I bought a Quest 2 a few months after launch, and thanks to my youtube channel I got a free Reverb G2 in order to make an ad.
The issue was that neither of those ever offered a fluid experience, it was full of stutters, it felt like 20fps all the time and I got seasick when turning my head around (I even saw black borders due to rendering not keeping up).
As a result I stopped using VR, as impressive as it was the experience was way to bad for my taste.
That is until yesterday. HOLY COW! I had completely forgotten about my G2 headset until I found it yesterday and said “wait a minute, will this work now that I get twice as much fps?”.
So I connected everything midflight over Shanghai, and I was absolutely in awe, everything went smooth, I even selected max rendering in the headset and 100% rendering (up from 80%) in the game and I still maintained what felt like +60fps over Shangai (Which is not a small city) with a visual clarity I had never experienced before.
I can tell you I won’t be flying without my headset anytime soon.
The only complain I have is that when I also put the graphics in ultra THEN fps start to go down slightly, so I need yet to find a good balance between graphics and render scaling.
Next I will try my Quest 2 and check how it looks in comparison now that everything works fine.
@BannanaSiblings
Ok guys I just tried the Quest 2 using Airlink (works much better than with cable, which lags):
Pros:
-The Quest 2 is SUPER smooth, way more than 60fps over Tokyo
-Everything looks good while flying GA planes, as long as you are relatively close to the thing you are looking at
-FOV is quite good and the sweet spot is large
Cons:
-The G2 is SO MUCH clearer, while looking in the distance it feels I have myopia with the Quest 2, maybe -1 or -2 myopia.
-It is hard to read instruments, with the G2 I can read almost everything, except maybe the central screens of the a320, but with the quest 2 instruments are readable but blurry in GA and many are unreadable in airliners
-The link does not allow to up my render scaling. I was trying to use 1.2 or 1.3 since it worked so well fps-wise, but the airlink crashed if I did, maybe it is not yet supported since it is in beta.
Overall the experience was excellent in both, I would say the G2 is better because of clarity (it is still not as real life though, there is a bit of blurryness still) but I would not pay the difference in price for such clarity unless you are mainly gonna use airliners.
Bur since most VR users are GA pilots I would say the Quest 2 is perfectly good and if you use the cable and can use 1.3 resolution the difference in visual quality won’t be that noticeable.
Super-useful review. This matches my own experience and that of many others I’ve read. Thanks for taking the time and effort to put this together so clearly and thoroughly.
You are welcome! A few months ago I was also looking for this info, so I figured I could just make the review in case someone needs it too in the future
I suggest trying 100% render scale and increasing supersampling resolution in your VR software beyond 150% with motion smooting activated and fixed to about 20fps.
It makes everything much sharper. Clouds, ground, instruments everything. At same time motion smoothing will keep it smooth and feel like 60 fps.
I am using 100% render scale and 100% res in my VR headset, honestly I doubt it can get clearer! Everything was SUPER sharp, only things a bit blurry were small objects in the distance, but that is o be expected from any headset, graphics were so good I could not stop looking at the engine in my BN2 Islander, it looked so real xD
EDIT: I try not to depend on motion smoothing too much because it causes some weird artifacts on straigh lines or when moving the camera around, it is difficult to explain, but it does not look as good to me.
I was doubting that too, but i have followed that suggestion and have tried it, realy i don’t regret. It is indeed much sharper, especially the bluriness in the distance significantly reduced. Also the clouds look sharper and way more defined. Ground textures also improved noticably. For me it was a difference like night and day. I was also using 100/100 before. How its like i have switched to next gen VR gear compared to my settings before.
The reason why it works is, because at rendering resolution > 100% in VR software, aggressive supersampling kicks in. Its being upscaled to higher resolution and sharpened with CAS filter. A complete postprocessing software solution, hence doesn’t cost as much performance as pushing render resolution in game beyond 100%, but has a very simmilar effect. However it may depend on the software used, at least steamVR is doing it very well.
Increasing from 100% to 150% drops my real framerate from minimum 33 down to 22 stable. However Motion Smoothing fixed below the minimum that you can achive without makes it absolutely smooth, and feels like 120fps. When configured properly it also doesn’t produce artifacts (bending, wobbling etc…)
Excellent review thanks!
So should I keep my Q2, or invest in the G2?
I’ve ordered the YAW2, so I’ll want the best visuals available to go with that motion simulator chair.
I would only consider upgrading to a G2 if you are going to use airliners, otherwise the increase in quality is noticeable, but not a game changer.
That being said, if you have the money to expend, go for the G2, a bit more uncomfortable since you have to be connected by cable, but the visual clarity is very welcome.
I’m interested in this also! It’s strange that you are able to run the G2 at 100% but not the Q2 at native. I run the Q2 at max resolution of 5472*2736 (I believe it shows as 1.5x but you have to be careful describing it as that because the 1.5x number changes depending on the refresh rate you select!) and 100 render scale in sim, a bit of blurriness/aliasing has come back since SU5 which makes it hard for me to read some of the text on the A320 PFD and wondering how much better the G2 is
