*** HP Reverb G2 Owners Thread ***

Glad you're all getting them! Nothing with mine yet but that was mostly expected from having ordered August 1st. Hopefully in the next week or so we'll see some more coming out :D

Nice to see some first thoughts on the unit! Very exciting now.
 
I will not try to go over ground that's already been covered - but will do a few 'Me too's' so that people know this is something to look out for.

So you know, I'm coming from an OG quest, and rocking a FE RTX 3080, with an i9-9900k @ 5ghz. I'm using a PCI-E USB C for the headset too.

Absolute first impression was - dang, this is light! Seems to be very well made and very comfy on the head/face with a good 'no light bleed' fit. Setup was a little interesting at times - and like another poster, the headset wasn't registering with the PC - it was the headset end of the cable that was loose. I through I'd given it a push to a 'I don't want to break this' level, but it seems like it needed more.

It finally went into place, and set up was a breeze after that.

As others have said, it does ask you to wait for a download to complete - and that stops for an eternity at several points that gave me cause for concern - but it completed fine. At this point, you should reboot. It didn't ask me to, and I was getting some horrible performance in the headset - it seems that it was waiting for a reboot which fixed the performance in the headset. You may not need to, it'll depend on if you had that software installed or not.

Next milestone impression when powering it on for the first time was the FOV - was a bit disappointed with that - even with the IPD wide open, it's not as good as MRTV suggests - and definitely comparable with my OG quest without doing anything scientific to check.

But then the clarity hit me full in the face - and the brightness and such rich colours! It truly does look amazing. I powered up Half Life Alyx and was blown away with how good it looks. I will say that if you move your eyes around the edges look blurry, but I need to check my settings before calling that a problem.

After being stunned by the visuals, I was annoyed by the haptic feedback. It sounded like I was trying to strangle a duck - and for the amount of annoying noise it made, it still felt very weak. Will need to turn that off - definitely a mark down for the controllers.

Speaking of which - they are 'fine', I prefer the Quest ergonomics, but they will do - I may just need to get used to them. Tracking is not great when you're testing to see how it works, but I've not actually noticed a problem in gameplay yet - still early days though. Sound is fantastic too - Way better than the headphones I used on the Quest, they certainly don't disappoint.

I will add any additional findings that I think are pertinent whist I get used to it.
 
In future you can report your post to ping it up to a mod :)
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First thing I tried - just got a Javascript error. On-topic though, I am struggling a bit more with tracking with Population one. my left hand won't stay on the foregrip of a two handed weapon as it loses tracking so much - and the angle of the grips - if I hold my gun the way I would with the Quest, the gun in POP One is pointing at the ground. I hope there is a setting to change the grip angle or it's going to make aiming a little iffy (not that it was great before).
 
No. I think that there are issues that I've not experienced with the OG quest that make it difficult in some games. HL Alyx seems to be fine, whereas Pop One has issues - also Space Pirate trainer was harder to drag the shield from behind the shoulder. I also noticed navigating in the Mixed Reality portal, the pointer was offset from the controller a lot. The other issue that's causing me problems, is the angle of the controllers are not great when holding a gun naturally. The in game gun seems to be pointing downwards to much. In Space Pirate Trainer, you can adjust the angle - but even then, not enough to make it intuitive for me at least - but that's not a tracking issue - that's a deign issue.

I would say that at this early stage - I think the issue isn't so much tracking - it's the reduced tracking volume that's causing most of these issues - with a small dollop of occlusion to make it feel worse at times.
 
Got mine today and have been toying about trying to get steam vr games going.

word from the newly wise. If you’re new to vr like me. Do. Not. Play. Dirt rally 2. First.
You’re welcome. Got out and just about held onto diner!

will need to make sure I’ve got everything setup right as I’ve no frame of reference for what’s ‘good’ performance. 2070s seemed to be holding up ok.

but my oh my does it put you into games. Loaded up squadrons for a quick go, completely forgetting the bindings I made and you can just sit in those cockpits admiring the 3Dness of it all.
Shame the controllers don’t work in game as Hotas useless for navigating menus.

typpng this on a phone now and my brain half things I’m still in the wmr.

if anyone has must dos etc please post here. That video for instance seemed to show steam wmr running at way too high a res. Annoyingly can’t manually set to the correct pixel density though
 
Another G2/Q2 video from MRTV. My take-home: encoding overhead of Q2 over G2 does not vary from game to game so do G2 vs Q2 visuals (encoding artefacts); 2070 is probably as low as one would comfortably go to drive a G2.
In another YouTube video No man's sky was running below 90 fps on a G2 with 3090. The GPU to completely tame this G2 beast has not yet been invented. I guess I am getting scalped again in 2 years time :D
 
Washout said:
will need to make sure I’ve got everything setup right as I’ve no frame of reference for what’s ‘good’ performance. 2070s seemed to be holding up ok.
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I massively recommend picking up fpsVR, it (among other things) gives you an in game overlay that displays various metrics like frame rate, GPU/CPU load etc and is extremely handy when dialling in settings.

I’m having serious performance issues with my 2070S in some of the games I’ve tried, despite lowering the steam render resolution... both project cars and AMS 2 (both use the same engine) are running very poorly despite dropping settings down. Odd given the quest was trying to render at a similar resolution to the current 50% setting in steam, and I had no such performance issues there. Something very odd going on! I see the latest Nvidia drivers have some VR issues, may need to try rolling back.

Half-life Alyx conversely runs beautifully (and wow is it good looking in this headset)... had a brief go with Onward which seemed to run ok too.

While I think there is definitely something fishy going on with my performance in some games, my big takeaway so far is that the 2070S is barely (and arguably not actually) sufficient.

if anyone has must dos etc please post here. That video for instance seemed to show steam wmr running at way too high a res. Annoyingly can’t manually set to the correct pixel density though
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There is a lot of misunderstanding around what a headset “should” be rendering at. ( @zero71 your guy in the video too) The 100% steam target is NEVER the native resolution and is usually approximately 1.4x the panel resolution. For example the Valve index has a per-eye resolution of 1440×1600. Setting the render resolution to 100% results in 2016×2440 in steam (the typical 1.4x panel res, same as the G2 is doing at 100%). EDIT - just to clarify I am on the steamVR beta which is correctly targeting just over 3k x 3k, I believe the non beta may have been targeting over 4x?

The problem here of course is that the G2 is so high res that the extra 40% in this case takes you over 3k x 3k per eye which is an insane rendering load. That extra resolution is however theoretically needed due to how rendering in VR works, and allows things like barrel distortion correction - as such it needs a higher number of pixels to sample from before outputting the distortion corrected 2160x2160 frame to the headset. Were you to render at anything below that target, after applying lens distortion corrections you’d actually be undersampling... which is fine of course, you can absolutely do that, but you aren’t then actually using your headset to the maximum. So anyone telling you that you should set it as close to 2160x2160 as you can doesn’t understand how it actually works. The nice thing is the G2 is sufficiently high res that you can get away with doing it and still have a great picture, just not quite as great as it would be at 100%. I noticed fine details such as small text on books in the steam home for example becomes significantly harder to read below around 80%.

if anyone is interested further in what is holding and why the target is higher than most seem to think it should be, this video is quite good despite its age https://youtu.be/B7qrgrrHry0

The best course of action is actually to leave it at 100% in global if you can (although depending on your GPU you masy need to drop to eg 80% just for steam home to run well) and then set per application targets as needed - some games aren’t very demanding and you can probably leave close to 100%, while others may need a substantial drop. Be mindful when you use both as they affect each other (eg if you set 60% global, per app will use that 60% as it’s 100% baseline).

If a particular game is proving challenging, you may be better served by forcing motion smoothing permanently on (again, do it on per app settings) where it will target 45fps and supply an interpolated frame every other frame giving you an effective 90fps albeit sometimes with some light artefacting. Do make sure you are easily hitting the 45fps though as you don’t want to dip below it. For example in my struggles with AMS2 this evening, for whatever reason is causing it I only seem to be able to get 58-64fps which gave a very choppy experience. By forcing on motion smoothing I got a very playable and much smoother experience, despite technically running at lower frame rate. Different games will be more or less suited to using reprojection, but I find driving games and flying games to generally be ok.

_VWV_ said:
So, do I get it right that tracking is a pass in games if you don't try to break it?
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Limited test of course, but just played an hour or so of Alyx, no tracking issues whatsoever and actually throwing objects probably better than my quest was.
 
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Finally managed to get through the troubleshooting phase last night, in total spent about 4 hours with the headset and had a few issues, i am sure the latter issues may be due to lack of knowledge on my part anf hopefully one of you can advise.

First off i met the infamous 7-14 error (using an MSI X570-A Pro motherboard) but i got around this buy using the USB C-A adaptor and plugging into the front port. This is odd that no other USB C or A ports work, only if i use the adapotor in that specific port.

Once i passed this i faced error 7-7 i believe, but not sure what i did to pass this, i think i may have just reset everything when i was doing some cable management.

Finally i was in WMR portal, which is awful by the way and this is where the issue are most likely in my part. Accessing games is a bit clunky. I hoped to be able to put the headset on and navigate through SteamVR Home but I have to directly access a game on desktop then put on the headset. If i go through SteamVR it is extremely laggy and doesn't seem to work.

I tried 4 games and had issues with each, first there was no sound at all, i went into some settings via the WMR portal and set it so that sound was not mirrored on the TV, this seemed to be the thing that did the trick as now works fine.

I tried Hellsplit Arena, this to me is unplayable, not performance wise but due to the fact you have to click grip to let go, not sure how to fix this so that to drop you simply release grip?

Half Life Alyx worked just fine no issues, and so did Boneworks and Saints and Sinners (although on played each very briefly) however there was an occasional issue when in the menu where vision just started to spin and the controllers just didn't respond

One last issue which is very immersion breaking is the haptic feedback of the controllers, it just does not stop, when your in game hands touch anything it's buzzing away, i'd rather just turn it off all together.

Overall i knew there would likely be issues, am i dissapointed? Yes and no, but i know it will improve when i get to grips with it, when some updates are rolled out and when my prescription lenses arrives so i can see it at its best
 
So far from your guys early reviews I'm getting ,
Tracking, ok depends on the game,
Controllers, a bit pants,
Visuals great but fov a bit of a let down,
Support for some AMD mobos is not great,
Ideally need a 4000 series card in a few years to get the most out of it,
Hopefully nvidia and amd can bring in some dlss or something to help before then,
 
JackAlias said:
Finally i was in WMR portal, which is awful by the way and this is where the issue are most likely in my part. Accessing games is a bit clunky. I hoped to be able to put the headset on and navigate through SteamVR Home but I have to directly access a game on desktop then put on the headset. If i go through SteamVR it is extremely laggy and doesn't seem to work.
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What GPU? Steam home is actually fairly demanding at full resolution, try turning down the global supersampling if it is choppy. You don’t need to be wearing the headset to do this - just go to settings on the steamVR widget. Also try the SteamVR beta channel.


Half Life Alyx worked just fine no issues, and so did Boneworks and Saints and Sinners (although on played each very briefly) however there was an occasional issue when in the menu where vision just started to spin and the controllers just didn't respond
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Sounds like your USB connection is barely compatible. Do you have a hub you could try? Apparently PCIe innatek card is the best interim solution, but there are generally some issues with USB on x570 boards that it seems are being worked on (potentially related to incompatibility with pcie 4.0) that aren’t limited to HP.

One last issue which is very immersion breaking is the haptic feedback of the controllers, it just does not stop, when your in game hands touch anything it's buzzing away, i'd rather just turn it off all together.
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Yeah they suck. I found this re turning it off but haven’t tried yet. https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
 
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Zeeflyboy said:
What GPU? Steam home is actually fairly demanding at full resolution, try turning down the global supersampling if it is choppy. You don’t need to be wearing the headset to do this - just go to settings on the steamVR widget. Also try the SteamVR beta channel.




Sounds like your USB connection is barely compatible. Do you have a hub you could try? Apparently PCIe innatek card is the best interim solution, but there are generally some issues with USB on x570 boards that it seems are being worked on (potentially related to incompatibility with pcie 4.0) that aren’t limited to HP.



Yeah they suck. I found this re turning it off but haven’t tried yet. https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
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Thanks for the advice, i'll have a look into this later on and see what i can do. Hopefully some of the issues are fixed via updates in the near future. I'm ok personally with a short wait since i am waiting for my prescription lenses anyway.
 
Just-Dave said:
So far from your guys early reviews I'm getting ,
Tracking, ok depends on the game,
Controllers, a bit pants,
Visuals great but fov a bit of a let down,
Support for some AMD mobos is not great,
Ideally need a 4000 series card in a few years to get the most out of it,
Hopefully nvidia and amd can bring in some dlss or something to help before then,
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- Personally I've not yet had any tracking issues, but it's early days so not willing to state that one categorically yet
- Controllers are nice to hold and use imo, but the lack of capacitive touch at least on the thumbstick and upper buttons is a shame. It's not really needed on the trigger and grip due to the analogue buttons.
- FoV I find it fine - it feels slightly larger than my original Quest did... I think what may be happening is that the facial interface is firstly a little thick (not the padding, but the plastic part itself could be just a touch slimmer) which leaves some FoV on the table (not much, but some) but more importantly it's not massively wide. If you have a wider face it will make the headset sit further off than it should, and you get more "looking through binocular" type vision. If I take a moment to properly seat the headset by pressing it firmly against my face it helps.... A wider and thinner facial interface from a third party would probably help if you are someone that suffers from poor FoV in this headset.
- I had problems with my X570 but they were resolvable in my case
- 3080/3090 will do an excellent job from what I've seen, but yeah 4000 series would certainly not be wasted. This headset can really do with as much GPU grunt as you can throw at it. DLSS 2.1 for VR could be very interesting if anyone actually bothers to use it.
 
Well I've just made an impulse purchase of one of these from the members market.

Never tried VR before. No idea where to start with it all. Gutted I didn't pick up Half Life Alyx now in the steam sales, doh!
 
It's interesting that tracking appears to have issues in selected games. Perhaps this is indeed software-related, so potentially is fixable. In general, I am really hoping MS will give some love to WMR. They did an update improving visuals on G2, which is nice. Now they need to get on with tracking. Game devs should also try to improve tracking, taking inspiration from the likes of HL ALyx.
 
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