*** HP Reverb G2 Owners Thread ***

Twinz said:
I hope the 3080 can handle some AA with the G2's resolution after the software gets sorted.

I'm running a G1 with a 1080 Ti. (Same resolution as G2) AMS2/PC2 looks plain but sharp with 136% SS, no AA and low-ish settings. (And it holds 90fps for clear weather day races) I want a 3080 so that I can run some shadows, grass, and AA while still holding 90fps.

The grass is a small thing, detailed shadows helps with immersion, and AA is the main thing I want to get out of a GPU upgrade. Maybe stay close to 90fps when it rains. I don't expect to be able to max everything out, but i want noticeably better visuals than my 1080 Ti offers, or there's not much point in a GPU upgrade for me.
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I dont know if the G1 slider is the same as the G2 in steam, i have mine at 100% which is 3160x 3092, not owning a G1 im unable to comment on any direct comparisons between the two,
Im the type of person who does not mind tinkering with setting all day long lol,
Im just finding what works for me and taking other peoples findings on board as well, plus gaining knowledge
I was pleasantly surprised with how good games still look turning off AA,
Elite dangerous for example i though would look a mess, it was quite the opposite,
But the higher the resolution you go the less AA you need, that is true even on a standard monitor i believe,
You would think the G1 and G2 would be the same settings, well i would anyway, but im guessing setup is very different, maybe
 
Best little widget in my opinion is fpsVR, think it costs a couple of quid.

You can choose to attach the overlay in various places, I like to attach it to the HMD while dialling in the settings on seated games. You can adjust how much info is shown but one thing I really like is it actually shows you clearly the highest loaded thread on your CPU as well as the overall usage.

loads of settings to play around with, and even gives you a clock so you don’t lose track of time while you’re endlessly tweaking settings lol.
 
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Zeeflyboy said:
I’ve found 76% (on the steam VR beta) to be a good global setting on the 2070S... you can of course tweak per game settings from there for more or less demanding games.

You can install the openXR for wmr app from the windows store, not sure if any games are using it yet. It’s more of a benefit to developers than a performance win, it just allows their games to be largely hardware agnostic. I suppose the advantage for users is that as more games deploy openXR you can potentially drop steamVR runtime and play them on the WMR app natively, potentially removing a performance overhead from having to have both applications running.

OpenXR does have an even further step of reprojection though where it can do 1 in 3, so 30fps interpolated to 90 but I have no idea how well that works. I suspect we might find out when some of us plebs with last gen cards try to run MSFS2020 in VR lol.
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All noted, thanks. Handy that you are running the same GPU as me and will have a go with 76 as my starting point. Are you finding that most games need dropping low in visuals and no AA or are you able to step them up a bit? I literally just used the in-games presets 'VR' for DCS which I think is running 2xMSAA but most things are low. It's all playable but I'm sure the uplift to 3080 must give some flexibility for some epic visuals.
 
@BluecatR AA is proving a killer, I need it low or off in AMS and ACC and most other settings have to be pretty low.

Reprojection works well in AMS for me which allowed me to put back some AA, I think the key is making sure you can hit around 60fps despite the nominal 45fps for reprojection and then reprojection does a decent job. in AMS I've more or less settled at a mix of medium and low settings, except for textures which are high.

I also find forcing reprojection in eg AMS2 to have some weird issues in my case, pushing down framerates well below 45 with lower GPU usage, If I leave it on auto it seems to work much better and just tweak the settings so it permanently stays there rather than jumping over 90 and switching on/off.

ACC is looking a bit crap to be honest. It's possible to get it running with some AA but it's blurry because you can't push the resolution up high enough to compensate for whatever it is their issues with anti aliasing in VR is. Turn off AA and performance is great, everything is pin sharp but the jaggies are extremely noticeable, again probably because you can't push the resolution up high enough to super sample. I need to do some more experimenting with reprojection in ACC and see if I can get everythign to a position I'm happy with.

RF2 will run and look great at the 76%, holding a solid 90fps so far and around 90% GPU usage. They have some awesome driving GTE and GT3 cars so well worth a look if you haven't already... the newer cars like the GT's look fantastic with PBR materials etc, and the newer tracks look pretty decent too.... all helped by the fact you can run it at both high resolution and high framerates, it actually ends up being more visually pleasing in many ways despite the aging engine.

The G2 is definitely growing on me the more I play around with it, and some games like Alyx run fantastically well but if sims are you target as I expect will be the case for many looking at this headset, I think we just have to recognise that something like the 2070S is just too weak to even approach getting the potential out of the headset.

Before I've always felt limited by the screens in VR, now I'm limited by the performance of the rig. I don't know which is more frustrating to be honest... to have that little glimpse of what could be when you bump up all the resolution and settings and get abominable unplayable framerates, but oh my GOD it's beautiful, then having to dial back to actual playable settings is quite frustrating. I think a lot of the frustrations around the G2 I'm seeing simply come down to people not having the horsepower to run it properly - HP recommended specs aren't even close to reality unless you are only playing games like beatsaber.

@JackAlias nope, not seen that one before. Tried a different displayport?
 
Just-Dave said:
I dont know if the G1 slider is the same as the G2 in steam, i have mine at 100% which is 3160x 3092, not owning a G1 im unable to comment on any direct comparisons between the two,
Im the type of person who does not mind tinkering with setting all day long lol,
Im just finding what works for me and taking other peoples findings on board as well, plus gaining knowledge
I was pleasantly surprised with how good games still look turning off AA,
Elite dangerous for example i though would look a mess, it was quite the opposite,
But the higher the resolution you go the less AA you need, that is true even on a standard monitor i believe,
You would think the G1 and G2 would be the same settings, well i would anyway, but im guessing setup is very different, maybe
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That resolution sounds much higher than what I get at 136%, so I think you may be doing a lot more SS than me at the moment. A 3080 may give me enough power to SS my way to smooth power lines and fences, but I have experimented with max everything (including AA) with my 136% SS and that AA/SS combo is the what I'm looking for.

My worst-case 1080 Ti testing had me below 30fps at long beach, at night, in a thunderstorm, with a full grid.

I don't need everything maxed. I certainly don't expect that in scenarios like my worst case race experiment. There's a lot of stuff I'm willing to turn down, but those crisp, smooth lines I saw in my testing are the main reason I want to upgrade.
 
Twinz said:
That resolution sounds much higher than what I get at 136%, so I think you may be doing a lot more SS than me at the moment. A 3080 may give me enough power to SS my way to smooth power lines and fences, but I have experimented with max everything (including AA) with my 136% SS and that AA/SS combo is the what I'm looking for.

My worst-case 1080 Ti testing had me below 30fps at long beach, at night, in a thunderstorm, with a full grid.

I don't need everything maxed. I certainly don't expect that in scenarios like my worst case race experiment. There's a lot of stuff I'm willing to turn down, but those crisp, smooth lines I saw in my testing are the main reason I want to upgrade.
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ive tried a lot of settings with AMS2, its not the best news really, but for me at least MSAA causes issues, not only do the cars ghost a little, the image is very soft and i loose all the sharpness, the other AA settings dont seem to do anything for me,
For me ive turned down a lot, shadows, reflections and removed AA completely,
With that i get a balance, its far from perfect i will say that, and does not look no where near as what i would see on my monitor,
I almost always use open wheel cars,
I tried the gt3 cars and with no AA it looked pants if im honest,
Maye Reiza can do a Vr pass and help us out, but for now i will not be expecting greatness with AMS2 visuals, unless someone stumbles across some magic settings :)
 
Just-Dave said:
ive tried a lot of settings with AMS2, its not the best news really, but for me at least MSAA causes issues, not only do the cars ghost a little, the image is very soft and i loose all the sharpness, the other AA settings dont seem to do anything for me,
For me ive turned down a lot, shadows, reflections and removed AA completely,
With that i get a balance, its far from perfect i will say that, and does not look no where near as what i would see on my monitor,
I almost always use open wheel cars,
I tried the gt3 cars and with no AA it looked pants if im honest,
Maye Reiza can do a Vr pass and help us out, but for now i will not be expecting greatness with AMS2 visuals, unless someone stumbles across some magic settings :)
Click to expand...

Well damn. On the bright side, this news kind of kills any lingering FOMO I had for the 3080 I have yet to be able to buy. It sounds like I'm not missing much by running my 1080 Ti.
 
Today turning on the headset and got some really awful CRACKLING SOUND coming from the headset headphones... Yesterday no proplem and restart did not help. Luckily i found the SOLUTION: Unplugged the power from the SPLITTER BOX and reconnected it a minute later. Simples! (The box is the one with the white light which splits into Display port and USB-C also it has the round connector which provides the extra power to the headset. I only touched the round power connector i havent touched the others!) Hope this will helps someone...
 
BluecatR said:
Sorry no, the blue protective film came off before us. Most scenes it's ok and not noticeable. I've got a good picture that shows the problem, just need to find somewhere to upload it and link it.

This should be on my onedrive now. You can see the rays I'm on about and the bottom left shows what I think are the LEDs that I can also see in certain scenes.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!BA9vlfxGKb71gbRNf_B_TLvygbXeaQ?e=Mm6UER
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Now I've had more use out of the headset and become a little more familiar with it, I'm less certain that what I am seeing is a fault. The LED artefacts around the edges have only ever been see in the sinking scene of Titanic VR. Further to that I'm fairly convinced that what I am seeing in other things are pretty bad god rays. What I've read leads me to expect that god rays have been improved a lot in the G2, yet I'm seeing them this badly. I also read quite an old reddit thread about god rays in certain circumstances being subjective or down to the eyes of the individual. It could still be that my unit is just outside certain tolerances in the manufacture I suppose meaning that everything isn't quite aligned as it should be. It's also perfectly possible that Parcelforce dropped the whole thing somewhere in their network and damaged it.

I realise I'm not drawing any conclusions here. Given that I can't expect any of you guys to have Titanic VR in your libraries to compare, there are two other locations that I have seen these rays quite badly. The first is in the WMR house. If you go and stand looking out to sea so that you are standing on a bright coloured surface but looking out at the comparatively dark blue ocean, I can see this ghosting on the screen which seems to be the god ray glow from the standing surface.

The other time I notice it is in darker scenes where the fpsVR window is just off the bottom of the visible screen. Do you remember the start of the superman films where the credits all streaked off the screen? The fpsVR window essentially streaks really visibly from the edge of the bottom to the centre of the lense. I suppose that is the most obvious occurrence of what I see and perhaps the most comparable for others. Anyone have any thoughts, do you see the same?

Other than these symptoms, I've had no re-occurrence of the speaker crackling now since day 1 and what I thought was a nick in the right lense that I couldn't get off in the end did turn out to be a small speck of glue. I know they say no fluids to clean the lenses but would pure water and clean microfibre not be ok either? Other than these god rays, I'm getting more used to the display and have to say I'm starting to love it now. All the info here on tweaking and configuring has been the most useful resource anyone could ever wish for though and so glad I've not been trying to do this alone.
 
Just a question re: FPSVR - does it only work when running a game via Steam? I have for example purchased Star Wars Squadrons from the Origin/EA store and so it runs via the Oculus suite not Steam - can I just open steam and it will work or is it only compatible with steam games?

Grateful to hear advice,

Birdseed007
 
BluecatR said:
Now I've had more use out of the headset and become a little more familiar with it, I'm less certain that what I am seeing is a fault. The LED artefacts around the edges have only ever been see in the sinking scene of Titanic VR. Further to that I'm fairly convinced that what I am seeing in other things are pretty bad god rays. What I've read leads me to expect that god rays have been improved a lot in the G2, yet I'm seeing them this badly. I also read quite an old reddit thread about god rays in certain circumstances being subjective or down to the eyes of the individual. It could still be that my unit is just outside certain tolerances in the manufacture I suppose meaning that everything isn't quite aligned as it should be. It's also perfectly possible that Parcelforce dropped the whole thing somewhere in their network and damaged it.

I realise I'm not drawing any conclusions here. Given that I can't expect any of you guys to have Titanic VR in your libraries to compare, there are two other locations that I have seen these rays quite badly. The first is in the WMR house. If you go and stand looking out to sea so that you are standing on a bright coloured surface but looking out at the comparatively dark blue ocean, I can see this ghosting on the screen which seems to be the god ray glow from the standing surface.

The other time I notice it is in darker scenes where the fpsVR window is just off the bottom of the visible screen. Do you remember the start of the superman films where the credits all streaked off the screen? The fpsVR window essentially streaks really visibly from the edge of the bottom to the centre of the lense. I suppose that is the most obvious occurrence of what I see and perhaps the most comparable for others. Anyone have any thoughts, do you see the same?

Other than these symptoms, I've had no re-occurrence of the speaker crackling now since day 1 and what I thought was a nick in the right lense that I couldn't get off in the end did turn out to be a small speck of glue. I know they say no fluids to clean the lenses but would pure water and clean microfibre not be ok either? Other than these god rays, I'm getting more used to the display and have to say I'm starting to love it now. All the info here on tweaking and configuring has been the most useful resource anyone could ever wish for though and so glad I've not been trying to do this alone.
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Last night i played Phasmorphia, all around the edge was a white light, similar to your day one issue in the titanic game, its almost as if the image is not being projected close enough to the lenses , if that makes sense,
Yeah also the god rays are not as good as i expected around the edges but the are perfect when looking directly at something that would usually cast one, big bright white writing on a black background for example
 
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You guys want to see something impressive.

Max out Doom VFR and go play with the archive holograms in mission control. Forget the frame rate, just take a look.

Truly a wow moment when you grab one close, the G2 in full effect.
 
So a few updated impressions for those of you still on the fence/waiting...

- Tracking/controllers:

Headset, perfect. No issues whatsoever.

Controllers, good overall but with caveats. Controllers themselves I found comfortable, the large tracking ring does mildly annoy in certain scenarios. Battery life once switching over to the PKCELL nizn has been good. Haptics suck so much I turned them off (setting in steam), which also helps with battery life as a happy side effect... overall though, controllers are more than serviceable. They also just about fit my AMVR quest grips too so that’s a bonus.

Tracking has been absolutely great when controllers are in view of the headset, the few problems I’ve had in eg onward are that big dead zone with your hands low down by your waist... unfortunately that can’t really be fixed because it’s just the fact there are no cameras looking down there. Quick movements eg getting the tablet from behind your back no problem, the IMU seems to do a decent job, but prolonged periods of hands down low will lose tracking.

Overall it’s just that the camera placement in eg Quest/Quest2 is just better for overall tracking volume. The one exception I’ve found is for throwing over arm, those side cameras do a much better job of keeping the controller in view so your throws will probably be better than on Quest/Quest2/RiftS.

- Lenses:

Absolute clarity in the centre, no god rays to speak of within I would say around 50% of the lens and mild beyond that... only notice them in high contrasts scenes, haven’t noticed any in gameplay yet.

Sweet spot is fairly large, but only if you can get your eyes close to the lens. If you feel the FoV is limited, it probably means the headset is sitting too far from your eyes and you’ll also feel the sweet spot is small... try repositioning and tightening it, I’ve found the foam breaks in a little over time which helps.

Try taking off the interface and getting it close enough for your eyelashes to touch - look at that beautiful big field of view and sweet spot! Someone absolutely must bring out a low profile interface for this thing!

- Screen

Nice colours and contrast, I would say functionally non-existent screen door. Resolution definitely not at human eye resolution but it’s damn good, especially if you can run at 100%.... you are going to need a beast of a GPU though for anything other than very well VR optimised games. Drop the rendering resolution and games become more achievable, but there is a significant drop off in clarity in my opinion.

Blacks frankly suck somewhat coming from the Oled of the quest, most of the time the good brightness makes it hard to notice but in the darker scenes of Alyx for example there is a lack of detail in the shadows and what should be black is very much dull grey.... but all new headsets at the moment are LCD so what can you do. Obviously overall the visuals blow the quest out of the water, so I can accept the trade off... bring on micro led displays though!!!

- Setup:

I had some USB problems with various ports, finally got the USB-C connector on my motherboard to work... I still have a lot of problems getting audio to start up reliably, which seems related to USB2.0 issues. Allegedly they are working on it with all the involved parties but there are definitely a few teething problems.

Overall:

Initial feelings of being slightly underwhelmed have given way to being largely very happy. If I can get those audio annoyances out of the way once they figure out the USB issues that will go a long way to making me extremely happy.

I will need a new GPU before being fully content however. The fidelity of the display is a cruel irony - running it as intended at 100% allows you to see the game much closer to how you would on a monitor, it also makes the low settings you have to use to get it to run all the more apparent to the eye...

Performance specifically with TAA has mostly been poor in both AMS and ACC. Not sure why... unfortunately the headset is so sharp that jaggies literally cut your eyes and the blurryness of low levels of TAA becomes readily apparent, it’s lose lose! Reprojection does work reasonably well as long as you give it some headroom but does have a few artefacts that can take away from the sharpness and overall visuals.

Best racing experience I’ve had so far on my limited GPU (2070S) is RFactor2... 76% resolution and it runs a solid 90FPS while looking great. Will certainly be playing more RF2 than anything else while I await the opportunity to buy a new GPU. Ferrari GTE on the Nurburgring = heaven.
 
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