So I'm thinking about dabbling with some VR, I intend to be playing Project CARS 2 & Elite Dangerous for a start. I do have some space by my desk that measures approx 2 x 3 metres. Will I need the headset, base station and controllors to get the most out of it? Current specs are i7-4770, 32GB DDR3, GTX 1080Ti. Looking at the HTC Vive, or maybe a Pro but am open to suggestions? Taa
Wait less than a week. In that time, the Rift S will (very, very likely) start shipping (April 30th/May 1st), and Valve will actually announce some actual concrete information on the Valve Index (May 1st).
I would wait, as the next 2 months, we will see some great HMD's coming. Acer 2160x2160 Per Eye HMD with IPD https://uploadvr.com/acer-conceptd-ojo/ HP Reverb 2160x2160 Per Eye HMD 114° FOV https://uploadvr.com/hp-reverb-vr-4k-599/ Valve Index with IPD (Speculation: 140° FOV - 1440x1600 per eye) https://uploadvr.com/valve-index-wishlist/ Oculus Rift S - Lags behind these upcoming HMD's. https://uploadvr.com/oculus-rift-s-official/ What is important to understand about the render resolution and displays resolution vs GPU power, is take the CV1 renders at 1344x1600 per eye at 100% Render Resolution - Even though the displays are 1080x1200 per eye. Now from owning the Samsung Odyssey + which has 1440x1600 per eye. Each screen has a pixel count of 2,303,000 pixels. Paired together to render the whole image is 4,606,000 pixels. Now add 1.8x SS = 8,294,400 pixels. 4k = 8,294,400 pixels. I could run that on a 1080 Ti. Now these 4K HMD's have 2160x2160 per eye = 4,665,600 pixels. Paired together = 9,331,200 pixels. So running this just under 100% render resolution would mean I could run this on a 1080 Ti smoothly. Now from experience, running ED, PC2 etc, The Samsung Odyessy + makes reading text very clear compared to lower resolution HMD's - So I would go with something with a res of 1440x1600 per eye or higher to be able to read text, the car dash etc.
Very curious about the Index. I hope Valve will stock the Base Stations alongside the HMD in the Steam Store. Doesn't make much sense otherwise. Making the HMD available but then being required to source the Base Stations from HTC! Also have some PC World/Currys vouchers to burn so it would be useful converting it to Steam Wallet credit to this end!
The 2.0 basestations are made by Valve rather than HTC, so are very likely to be sold through Steam (the accidentally enabled Index store page also revealed that the HMD is sold separately from both the controllers and the basestations). Bear in mind the 2.0 basestations are not compatible with existing Vive hardware. Sadly it's much more complicated than that. Not only is there panel resolution and field of view to take into account, there's also the lens power and function (all current HMD lenses are aspherics) as well as subpixel geometry that all affect both desired minimum eyebuffer resolution, AND actual perceptual clarity. And that's not even getting into rendering tricks like lens-matched shading and similar, or the larger-than-you-would-think performance penalties that apply once you go much beyond ~100° rendered view angle and start to need multiple angled viewports to avoid edge-pixel wastage from rectilinear rendering. Take the HP Reverb for example: it's got double the per-axis resolution compared to CV1 and only a bit wider FoV, so it should have nearly 4x the clarity, right? Except that by setting the eyebuffer resolution to match the panel resolution (remember, there is no such thing as '1:1 rendering' for VR until you switch away from rectilinear rendering to something like raycasting) combined with HP's use of the same sort of hybrid-fresnel lenses the Rift and Vive use but operating over a larger FoV, means that centre clarity remains broadly the same or even slightly worse: the larger FoV means you are hit by the curse of rectilinear rendering (proportionally more pixels distributed to the periphery the higher the FoV gets), then with a more extreme lens pre-warp shader to stretch the centre region to counter the lens' greater pincushioning, means that pixels/degree in the centre is nowhere near as high as expected. To compensate, you then need to not only raise the eyebuffer resolution higher, but it needs to go higher than the 'standard' 1.3x per axis for current HMDs just to get closer to matching the panel's perceptual centre resolution (works out to more like 1.5x per axis, or 2.25x area, whcih for the Reverb gets you to 3240x3240 or ~21 megapixels per frame). Personally, I'd expect the Index to roughly match the Vive Pro in resolution and in FoV, possibly with a switch the fast-switch LCDs to bring the cost down a bit (and maybe moving to finer Fresnel grating pitch to open up the eyebox a bit at the expense of moving the 'halo' artefacts more in the 'god ray' direction). Higher FoVs need some more radical changes to the rendering pipeline than lens-matched shading would lead you to believe (LMS just uses offset frustum segments, whereas tackling the rectilinear curse means actually rotated coordinate systems and angled edge blending) and this has not only remained absent in SteamVR and current OpenXR previes, but absent from GDC and Siggraph presentations where you would expect such advances to be demonstrated in advance of deployment - because devs actually need to implement them if you want a usable software library.
Well that seems to have been exactly what we got, barring 'bring the cost down' going from a wallet-busting £1300 for the Vive Pro kit to mere eye-watering £920 for the Index kit.
From what I've seen I like the design of the headset. Did not expect to see innovation in the audio aspect of the HMD which was a nice surprise. Trust this guys point of view on most things, worth a watch. Goes into more detail on the sound from the HMD... Experimented with the pre-order process and it doesn't appear to be charging 'Shipping' at the moment. Not sure if this is an oversight but it certainly doesn't get charged during pre-order checkout at the time of writing. Also pleased to report that Steam Wallet credit can be used to purchase the Valve Index hardware. So at least I finally have something to spend my Curry's vouchers on! As an owner of the Vive I'm very happy with the way Valve has introduced this new hardware to the ecosystem. So at least we can Pick 'n Mix for incremental upgrades. I think I'll go for the Index Controllers pre-order and see how the HMD reviews in the coming weeks. Looking good though!
