VR from competitive stand point

[Skyracer]

How good is pixels density in reverb g2? 4 years ago when i was choosing between VR and track ir it fell on that track ir has better pixel density. How is the situation today? Is it worth getting from a competitive stand point?

[The_Nephilim]

well I see your system specs may need an upgrade.. if that is your current rig forget it.. 

 

Pixel Density went up some since you last looked I am sure it is better then your 1024 x 768 monitor..

[winghunter]

Unless you have an Aero and the GPU to drive it at full resolution, you wont get enough pixels to spot aircraft from a distance.

On my reverb G2 I always fly with labels, otherwise its too hard to spot anything > 3 miles.

For realism, fun and immersion, you cant beat VR. I dont care about unrealistic competitions. If there were VR-only competitions then it would make more sense.

Edited March 29, 2022 by winghunter

[Skyracer]

9 hours ago, winghunter said:

Unless you have an Aero and the GPU to drive it at full resolution, you wont get enough pixels to spot aircraft from a distance.

On my reverb G2 I always fly with labels, otherwise its too hard to spot anything > 3 miles.

For realism, fun and immersion, you cant beat VR. I dont care about unrealistic competitions. If there were VR-only competitions then it would make more sense.

 

And your specs?

[winghunter]

RTX 3070, i7 10750

Edited March 29, 2022 by winghunter

[Mr_sukebe]

Agreed with the above.

I've only flown in VR for 5 years now and wouldn't go back.

However, there's no two ways about:

 - Aircraft IDing is MUCH easier on a monitor

 - Aircraft spotting at range is fine, but there's a weird crossover as you close in where (at least for me) the dot just disappears 

 - The FOV for my VR unit is like wearing a scuba mask and my seat is fixed, so I'm reliant on my rather ancient neck.  I simply can't turn it enough to keep track of another aircraft when I'm in a dogfight.  I've tried VRknecksaver, but couldn't get it to work in DCS (works fine the other WW2 sim)

In short, I'm just not able to be competitive in dogfights.  Having said that, I love flying in VR so much, I don't really care, I just avoid getting into a dogfight.

[DeltaMike]

With a G2, pixels per degree is about the same as a 640x480 monitor. Good news is you get a big fat pixel for distance spotting. Bad news is, aircraft are kind of a pixelated mess until you get close. 

I don't have the neck range of motion I used to, hard to keep track of the bad guy after the merge. But, you can't beat the situational awareness overall.  Especially at unusual attitudes. I don't see how you fly formation in flat screen.  Shoot, I don't know how you land in flat screen, although I did it for years (poorly) before VR came along.  Depending on the contest you might need to do either and you'll almost certainly want to keep track of your wingman if you can.

I haven't checked the f16 mfds in the G2 yet, I used to fly the f16 with rift s, it's doable with a little practice.  F18 mfds are fine.   

I'd say if you're sporting a G2 at native resolution and no anti aliasing VR has the potential to give you an edge.  Plan on a 3080 or better to do that.  

We had one guy flying track ir, I remember several times it spazzed out on him and he had to reboot it. Not good.  

We made it to the finals in satal most of us in VR.  

[Burt]

23 hours ago, Skyracer said:

And your specs?

Please don’t get upset but your specs will not run the G2 and be happy about it. 

[DeltaMike]

2 hours ago, Burt said:

Please don’t get upset but your specs will not run the G2 and be happy about it. 

Yeah. Trackclit and Snackview Pro is bare minimum imo

[JG27_Arklight]

On 3/29/2022 at 3:25 PM, DeltaMike said:

With a G2, pixels per degree is about the same as a 640x480 monitor. Good news is you get a big fat pixel for distance spotting. Bad news is, aircraft are kind of a pixelated mess until you get close. 

I don't have the neck range of motion I used to, hard to keep track of the bad guy after the merge. But, you can't beat the situational awareness overall.  Especially at unusual attitudes. I don't see how you fly formation in flat screen.  Shoot, I don't know how you land in flat screen, although I did it for years (poorly) before VR came along.  Depending on the contest you might need to do either and you'll almost certainly want to keep track of your wingman if you can.

I haven't checked the f16 mfds in the G2 yet, I used to fly the f16 with rift s, it's doable with a little practice.  F18 mfds are fine.   

I'd say if you're sporting a G2 at native resolution and no anti aliasing VR has the potential to give you an edge.  Plan on a 3080 or better to do that.  

We had one guy flying track ir, I remember several times it spazzed out on him and he had to reboot it. Not good.  

We made it to the finals in satal most of us in VR. 

 

 

What....?

 

I think you need to take a look at your res settings (or something else?) I own a G2 and it is nothing like what you described in your post. I have no issues reading text in cockpits or even spotting vehicles at a distance. Honestly not sure how you are seeing what you describe

What you describe reminds me of the DK2 lol

Edited March 30, 2022 by JG27_Arklight

[DeltaMike]

Spotting is excellent; a/c identification, not so much. Not likely to be a big issue in competition.  

Pixels-per-degree is a function of physical pixel count, size of the monitor and how close you are to it.  Even a 4k monitor is gonna look grainy at imax size, right on top of your eyeball. Your iPhone is 60ppd, G2 is 20.

[M1Combat]

1 hour ago, DeltaMike said:

Your iPhone is 60ppd, G2 is 20.

This means nothing without including the range at which these numbers are correct.  A G2 might be 42zillionppd if it's 8 miles from your face...  and an iphone could be 4ppd if you jam it in front of your eyeball...

[JG27_Arklight]

3 hours ago, DeltaMike said:

Spotting is excellent; a/c identification, not so much. Not likely to be a big issue in competition.  

Pixels-per-degree is a function of physical pixel count, size of the monitor and how close you are to it.  Even a 4k monitor is gonna look grainy at imax size, right on top of your eyeball. Your iPhone is 60ppd, G2 is 20.

 

 

It depends what VR PPD chart you use since most of them are off a little (quite a few of them only use HR/DF and don't take other factors into account, which is a little simplistic, tbh). Having said that, for sure 4K is a lot better visually than VR with regards to what you "see", but that quickly fades once the sense of space/depth takes over and immersion is greatly increased. Pick your poison!

One this is for sure, it sure is tough for me to use TrackIR after flying with a the G2 and even Rift S. 

[Mr_sukebe]

3 hours ago, DeltaMike said:

Spotting is excellent; a/c identification, not so much. Not likely to be a big issue in competition...

 

I'm curious, have you tried PvP dogfighting in VR?

[DeltaMike]

18 hours ago, M1Combat said:

This means nothing without including the range at which these numbers are correct.  A G2 might be 42zillionppd if it's 8 miles from your face...  and an iphone could be 4ppd if you jam it in front of your eyeball...

PPD accounts for that. Pixels per degree.  

[DeltaMike]

16 hours ago, Mr_sukebe said:

 

I'm curious, have you tried PvP dogfighting in VR?

That's the only way I've ever done it. 

I came along when the ldo response would have been "VR is fun and all but you must have trackIR for competition." 

Even so, the majority on our SATAL team flew Rift S, we made it to the finals and at the end of the season two of our team members were picked up by arguably one of the best teams out there.  

Mid season we transitioned from F15 to F16.  Displays were harder to read but the game was still playable. In competition there's seldom any difficulty sorting targets. I only got team-killed once, in practice

Comparing G2 with Rift S, spotting is an order of magnitude better and I'd bet money it's easier than with a 4k monitor.  With caveats: full res and no msaa (or FXAA).  Harder than it sounds, you'll need a 3080 at least.  

Displays just are what they are, they aren't rendered at particularly high res to begin with

I don't think VR can be beat as an SA tool, and imo that counts in competition

Edited April 1, 2022 by DeltaMike

[Mr_sukebe]

47 minutes ago, DeltaMike said:

That's the only way I've ever done it. 

I came along when the ldo response would have been "VR is fun and all but you must have trackIR for competition." 

Even so, the majority on our SATAL team flew Rift S, we made it to the finals and at the end of the season two of our team members were picked up by arguably one of the best teams out there.  

Mid season we transitioned from F15 to F16.  Displays were harder to read but the game was still playable. In competition there's seldom any difficulty sorting targets. I only got team-killed once, in practice

Comparing G2 with Rift S, spotting is an order of magnitude better and I'd bet money it's easier than with a 4k monitor.  With caveats: full res and no msaa (or FXAA).  Harder than it sounds, you'll need a 3080 at least.  

Displays just are what they are, they aren't rendered at particularly high res to begin with

I don't think VR can be beat as an SA tool, and imo that counts in competition

 

 

Love it!

[Burt]

I believe if you run high performance in WMR you will get alittle more clarity in the cockpit / viper /Tomcat. I tried it and It works. But I’m sure there’s a lose somewhere else that I didn’t dig into. I went back to the quality setting.

Edited April 1, 2022 by Burt

[Strong05]

20 minutes ago, Burt said:

I believe if you run high performance in WMR you will get alittle more clarity in the cockpit / viper /Tomcat. I tried it and It works. But I’m sure there’s a lose somewhere else that I didn’t dig into. I went back to the quality setting.

 

It's the opposite.  If you select high performance WMR automatically reduces the resolution and upscales to increase frame rate.  If you want the best clarity you have to select the high quality settings.  With the performance setting everything looks like it did with the OG Vive or Rift. 

[Burt]

Gotcha but I remember in cockpit the dials and gauges/ prints were just alittle more crisp…just alittle.

Edited April 1, 2022 by Burt

[DeltaMike]

I dont know about WMR but some of the scaling mods include a sharpening filter which helps text legibility. In my testing a modest amount of scaling, say with a Scale factor of 0.77 doesn't hurt spotting distance to a measurable extent. 

Using mods in competition runs the risk of being accused of cheating, justly or not. 

Good news is, you can't spend your way into the finals.  A dude with a single monitor and home made track IR can dominate if he puts in the study and practice.  Dude with a 3090 and a Pimax will get his fanny handed to him if he doesn't understand geometry and tactics, and doesn't know what his wingman's gonna do before the wingman himself knows it

[M1Combat]

On 4/1/2022 at 5:50 AM, DeltaMike said:

PPD accounts for that. Pixels per degree.  

I know what PPD stands for.  No it doesn't.  That's like saying a miliradian or Minute of angle is the same measured distance no matter how far from your scope you're measuring it.

 

 

Take a one degree arc...  how many pixels fit within that distance when the pixels are 1' away from the origin.  Now how many at 100'?  It's a different number.

[DeltaMike]

^Yes.  That and a couple bucks will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

To the extent we are agreeing that any VR headset short of the XTAL has lousy PPD, it's all good.  

Interesting discussion here with some slightly different calculations that make that old 640x480 monitor look like a champ compared with a Reverb G2.  Of course when we gush about how sharp our reverb looks, we are comparing it to our old Rift headsets, not our 4K TV, much less our 4K monitor (for the reasons you describe).  

Which is fine.  I don't spend a ton of time perusing the pancake-style sections of this forum, but it appears there is a vigorous discussion about spotting distance as a function of monitor resolution, with the people sporting 4K monitors complaining that it's more difficult to spot than with a 1080 monitor. 

As an object gets farther and farther away, it is rendered as a smaller and smaller model, until after a point it is rendered as a single pixel.  The easier it is to pick out a single pixel in your monitor, the easier it is to spot something 20 miles away.  In my experience, the G2 does a fine job of that.

When the object is first displayed as a polygon, for reasons I don't fully understand, it's hard to get the pixel colors just right.  The object tends to blend into the background.  So, first you see it, then you don't, then you see it again.  As you get closer, once you can actually see the polygon, how pixelated it appears does depend in part on PPD (examples here).  

So we could say that, these days anyway, spotting distance is OK in VR (haven't directly compared it to 1080, guess I should get on that) but still gripe that aircraft identification is a pain in the rear end (for example).  With the next question being, does it matter in competition?  I think probably not, as I mentioned at least in my experience getting stuff sorted isn't the biggest challenge, depends on what you're flying I guess.   So in other words I haven't heard of a competition where you actually had to VID the bandit before you started spamming missiles, quite the opposite usually.  I've been in training scenarios where VID was part of the game, but not in competition.  

Feel free to take this with a grain of salt, I'm pretty lousy at competition, I'm just saying I lived through this debate in real time and in the Rift S days it came down to "I like VR so that's what I'm gonna use" and it didn't seem to hurt the dudes who had real talent.   The real game changer was datalink, which is why I mentioned the F16 displays.  They can be a bit hard to read in VR.  Haven't had a chance to check it out with my G2 yet, guess I should get on that, too.  Regardless, a top notch Viper pilot with a functioning Track-IR setup might want to try before he buys.  In the Hornet, eh pick your poison.  I'm pretty sure the same amount of information is on your displays, just a question of how pretty it is, and whether you can or should "pretty it up."  

Edited April 3, 2022 by DeltaMike

[Voyager]

On 4/2/2022 at 6:05 PM, M1Combat said:

I know what PPD stands for.  No it doesn't.  That's like saying a miliradian or Minute of angle is the same measured distance no matter how far from your scope you're measuring it.

 

 

Take a one degree arc...  how many pixels fit within that distance when the pixels are 1' away from the origin.  Now how many at 100'?  It's a different number.

The HP Reverb is 20ppd and known because the screen has a relatively fixed distance from your face. 

A 4K display, at a distance equal to its diagonal, has a 60ppd resolution. That was their design viewing distance, as the human eye peaks around 60ppd.

Basically that means a 27" 4k monitor will have a 60ppd at the typical 27" ( little bit longer than arms length) placement. Closer it will have less effective pixel angle density, further, more. 

Also, individual peak resolvable resolution changes from person to person, depending on your eyes and vision correction. 

Using that conversion, a G2 is more the equivalent of a 1280x720p monitor. Certainly not as good as a 4k monitor, but definitely better than a 640x480.

That said, once headsets hit 30ppd, we'll be at around 1080p performance, which should be about the point where they become equally capable. 

Given 4k can already meet human vision limits, I don't expect 8k to provide any meaningful advantage. Sim developers may even have to start implementing stuff like airy disk emulation and atmospheric attenuation at that point. 

[DeltaMike]

3 hours ago, Voyager said:

The HP Reverb is 20ppd and known because the screen has a relatively fixed distance from your face. 

 

Sort of.   Easier to just use FOV I think