I’ve spent the last 3 days trying to get an optimal setup to work for the HP Reverb G2. I’m not sure at this point if I have a defective G2 or this is just normal course for VR headsets. I just received this headset a couple days ago
Picture quality and performance compared to my wide screen gaming is day and night. (Day being my monitor which is spectacular)
Issue
Poor Frame rates
Slightly distorted colors
Blurry edges
Periodic black outs (There is a thread out for there for this already)
Wow, with those specs on your PC, you must be totally bummed out about your G2 Reverb ! I am understanding that a VR headset eats frame rates because it must effectively render the graphics on two screens (left and right eyes) as opposed to your single wide-screen monitor which is just a single screen. I am quite interested to see how this works out for you, as you have a 3090 card (top of the heap) and a fast CPU as well - so it’s mind-boggling that you are having these (disappointing) issues! Hopefully another Reverb owner may chime in and provide some guidance. best of luck!
I use a G2 on a 2070super, you have to reduce the settings considerably to get a smooth performance, but it great once dialed in.
What you’re describing is par for the course for VR headsets, you expect them to compare to a monitor for clarity. The sweet spot on the lenses for the headset will also mean that the edges of the display can seem blurry, the maint rick with VR (this gets learnt pretty quickly) is you move your head not your eyes.
I’m assuming this is your first foray into the world of VR? As long as you temper your expectations the immersion can be liberating. hope you find a way through it to enjoy it.
Surely the easy way to rule out the G2 is to try it in a game that is less ridiculously hard to run in VR?
even at 100%/100% MSFS isn’t as clear and sharp as eg IL2 because TAA tends to make things a bit blurry. If you have motion smoothing turned on that also adds another layer of blur in my experience.
Make sure you have set best experience in WMR settings so the system isn’t trying to scale things automatically for you and make sure you select custom render scale in the OXR app - again this avoids the system automatically scaling for you.
I can assure you, those issues are related to settings, just keep doing some tweaks. I have similar specs on the PC end, Core i9 9900KS, but I only have an EVGA RTX 2080 XC-Ultra to drive the HP Reverb Pro, and I’m getting great results. My only problem, that I develop motion sickness, and can’t tolerate to run the game in VR for longer than 20 minutes.
That’s easy to fix, just upgrade your body to a new vestibular system.
For real though, goes away for most people as long as you keep trying and stop at the first signs of feeling sick. Try getting some ginger chews as well, helped a friend of mine when he was trying to get VR legs.
Thanks so much, I’ll try that. BTW, the VR idea to play this version of FS, came from this forum, I was never interested to ever try any VR headset. The sim is so vastly different in 3D, it feels almost like the real deal. Not sure at all why you have issues running this thing with the RTX 3090, I don’t even think about upgrading from the 2080 XC, I’m getting good frame rates, and details are all set to high. I’m sure your storage is also up to par, I just transferred my system over to a 1TB 970 EVO Plus from an EVO 960 Pro SSD, and the game is installed on a 500 GB EVO 980 Pro. Due to the lousy garbage windows file system, I’m not noticing much difference.
Could you do me a favour whenever you get a chance and check what 100% manual resolution scale in the “OpenXR Developer tools for windows mixed reality” app results in for your G1? (if you are unfamiliar first go to the developer settings tab at the top - tick custom render scale, set 100%, close and re-open the app to make sure it’s taken and then under the system status tab look down a few lines to “view configuration” and you’ll see a View[0].recommendedImageRectWidth: XXXXxXXXX where the X’s will be the resolution per eye. The G1 needs to be connected when you do this.
I suspect that, as in steam, the G1 is running roughly half the total render resolution of the G2 and if so you will experience performance equivalent to someone choosing to run the G2 at ~50%… or on the other side of the same coin for you to have the same visual experience as someone running their G2 at 100% (small panel improvements aside) you would need to run at ~200%.
Blurry edges are due to optical G2 design. You can verify this even in the WMR cliff house. Sharp in the limited sweetspot, blurry outside.
Consider Valve Index: not as sharp in the centre, but not so blurry outside it.
However Cliff House is not the best to test this because it uses a form of VRSS which I believe is still active even when setting WMR settings to quality, and really visible in performance mode.
I honestly don’t think this is the same. When I had a G1 at 100% (same res as G2 at 50%) the image was about the same as the G2 at 100% which doesn’t look like a G1 at 200% supersampling. The reason in my opinion is simple: the G2 requires a higher resolution because of the optics which are deforming more and require therefore a higher pre-distortion thus, more pixels to compensate. Another factor could be the new anti-CA filter which requires more pixels to ensure a minimum of sub-pixel precision, but It would take comparing a G1 and a G2 to see whether this is actually the case.
Ah could well be, although the performance comparison still applies of course if that’s the case… just not the visual comparison. Whatever the reasoning for the difference between G1 and G2, someone with a G2 would have to run at around 50% (perhaps then also with significantly worse visual clarity) to achieve his performance levels at 100% which was the main point - explaining how even a 3090 can struggle with a G2 while his 2080 gives him performance he is happy with when using the G1.
I agree with you, which makes the G2 design and optics somewhat questionable for these reasons as well. I can’t help thinking, regardless of the hype buildup during the pre-order phase and the expectation it would be much better than the G1 or other headsets, that HP offering is not up to the expected level. I have no doubt anyone with no prior VR experience will find it fantastic, but when you’re used to other models and even the G1, I come to realizing the panel resolution is not enough and instead of partnering with Valve to get Index Audio in a HP headset, I would have much preferred partnering with HP to get G2 panels in an Index headset with a dual-element lens they know how to build.
I don’t know if this helps, I’m getting 3148X3084. Initially I didn’t have OpenXR installed, I just grabbed it after you posted this request. The sim was running fine with WMR only, I just changed a few settings in the sim, to bump up the details from medium to high, left everything else in default settings. If I did not encounter this forum, unlikely I would ever have taken up to include a VR headset. In fact, this was the only version of Microsoft FS (I purchased every version since the release of the one for Win 95), that compelled me to learn even the basics to fly. I completed all the flight trainings included here, and it will be un uphill battle to move forward, I’m not an aviator and will never be one, lol. Unfortunately for me, my condition with the motion sickness is worsening, turning into a vertigo. I won’t give up though, I will win this fight
Oh, and my version of reverb shows up as VR-1000, it’s the Professional release. It should be comparable to the G2, of what I’m reading.
Thanks for that - @CptLucky8 ain’t that interesting…
Do you have a link to exactly what you bought? Is it This? To my knowledge that is purely a G1 base which makes your result very interesting.
Are you using “best quality” in WMR settings? If you manually set 100% (giving 3k x 3k) does your performance tank which would suggest the resolution was being scaled automatically for you.
I believe it was this one (can’t remember the exact part number, to me there is G1 or G1 Pro which differs only by the materials used for the face mask and support handled by the HP Z team instead of the regular consumer team).
Rendering 3K x 3K takes more resources than rendering 2K x 2K, this is self evident. If the optics require you to rendering 3K x 3K in order to compensate for the necessary pre-distortion step, which is in fact warp distorting the image to compensate the lens deformation so that the image appears planar, then sure, the G2 because of its lenses is requiring more rendering resources for the same final image definition and details you’d get with a G1. I might be wrong in my logic and maybe the G1 was under-used at 2K x 2K but I doubt it.
I’ve played around with the settings and and I’ve got some recent results. Again this is nowhere close to the quality i’m used to seeing using my Monitor on Ultra specs.
However, this isn’t bad and there is definitely a sweet spot on the G2 lenses. here are the settings I am currently using
