started working to use it in their software.

I think you misread my comment or at least misunderstood it.

What I am saying is that if a high end rig, such as my own with a Vive Pro, struggles to maintain playable framerates in Elite then I can only sumise that the Pimax will also suffer from the same issue but to a higher degree due to its higher res and FOV. Which makes complete sense. There is little sense to buying a HMD based on its specs if your rig cannot play the game you want on it.

No there is no indepth review of the Pimax devices running Elite, which in itself is a little odd if you ask me with Elite being one of the more popular VR titles around. Obviously we'll have to wait and see but I don't think recommending an unproven device is a smart move at this time, at least if Elite is the game you will primarily play in VR.

As for demmanding areas of the game:

- In and around stations
- Planetside starports (particularly while driving in an SRV)
- SRV use
- RE Sites (Ice ones in particular)
- Engineer bases
- Guardian Sites

One other thing to keep in mind about the video in your previous post, it's not exactly unbiased. The guy who made it, along with his counterpart MRTV got free Pimax HMDs, they have an incentive to tell people everything is peachy, better than everything else and gloss over any negatives, its called advertising. Not to say that some games will not perform just fine and I'm sure they're quick to show those, but it doesn't make it true for every title out there and they haven't made an Elite video, despite many requests for one...I haven't seen a Fallout 4 VR video from them either, another game, much like Elite, which is very demanding.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

Nah, we're simply talking about two different things CylonSurfer. Like Dr. Kaii said, there's no need to purchase anything if you already have vive pro. Pimax is not yet on the market, there is only 100 pcs or less sent to backers, there is more than 6k backers out there. It's not on the market anytime soon.

What I tried to stress is, if you are like me, coming from OG Vive, there is absolutely no reason to buy vive pro now. It is advisable to wait and compare the reviews after more people gets their hands on these headsets. It is demanding for sure, but AFAIK it has these fov settings which can help a bit. I will do some elite testing as soon as that headset arrives.

Also I am not defending SweViver or anything, but AFAIK he paid for his pimax. What he has now is a testing unit which will be sent back after his backer unit arrives. Of course we have only their word for it, and they seem to be biased to a fanboish level, but it's really easy to throw mud someone's way and see if it sticks. Like said when second hundred units is sent, I will see for myself. And my rig is lacking in cpu and ram departments so even harsher environment.

One final note about VR performance - I remember you making educated posts about software engineering ;-) so I assume you know that FO4VR is not "demanding", it is plain and simple badly optimised, and has apparently problem with the previous fall creator's update of windows 10. Which, hilariously, was proven by SweViver who installed a fresh w10 pre-fall update version and suddenly he had solid 90fps in the most demanding areas of the game. With the same 1080Ti which struggled with the game previously. As for Elite it is no optimisation marvel itself, I remember frame drops in stations on a GTX 1070 in 2d, 1080p. Maybe CPU bottleneck, maybe slow RAM (1600 at the time), but it had drops below 60.

TL; DR still recommend checking pimax out if you didn't buy pro already. And if you did, you can always sell it if you like pimax better.

 

[CylonSurfer]

Nah, we're simply talking about two different things CylonSurfer. Like Dr. Kaii said, there's no need to purchase anything if you already have vive pro. Pimax is not yet on the market, there is only 100 pcs or less sent to backers, there is more than 6k backers out there. It's not on the market anytime soon.

What I tried to stress is, if you are like me, coming from OG Vive, there is absolutely no reason to buy vive pro now. It is advisable to wait and compare the reviews after more people gets their hands on these headsets. It is demanding for sure, but AFAIK it has these fov settings which can help a bit. I will do some elite testing as soon as that headset arrives.

Also I am not defending SweViver or anything, but AFAIK he paid for his pimax. What he has now is a testing unit which will be sent back after his backer unit arrives. Of course we have only their word for it, and they seem to be biased to a fanboish level, but it's really easy to throw mud someone's way and see if it sticks. Like said when second hundred units is sent, I will see for myself. And my rig is lacking in cpu and ram departments so even harsher environment.

One final note about VR performance - I remember you making educated posts about software engineering ;-) so I assume you know that FO4VR is not "demanding", it is plain and simple badly optimised, and has apparently problem with the previous fall creator's update of windows 10. Which, hilariously, was proven by SweViver who installed a fresh w10 pre-fall update version and suddenly he had solid 90fps in the most demanding areas of the game. With the same 1080Ti which struggled with the game previously. As for Elite it is no optimisation marvel itself, I remember frame drops in stations on a GTX 1070 in 2d, 1080p. Maybe CPU bottleneck, maybe slow RAM (1600 at the time), but it had drops below 60.

TL; DR still recommend checking pimax out if you didn't buy pro already. And if you did, you can always sell it if you like pimax better.

You are certainly right about Fallout 4 VR, it is a terribly optimised game and yes, Elite has its moments too as much as Frontier support like to deny that. Watching the live steams I see the same hitches and stutters in the same areas of the game I notice whilst playing in VR.

 

[Orvidius]

Orvidius, have you tried disabling spud on your new rift ? I had a similar issue with blacks in mine and disabling spud resolved it completely :
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp....t/why_you_may_need_to_disable_spud_oled_mura/

I haven't, but it's not a problem with Mura that I'm having. It's that it activates anything above a value of zero to a much brighter color than it should be, in all pixels, which results in sharp edges and colorful halos around objects that should fade into a black background.

EDIT: Reading it a little more closely, I see that people are reporting improvements with red banding and the like, so maybe it would help. But part of the issue also is that there's a greenish field across the center of view that's always lit up. I don't know if this is part of the SPUD issue or not.

EDIT 2: I think it really is a Mura issue actually, based on further reading. Still, we shouldn't have to resort to registry keys and turning off features to "fix" a display issue like that. In any case, my Vive Pro is arriving in a few days, so I'm not sure how much time I want to invest in tweaking the newer Rift.

 

[Orvidius]

Orvidius, have you tried disabling spud on your new rift ? I had a similar issue with blacks in mine and disabling spud resolved it completely :
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp....t/why_you_may_need_to_disable_spud_oled_mura/

This is really the wrong thread, but I figured I'd share how this all compared. I'll update again when my Vive Pro gets here, and share how that compares as well.

I tried turning off SPUD on the Oculus Rift and tried that with both the new and old headsets:

With the old headset, I never had any complaints with SPUD on (the default). With SPUD off, it was hard to see the difference except for one thing. There was now significant black smear, enough to be annoying. This HMD really needs SPUD turned on.

With the replacement headset, with SPUD turned on, it was having the issues I described earlier. Some noticeable Mura, but not too bad. Mainly the problem was with near-black colors being much brighter than they should be, to a much greater degree than on the older Rift, resulting in sharp edges on things that should fade smoothly to black. The galactic band in the skybox was particularly noticeable. When looking at a pure black scene, such as going into the System Map and turning your head 90 degrees, there was a greenish band of light across the center of both displays.

Now with SPUD off on the newer headset, the black level looks good, and the sharp edges are still there but reduced. However there's a reddish tint to everything, and so the overall color isn't quite accurate. This is most noticeable on the galactic band that has a red/purple tint to the cloudy and dusty areas that shouldn't be there. The black smearing isn't too noticeable. So this is the less offensive mode for the newer headset, for playing Elite, but still not correct.

I'll compare the Vive Pro when it arrives, which should be pretty soon.

 

[TorTorden_VR]

..along with his counterpart MRTV got free Pimax HMDs, they have an incentive to tell people everything is peachy, better than everything else and gloss over any negatives, its called advertising. Not to say that some games will not perform just fine and I'm sure they're quick to show those, but it doesn't make it true for every title out there and they haven't made an Elite video, despite many requests for one...I haven't seen a Fallout 4 VR video from them either, another game, much like Elite, which is very demanding.

Not quite.
Both Sebastian and MRTV are known backers who where voted into the beta by the other backers on the Pimax boards.
They have as much money into than I do, if not more.

They are expected to return their test units when they get their pledges or whenever Pimax tells them too.
That's not a free lunch in my opinion.

....
Now with SPUD off on the newer headset, the black level looks good, and the sharp edges are still there but reduced. However there's a reddish tint to everything, and so the overall color isn't quite accurate. This is most noticeable on the galactic band that has a red/purple tint to the cloudy and dusty areas that shouldn't be there. The black smearing isn't too noticeable. So this is the less offensive mode for the newer headset, for playing Elite, but still not correct.

I'll compare the Vive Pro when it arrives, which should be pretty soon.

There are many a reason OLED is not the end all, be all of displays, in fact it's got more problems than anything.
No two OLED panels are identical, well neither are LCD's but the difference in panel parity between the two techs are mountainous.
It's 0.5% on LCD vs 10% or more for OLED.

Not only does OLED suffer between panels they even struggle across one panel, many an LG OLED has been returned because the panels lack uniformity.
This on top of on\off transition times and the more I look into these problems, I'm starting to think the only reason these are used in the vive is that Samsung sold them cheaply, and they use very little power.
The only benefit for the END consumer is perhaps the true blacks, but again for most doesn't ever see this cause unless you de-activate SPUD the pixels are never actually turned off but left at minimum brightness.

Personally I think I might have gotten the lottery units of rifts for disabling SPUD.

Blacks become perfect, no noticeable colour tint or increased smear, I even get less mura noise.
In fact all of these where more obvious with SPUD turned on.

Nah, bring on the LED based displays

There are work being done on <3" LED panels with a resolution over 1440p.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

Not only does OLED suffer between panels they even struggle across one panel, many an LG OLED has been returned because the panels lack uniformity.

Unlucky owner of an LG OLED B7 55" panel which looks like it has been put from two panels with different brightness. It's my second panel - the first developed bad pixel in just under 20 days of use and was exchanged (and boy were the shop reluctant and making trouble with the return, but that's Poland for you). The second one made this difference of uniformity known in under three months of use, and frankly digging more online about the problem (because none of the rave reviews out there will tell you the ugly truth) I decided to suck it up and keep it. It seems I won the bad panel lottery after all - mine has "only" one noticeable bar in the middle of the screen and two smaller barely noticeable bars, there are much worse examples out there, and this one doesn't have bad pixels so far. Relevant google image search

I'm surprised I don't see it in the vive tbh. Maybe the're hand picked or something, or it has to do with the fact that there are two panels generating the image and it cancels out. IDK.
</offtopic>

 

[Orvidius]

I'll compare the Vive Pro when it arrives, which should be pretty soon.

My VP arrived yesterday. The image is absolutely wonderful. None of the Mura, color tint, blasted out high-gamma colors that should be near black, artificial sharp edges around cloudy things, color auras, etc that the various Rifts have had. The image is crisp, bright, and fades nicely to black. I only saw a minuscule amount of black smear, in one place, otherwise it hasn't been noticeable.

But nothing ever goes completely smoothly. I know people said that the audio isn't as good as the Rift. That's an understatement. The audio is pure junk. No bass tones whatsoever. It's only the tinny, high-frequency sound that gets through. It's as if they intentionally filtered the bass and some of the mid-range out. Googling shows this to be a widespread problem. Some people report that you just need to press the earphones closer into your ear, but this doesn't help much in my case. The frequency ranges are just missing. So for the moment I'm back on external headphones (which fit under the HMD strap better than over it, making for a compressed, tight feel. This is making me consider earbuds, even though I generally don't prefer those). For now it's a set of $25 Logitech headphones, and it sounds infinitely better.

EDIT: I haven't tried messing with bass boost, etc yet in Windows. I'll probably give that a try.

EDIT 2: I also tried a firmware update, and that didn't help.

 

[drkaii]

My VP arrived yesterday. The image is absolutely wonderful. None of the Mura, color tint, blasted out high-gamma colors that should be near black, artificial sharp edges around cloudy things, color auras, etc that the various Rifts have had. The image is crisp, bright, and fades nicely to black. I only saw a minuscule amount of black smear, in one place, otherwise it hasn't been noticeable.

But nothing ever goes completely smoothly. I know people said that the audio isn't as good as the Rift. That's an understatement. The audio is pure junk. No bass tones whatsoever. It's only the tinny, high-frequency sound that gets through. It's as if they intentionally filtered the bass and some of the mid-range out. Googling shows this to be a widespread problem. Some people report that you just need to press the earphones closer into your ear, but this doesn't help much in my case. The frequency ranges are just missing. So for the moment I'm back on external headphones (which fit under the HMD strap better than over it, making for a compressed, tight feel. This is making me consider earbuds, even though I generally don't prefer those). For now it's a set of $25 Logitech headphones, and it sounds infinitely better.

EDIT: I haven't tried messing with bass boost, etc yet in Windows. I'll probably give that a try.

EDIT 2: I also tried a firmware update, and that didn't help.

I never once used those in built headphones, took them off and used mine (got an extra long cable)