Nothing wrong with 2d games. VR in general is often a hassle in one form or another. I have haf generally decent xp with Pimax on majority of games with a few complete duds. Sometimes it has beem purely a pimax issue, with other times being a DeV issue like Astronauts Vanishing of Ethan Carter; ran fine on the p4k where as not so good on 5k+/8k/8kX. However this title seemed to be broken on some areas due to changes on VR and the dev not revisiting to fix things. Which is a shame as this game still has great visuals.
I can appreciate though the sentiment on going with Sony as there closed system works. The original Psvr was quite good once unlocked on pc. It is too bad Sony doesn’t seem to want to support these things themselves. As Have seem some impressive psvr on pc with a good system powering it way back when.
Until PcVR has OpenXR fully/properly implemented it will be hit and miss. Between Valve and Oculus breaking things. Plus with the quality issues on the v2 lighthouses not being as good as advertised vs the v1 Lighthouses.
Okay so I spent some more time with it today and I love it even more! Once you find the sweetspot with the right positioning, then putting the headset on, I almost immediately get into the sweetspot every time and once you get the perfect ipd set, the sharpness on the Vive Pro 2 is the equivalent of 1.25x render quality on the 8KX, except that everything is so easy to look at with no eye strain in the Pro 2. It feels just like looking at real life but in VR. This is exactly what I’ve wanted from VR. To have a completely relaxed but focused eye gaze. Glare is not noticeable when you’re immersed in the game, but when you’re reading menus and stuff then you’ll see it.
I then tried the 8KX again and actually the picture quality is really nice too at 1.25x and clarity and colors are decent too. The issue is, reading text in steamvr desktop view is harder, maybe it’s because of the way the 8KX handles white on black contrast along with some blurriness outside the sweetspot when you try to move your eyes around without moving the head. In the Pro 2 you can move just your eyes and it’s still clear.
If you can get past the glare, I hope it will solve all your eye strain issues like it did for me. Just be ready to do some experimenting. I found having the headset higher up on my face with the top strap tightened kept it in the sweetspot. You want to make sure you have it centered by tilting the headset left or right until it’s sharp in both eyes, then adjust ipd with the technique I mentioned in the video.
I’m honestly surprised that a headset I was so ready to dismiss from the bad reviews turned out to work for me.
thats a weird mainsream opinion about htc, their hmds are top tier products except cosmos. I really was bugged when ppl started to put all the sh*t on htc even after their main flaw fix (resolution) complaining about 6mm foam absense and redusing to accept obvious pros of the hmd. its sold out, so it speaks for itself.
It’s astonishing how different the experiences with one and the same device can be. I wanted the Pro 2 to succeed really hard, because it would have solved a couple of dilemma’s for me, sort of fusing the G2 and 8KX into one.
But at the end my conclusion sadly was, that it wasn’t even capable to replace just one of them, because I found each of them superior to the Pro 2, taking all aspects into account.
It’s a pity that HTC didn’t manage to get the device to be such an experience for all of us (or at least the majority of users) as it is for you. It’s effectively a 50:50 gamble, if it works almost perfectly for you as you describe it or actually introduces more issues than it provides solutions compared to what we have at home already, as it was for me…
Looking at the Youtube and other reviews out there, there unfortunately seems to be a fair number of reviewers & users who were not as happy with it as one would have hoped.I don’t recall the Pro 1 to have been that controversial - it was just considered to be awfully overpriced at the time. It seems the new lens design only works when one has a certain set of face shape and other parameters within the range of what HTC were developing against, and they missed quite a large chunk of the population.
Some of them were just too stubborn to replace the foam, which seems like something essential to do. I know you did. But just saying, I’m not taking some of those bad reviews too seriously
Foam or not. Every user I know has been replacing foam for years to increase FOV. The trick is as old as VR itself and had no place in an out of the box rating.
Its honestly not worth using on the standard foam. The vertical view is so narrow its silly but it does open up once you get ultra close. For my part ill be returning it and keeping my 8kX until the next HMD comes along. I have to say though it does not take much to dethrone the 8kX with its prevalent eyestrain issues. If i had the VP2 with proper vertical FOV the 8kX would be sold today.
I don’t care about an ‘out of the box rating’. I want to know if the device is any good for me. Just saying, those ‘out of the box ratings’ that are bad should be ignored by the practical people who just are interested in getting a good VR experience.
Luckily we have our own @NextGenVR who understands that and does much more valuable reviews.
This was the reason I directly ordered it because I knew those who had purchased the Vive Pro at the time had been quite positive about it.
So I thought it would be a properly engineered, easy to use headset offering me what I crave, a wider FoV (doesn’t need to be 160°, approx. 120-130° will do for the moment) with high resolution and otherwise using current better or best practices on audio, tracking etc… On paper it was pretty exactly what I was hoping for, when contemplating the realistically to be expected next iteration of a headset. Not a revolutionary device by any means, but again a further step into the right direction.
The 8KX had be giving me a really hard time with its infinitely finicky IPD adjustment process, convergence issues etc… When trying it in the recent days, to compare it with the Pro 2 (together with the G2), I didn’t notice these discomforts as much, so I don’t know if Pimax improved firmware or PiTool in the meantime or if I just didn’t use the headset long enough (although I did use it for sessions of 20 minutes at least twice, and last year I could notice the slight discomfort pretty much right away if I paid attention to it, even when I finally found IPD settings which kind of worked for me).
But it still remains a bit of a diva when using it with games & apps, it’s not the kind of almost plug & play experience the G2 for me has turned out to be. With the 8KX I will need to test various different combinations of the different settings to find out which one works fine, and that’s a bit tedious when I try to roam through my vast collection of VR games & experiences.
So, to come back to my point, I was hoping the Pro 2 would take care of all of that and present me some of my realistic cravings in an easy to use neat little package.
Which is why I am a bit p*ssed off that I just couldn’t get it to even look on par with any of the other others. If it had at least given me this feeling that I won’t do a step back by selling off the other one (primarily looking at the G2) and keeping the Pro 2, I probably would have kept it. But it just wouldn’t give me that kind of satisfactory experience. What is wrong with the Pro 2 ?! Or me…
So I got mine, been testing it for half an hour. I already know that this is going be my daily driver, because these panels are just WOOOW. These colors really are close to OLED!! Not sure how they did it, but damn, these are some quality panels!!!
I can understand the controversy about the foam. The one that HTC supplied as default is one you’d use in Siberia in the freezing cold, haha. WTF, never seen such thick foam, what were they thinking? Anyway within 10 seconds I had a thin foam in place and then everything is like it should be.
However I can understand a lot of the criticism. The glare is actually quite bad. Maybe I still have to find the sweetspot, or set it up correctly, but right now it’s index glare all over again. I’d have to do an A/B to see if it’s slightly better or worse, but it’s definitely MUCH worse than the 8k-X.
Also in the half hour I’ve tried it, I had a hard time finding the sweet spot. I’ll still need to tinker around with the device but I did feel eye strain. Setting it up correctly definitely is not as simple as you’d expect from such device. Also the comfort, I expected this to be exactly a VP1 copy. Well maybe it is, I’d have to compare but it definitely needs setting it up correctly which isn’t a breeze.
Vertical FoV is indeed somewhat less but honestly to me it’s only a slight difference, while the horizontal FoV is actually really nice.
With small face foam the device does become a heat trap!! Hopefully something can be done about this.
So far, definitely not ‘all perfect’, but these panels are just so good that this does promise a lot.
But I do believe (hope!) that with some tweaking I can get it to be near perfect @john2910
Can you check what steam runs at, at the moment i am down sampling steam to 70%(i do have some performance issues at the moment,but it still looks good)
I have it running at 100% at the moment, seems fine in the few games I tried (nothing too heavy).
About the comfort, it actually does seem to be a 1:1 VP1 copy. However with the very thin face foam I’m using I just feel a bit more pressure on my forehead than I’d like. Will have to see how to fix this without giving up FoV.
These panels are just the bomb though… If we could use the gear VR lens mod with this … haha who knows
