I'm no fan boy of either set. I actually pre-ordered both. Vive for room scale in the living room, and Rift for cockpit games. So far, I've received the Vive. I've tried the Rift CV1 for a few minutes at VRLA.
The Rift CV1 is much more comfortable. When I tried it out, the sweet spot was huge, and the balance great. I'd recommend it if you plan to keep it on your head for a few hours. I found I have to recenter it often enough. I can reduce that by tightening the straps, but it gets less comfortable.
The Vive is really fun for room scale, but is substantially heavier (or at least heavier feeling). It's probably because I was walking around and swinging swords, but it seemed to get sweaty and hot really fast. I'd expect the CV1 with the cloth lining to keep cool better.
The other big thing is async time-warp. It makes the DK2 extremely smooth. Noticeably smoother than the HTC Vive. It's not really a fair comparison, as the Vive is 90hz with 1.25x the resolution. Also, SteamVR's closest thing to async time-warp (reprojection) was just implemented, and may be making games worse until the games are adjusted by the devs.
The Rift CV1 is much more comfortable. When I tried it out, the sweet spot was huge, and the balance great. I'd recommend it if you plan to keep it on your head for a few hours. I found I have to recenter it often enough. I can reduce that by tightening the straps, but it gets less comfortable.
The Vive is really fun for room scale, but is substantially heavier (or at least heavier feeling). It's probably because I was walking around and swinging swords, but it seemed to get sweaty and hot really fast. I'd expect the CV1 with the cloth lining to keep cool better.
The other big thing is async time-warp. It makes the DK2 extremely smooth. Noticeably smoother than the HTC Vive. It's not really a fair comparison, as the Vive is 90hz with 1.25x the resolution. Also, SteamVR's closest thing to async time-warp (reprojection) was just implemented, and may be making games worse until the games are adjusted by the devs.