* HP Reverb G2 Owners Thread *

Zeeflyboy · 2 Dec 2020 at 11:56

Just a heads up for anyone having issues with the audio not starting in the headset - I've figured out I need to start the WMR portal before turning on the power to the headset for the audio to come alive.

zero71 · 2 Dec 2020 at 15:38

Just set mine up. I didn't have the long pause in the middle of the setup that some had. I just connected the headset and WMR started automatically and it walked me through the setup procedure and I was in VR within a couple of mins. I have only tried SuperHot VR so far, but even that has left me feeling queasy. It's quite the experience, but I'm not sure VR is for me. I had a real hard time throwing things in SuperHot, must be a timing issue.

Ravenger · 2 Dec 2020 at 15:49

zero71 said:
I had a real hard time throwing things in SuperHot, must be a timing issue.

Throwing always felt a bit off for me in Superhot. Not many games get it right. HL Alyx is probably the best example of throwing done well.

Unseul · 2 Dec 2020 at 15:51

I struggled with throwing in superhot. Tended to just give up and dodge bullets until they got close enough for me to grab the gun. Use the items to block bullets rather than trying to hit them with it.

John Harris · 2 Dec 2020 at 15:52

Question to the Reverb Owners: Are you unplugging your device when not in use? My PC is on most of the day through work and then leisure, so if left connected, it seems to get warm (not sure why - there's nothing charging in there!). The HP light stays on too.

bigmike20vt · 2 Dec 2020 at 15:52

zero71 said:
Just set mine up. I didn't have the long pause in the middle of the setup that some had. I just connected the headset and WMR started automatically and it walked me through the setup procedure and I was in VR within a couple of mins. I have only tried SuperHot VR so far, but even that has left me feeling queasy. It's quite the experience, but I'm not sure VR is for me. I had a real hard time throwing things in SuperHot, must be a timing issue.

lots of people have VR sickness at 1st..... when starting off go with really easy experiences 1st and only do 10 mins or so at a time. it is vital that as soon as you start to feel clammy you take off the headset and have a breather for 30 mins.... that way you can then try again. Push it too hard and it can make you feel rubbish for the entire day and put you off.

Oculus are actually much better at the "new user" experience with a series of short curated experiences which are really easy and each title has a comfort rating.

stick with it and i think 99% of people can get over the initial hurdles.

All that said............. everyone pushes it too far at 1st. I felt dog rough after an hr experience in half life 2 back in the day.
My Scuba diving instructor told me one of the number 1 rules of diving is when going down, as soon as you feel discomfort (ideally before you do actually) you stop decending and equalise before carrying on. Never ever try and push through because you are "almost" at the bottom.

the nausea warning is comparable in VR imo.... never push through because you cant.... stop, wait for your body to adapt then try again.

bigmike20vt · 2 Dec 2020 at 15:53

John Harris said:
Question to the Reverb Owners: Are you unplugging your device when not in use? My PC is on most of the day through work and then leisure, so if left connected, it seems to get warm (not sure why - there's nothing charging in there!). The HP light stays on too.

good question. i had an issue with mine last night it kept disconnecting and reconnecting when i was trying to game with a mate. i ended up having to pull the usb plug. ideally i would like to keep it plugged in all the time. it would be nice if it could be kept off via software and only fire it up with a double click on the desktop.

also add in that i have 2 headsets, an oculus one and a G2... but only 1 head. it would be nice to be able to control them better.

Washout · 2 Dec 2020 at 16:03

Zeeflyboy said:
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.

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.

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.

Thanks for that, will play with it more tonight!

One other thing I've noticed. As soon as wmr kicks off it adds three screens to be desktop. They go when it's off. Disabling them doesn't seem to affect the vr so not sure what they're there for?!

John Harris · 2 Dec 2020 at 16:11

(10) How To Prevent Motion Sickness In Virtual Reality - YouTube

This helped me - and the best advice he gave was NOT to power through if you start to feel sick. Stop right away, and pick again later. After a while, I got my VR legs and rarely get Motion Sickness now (whereas before, I could feel rough for hours after 'sticking with it').

Ravenger · 2 Dec 2020 at 16:12

John Harris said:
(10) How To Prevent Motion Sickness In Virtual Reality - YouTube

This helped me - and the best advice he gave was NOT to power through if you start to feel sick. Stop right away, and pick again later. After a while, I got my VR legs and rarely get Motion Sickness now (whereas before, I could feel rough for hours after 'sticking with it').

This is good advice. The issue with pushing through VR sickness is you can train your brain to associate feeling ill with being in VR. Then whenever you use a headset you'll feel immediately sick. That's very difficult to reverse.

John Harris · 2 Dec 2020 at 16:13

ideally i would like to keep it plugged in all the time. it would be nice if it could be kept off via software and only fire it up with a double click on the desktop.

Agreed - and that's what I though it was doing - when I close the MR portal, it makes the 'device removed' chime, so I thought that it was then dormant until I do something - but the heat on the headset worries me. Do I want it to be warming up like that all day?

John Harris · 2 Dec 2020 at 16:16

This is good advice. The issue with pushing through VR sickness is you can train your brain to associate feeling ill with being in VR. Then whenever you use a headset you'll feel immediately sick. That's very difficult to reverse.

Very good point! And I was like that for a while too - the thought of going into VR wasn't appealing after several bad sessions. And to be honest, I still get them sometime, mostly when I'm tired and I'm playing a game with a lot of motion. For new VR users, I always suggest teleporting at first too.

Zeeflyboy · 2 Dec 2020 at 16:26

John Harris said:
Agreed - and that's what I though it was doing - when I close the MR portal, it makes the 'device removed' chime, so I thought that it was then dormant until I do something - but the heat on the headset worries me. Do I want it to be warming up like that all day?

Warmth attracts spiders.... just saying

John Harris · 2 Dec 2020 at 17:18

Warmth attracts spiders.... just saying

Now I DEFINITELY don't want it warm!

So I just unplugged the power brick, and that seems to have done the job. Bit of a pain to have to remember that, but I'll live - rather that than spiders any day!

bigmike20vt · 2 Dec 2020 at 17:32

John Harris said:
Now I DEFINITELY don't want it warm!

So I just unplugged the power brick, and that seems to have done the job. Bit of a pain to have to remember that, but I'll live - rather that than spiders any day!

Ever seen Star Trek the Wrath of Kahn (the original one not the reboot)

its how they get the sound on the G2 so good

https://decider.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/star-trek-ear-bug.gif

Ravenger · 2 Dec 2020 at 17:34

John Harris said:
Now I DEFINITELY don't want it warm!

So I just unplugged the power brick, and that seems to have done the job. Bit of a pain to have to remember that, but I'll live - rather that than spiders any day!

You could use a remote smart plug to make it more convenient.

JackAlias · 2 Dec 2020 at 18:11

Yesterday there was sound, today nothing at all. I must admit this is a very frustrating. Not to mention the fact that the bindings seem to be off in some games.

rossiboy001 · 2 Dec 2020 at 19:19

Still waiting for mine, was sent out today in the van and due for delivery still today on website but getting late now, no sign of van.

John Harris · 2 Dec 2020 at 19:36

Ever seen Star Trek the Wrath of Kahn (the original one not the reboot)

its how they get the sound on the G2 so good

LOL Yup! I don't think I'd want one of those either!

Zeeflyboy · 2 Dec 2020 at 20:40

JackAlias said:
Yesterday there was sound, today nothing at all. I must admit this is a very frustrating. Not to mention the fact that the bindings seem to be off in some games.

I assume you’ve made sure it has switched over to the correct audio output?

If so, I get that too (supposedly on the right output, but no audio) and I believe it’s due to usb problems... are you on an AMD board?

Originally I fixed it by uninstalling and reinstalling the device and driver. Recently I’ve found it I turn off the power, start up the WMR portal, then power up the headset the audio works every time... or at least every time so far.

*** HP Reverb G2 Owners Thread ***

* HP Reverb G2 Owners Thread *