Worth upgrading from Vive Pro?

[Polo]

Hi all,

 

I'm currently using a stock Vive Pro (other than a replaced face cushion) almost exclusively for DCS. Is there any noticeable benefit in upgrading to a newer headset (Vive Pro 2, G2 etc.) or is it worth having a go at the Gear VR lens mod instead and waiting sitting on this headset for now?

 

Open to anyone's experiences...good, bad or ugly on this. Thanks!

[speed-of-heat]

More of a generic observation, I don’t have experience of the VP/vp2, but I do if the g1/g2, and I came from an odyssey plus before that… what else can you afford to upgrade?  I assume that you get a reasonable performance experience today and you get want to improve the visual quality of your experience?

 

if that’s the case you will likely need to upgrade your hardware, to support it, or operate the headset below its full potential, in order to achieve a similar performance experience , the number of pixels you drive will be increased by 78% to operate at its native resolution, do you have 78% performance headroom?
 

If not then you will likely need to increase other element of your hardware or decrease the current settings/max resolution to get a similar performance. or be happy with any “quality of life” upgrades that the vp2 has over the VP .

[SneakyBastd]

1600 pixels vertically, vs 2448. A significant increase in quality. I came from 5k+ to VP2, so 1440 vertically. The difference means you can read MFDs without having to lean in, or zoom. The forward/backward position lights on tankers for refuelling were hard to make out on the pimax, but clear on the VP2. Easier to make out the carrier deck in the groove. Everything just looks better and more detailed. Those kinds of changes.

Whether that is worth the price difference is up to you. 1400-1600 pixels vertically is certainly decent and good enough to play on. All a VP2 does is make it easier to read dials and things, which is nice to have, but certainly not required. If you think that would be nice to have, and the cost doesn't bother you much, then go for it. Otherwise just wait for something similar at a lower price point.

And as speed of heat says, you will want a 3080 or equivalent for a VP2.

[Eugel]

I upgraded from the Vive Pro to the G2 and I would say it is worth it.

But there are some ups and downs. The biggest benefits are picture clarity and readability of instruments. While the Vive Pro still has a very noticable screen door effect, the G2 has none and this alone made it worth it for me.

 

Downsides are as mentioned above: you need a lot of power to really use this high resolution. At standard resolution, steam VR renders the G2 at much more than its native resolution (it´s a lot higher than an 8K resolution, closer to 10K actually) so most likely you won´t get 90 FPS and will have to go down to 45 FPS and use motion smoothing (which the G2 does a lot better than the Vive Pro).

The tracking is not quite on the same level as with the lightstations of the Vive. The major point being that you can´t run the headset in a dark room.

 

The biggest downside for me was that the G2 is a real diva to get running in the first place. So it doesn´t like some USB ports, you will need to use the windows mixed reality software and mixed reality for steam in addition to steam VR. So you have to start three programs every time and the settings are scattered all over the place. So be prepared to spend 1-2 weeks to get it running the way you want and especially in DCS until you find the sweet spot. Don´t expect a plug and play experience like with the Vive.

 

But in the end, if it runs (even at 50% render resolution and 45 FPS) it is a much better experience to fly in DCS, so for me it was absolutely worth it.

[eaglecash867]

Performance is also going to depend a great deal on how high you currently have your DCS PD set to sort of "church up" the visuals in your Vive Pro.  With a G2 or VP2, you'll find that you can run DCS PD to a much lower number which will help to offset the performance loss from higher resolution.  When I had my Oculus Rift CV1, I was running a DCS PD of 2.0 to make it look decent.  With my G2 and the hardware in my sig, I'm running DCS PD at 0.6 and SteamVR SS at 128%.  I get good performance with Motion Reprojection turned on, and the visuals are leaps and bounds better than what I had with my CV1 that, honestly, suffered in performance from having to run DCS PD at 2.0 to make it look good.  As for GPU, when I had the Reverb G1, I upgraded from a 1080ti to a 2080ti and didn't notice much difference at all in performance.

[Supmua]

For me it’s completely worth the upgrade (VP1 to VP2) because the improvement in clarity is quite significant, plus no more annoying screen door efffect.  Think of a VR headset as a monitor, the most important part for most people would be pixel resolution, not audio or other factors. 

Edited July 24, 2021 by Supmua

[Voyager]

On 7/23/2021 at 6:07 PM, DaMoFo said:

Hi all,

 

I'm currently using a stock Vive Pro (other than a replaced face cushion) almost exclusively for DCS. Is there any noticeable benefit in upgrading to a newer headset (Vive Pro 2, G2 etc.) or is it worth having a go at the Gear VR lens mod instead and waiting sitting on this headset for now?

 

Open to anyone's experiences...good, bad or ugly on this. Thanks!

 

What GPU do you have? I got the VP2, but only have a 1080 Ti to drive it, and it is not enough. 

 

If you're doing well with the VP1, but don't have a 30 series or RX 6000 card, you're better off running with the VP1 until you can get a GPU upgrade. 

[Polo]

6 hours ago, Voyager said:

 

What GPU do you have? I got the VP2, but only have a 1080 Ti to drive it, and it is not enough. 

 

If you're doing well with the VP1, but don't have a 30 series or RX 6000 card, you're better off running with the VP1 until you can get a GPU upgrade. 

 

Oops, should have listed it in my first post - my GPU is a 6900XT running on a Ryzen 5900X, so the horsepower should be okay for the VP2. Was a 2080Ti before that, and there is a noticeable qualitative increase in image quality and speed. Am running SteamVR at 150% and DCS World at PD 1.0, 2xMSAA and most settings at high/ultra (shadows on medium, terrain shadows flat), and the visuals are pretty good as-is.

 

Thanks all for the feedback, sounds like this newer generation does have an improvement in clarity.