First VR flights with the G2

[HugeMercury163]

OK so I got the Reverb G2 yesterday and spent most of the afternoon flapping about getting it set up. Then today I got it working on MSFS…wow!

My rig:

ASRock Phantom Gaming 4 X570 motherboard.
Ryzen 5600XT
Radeon RX 6800 XT
32GB 3200 RAM
Corsair RM 850X 850 watt Gold PSU

As you can see from my rig I have two potential hardware snags (the GPU which can causes crashes for some in VR and the mobo chipset and its iffy USB for MSFS using G2 headsets).

The first flights yesaterday showed that up, as I was getting maybe two minutes of WOW! and then the sound would quit on the G2, then black screen, then a freeze of the game, after which it would fix itself and come back on, after showing me my volume level in the headset. Rinse and repeat, every minute or two, but no CTD.

Mmm. I had tried a few different USB sockets both on the front panel and the rear and the front panel seemed to connect best. All other games worked fine, Half Life Alyx was just awesome (love the pigeon, lol).

Today I decided to try using the USB C connection on the Radeon GPU rather than the adaptor and bang, everything worked fine. My settings need some fine tuning, but I have just flown the Spitfire up and down the coast near Dover with not a hitch. Man, what a blast that was!

I also flew the Pitts all over the place around my home town and apart from a lack of smoothness due to a need for setting up things better, no problems, touch wood. Sound was perfect, no glitches or freezes at all.

If anyone else has the same GPU/CPU combo or at least close could you share your settings please so I have a starting point. I was using a mix of mostly high and a few ultra settings today and getting 27-30 FPS in the Spitfire cockpit. Render scaling in game was set to 80 and I manually set the Steam VR settings to aprox 2100 per eye (you can’t get the slider to get it spot on).

Just used Windows mixed reality today as I keep losing the OpenXR panel so couldn’t start it first.

Cheers all.

[Gsx31]

Comme un autre ami il y quelques minutes, je vais t’orienter vers ce sujet, pour éviter un 7ième sujet sur les crash avec le Reberv G2

MSFS 2020 virtual reality crash - HP Reverb G2

Look towards the end, I just found a solution, but there are several.

I have an AMD X570 RX 6800 XT Ryzen 5 3600 platform

[HugeMercury163]

Merci.

[Gsx31]

Translation problem, I just saw that you didn’t have CTD problems, but sound problems.
There has just been a firmware update, to resolve this issue.
New HP Reverb G2 firmware released

For OpenXR that closes, someone else had the same problem, and from memory, the only solution would be a reinstallation of Windows might solve it. I didn’t have the case, so I didn’t look.
Still, performance with OpenXR would be extra to SteamVR.

I was thinking of changing my Ryzen 5 3600 to the 5600X, we will have to compare our performance on the same flight with the same settings, to know if the price is worth it.

[HugeMercury163]

Sound problems complete resolved by using the USB C port on my graphics card.

Been flying all day in GA aircraft, mostly the Spitfire. Not a crash or a pause at all. Not as sharp as I’d hoped, but as I wear multi-focus glasses, I’m used to swivelling my head all day long to maintain a sweet spot, so that’s not such an issue for me. I will buy some prescription inserts for the G2 though as my glasses keep getting smudged putting the headset on and off.

[Gsx31]

I just flew over London with the Spitfire, with a few clouds at noon, I’m at 30 FPS at 2000 ft
OpenXR 100% and these settings in the game. I spent 15 days with CTDs, so I didn’t look into the settings. But I find that the image is sharp enough for VR, knowing that I have just spent 5 years with the Oculus CV1. I read here that the G2 would have been designed for people over 40 with persby

[HugeMercury163]

@Gsx31

persby

Yep, you mean presbyopia, the gradual inability to adjust focus from far to near, otherwise called adaptivity. I have it as I’m 68.

When I fly r/c model planes I use Fatshark head-tracking goggles to see through the video camera on the model and I have prescription inserts for them, they even have the TV receiver built in along with the antennas. TMy Fatshark goggles use a much smaller LCD panels than the G2 but are way sharper overall. The screen may only be 800*600 but there is no sweet spot, it’s all pretty much crystal clear.

I think the eyepieces on the current crop of VR headsets are all total rubbish, disgracefully bad. They should have reached out to Nikon or Zeiss to come up with a wide angle, all glass alternative. There’s simply no way these high res panels should look like they do, they should be as sharp as a 4K monitor. Nikon, Canon and Sony mirrorless DSLR cameras have far, far better viewfinders, crystal clear from edge to edge and they use high res panels that are far smaller.

It’s a disgrace. I fact I shall see if I can replace the lenses in my G2 with commercial wide angle telescope eyepieces that will work better.

[LoeweStaub8533]

It sounds like you are not quite familiar with the challenges of High Field of View headsets. How is the FOV of a camera viewfinder? Way less than with a HMD I would assume. Changing the lenses of your G2 would simply not work. There’s a huge software part in getting the image ready for your eyes.

[Gsx31]

@HugeMercury163

Yep, you mean presbyopia

Yes, bad copy and paste from my smartphone.
I’m 52, and had to get my first presbyopia glasses in 2016, but I never wear them, or only if I really need them. So my brain is always forced and trained to adjust the focus from far to near. Within a certain limit of course.

I have a few years of RC behind me, but on cars, at one time I wanted to get into the helicopter, I bought myself a model whose name escapes me, with a 120cm rotor. I would have dreamed of piloting it with glasses like yours. But I was afraid of killing myself, or of killing someone if I ever lost control. Suddenly, it remained on a shelf, collecting dust, until the day I sold it.

In my opinion, this bad experience that you have with the G2, is due to the fact that you go through the SteamVR runtime. Someone on the forum had the same problem with OpenXR developer, which was shutting down on its own. He couldn’t run VR in his G2. I gave him a try with SteamVR, but he found the picture quality degraded.
I tried to force steamvr_win64.json, and the performance are really bad, but it works !

Another topic on the difference in quality between SteamVR and OpenXR

[HugeMercury163]

No I made sure in the registry that I am running OpenXR. I think my main problem is I’m new to VR headsets and was expecting something like my experience with model plane FPV goggles and DJI drone headsets which are different (but 2D not 3D).

I will also order some corrective lens inserts for my old eyes, as my glasses keep fogging up or getting smeared. But I have been getting much better at nailing the sweet spot as I look around and I am very careful when positioning the headset to get the best possible clarity.

Meh, whatever, today I had a lot of fun flying the Spitfire and other GA aircraft in various places. The Spitfire in the Alps near Innsbruck, with snow everywhere and fluffy clouds on ultra was simply beautiful, I was in heaven, pulling every stunt and maneuver I know. I was IN that plane!

I even leaned out of the cockpit to slap the side of the cockpit and of course it wasn’t there.

Sadly I have been having some crashes to desktop though, so that’s a pain in the butt.

[Gsx31]

You should have bought a used Oculus CV1 for a few months, so you would have appreciated the quality of the G2. Although I liked my little CV1 even if it has 2 times less resolution, its amoled panels are superior to oled panels.

After, as you say, the immersion with a VR headset, no matter the quality, will never be equaled, even by the most beautiful 4K flat screen. We are immersed in the game.

For the feedback on the desktop, unfortunately, we are all affected, or at least, there are many of us. For my part, I have greatly improved things by installing the English language pack (US) I still have more. The other day with the Spitfire in London, I had CTDs between 2 minutes and 15 minutes. I tried with another plane, I saw it fly 45 minutes in the same place before the CTD.

These CTDs have many causes and just as many solutions. Yesterday I tried uninstalling all of the Microsoft Visual C ++ and reinstalling only the latest one, but got a CTD over England after 40 minutes. It could come from a mod, plane, landscape, or whatever, but also a bug on an area on the game map. I have a very long list of all the items to check. I test them one by one. But in the end, I’m sure I would still have CTDs, because whatever one update fixes on one side, it will create another problem elsewhere. In my opinion, it is still a very long time before everything is corrected.

[BufordTX]

VR lenses are all cheap plastic, because it can be injection molded.

Fluorite or optical glass would have to be ground, and this would really ramp up the cost.

They try to correct for awful distrotion and chromatic aberration in software, which a camera can’t do…except with LR in post. The latest WMR update changed the correction math and improved the G2.

[Ianrivsmith]

@BufordTX

The latest WMR update changed the correction math and improved the G2.

Yes. At first I thought it was clearer due to the new msfs update. Then I realised the WMR drivers had been updated. With the last windows update. The difference is night and day.