VR - Is it really going to be a success? Or, thanks Time for starting a discussion!

The original PSVR was definitely in the bargain category, but OK for the money. Unfortunately the Quest exists now and blows the original PSVR out of the water at a similar price - before factoring in the PS4.

Hopefully Sony can be more competitive with the PSVR2.

I thought I read something about that needing dev mode. Not sure what that means.

Developer Mode means you’ve registered as a developer on the Oculus site and turned on developer mode for your Quest headset. It’s easy to do with zero downside (really).

I already have that switched on for Virtual Desktop, but maybe it means the setting for the Guardian is in the dev mode bit rather than the Guardian bit.

Any thought on this post? Curious is if it’s more placebo effect, or if it’s real.

It’s definitely real, as it’s posted by a Microsoft developer:

We do have some feature updates in the works. One of the notable ones is a change we’re working on with Valve that’ll significantly reduce the amount of GPU memory used when running SteamVR. That one’s exciting because we’ve found it has a cascading effect - a lot of VR workloads tend to max out the GPU memory, and reducing the amount used reduces the need for memory paging, leading to a smoother overall experience.

This is probably only WMR-specific. Right now the issue is that we have to create an intermediate set of GPU buffers that we copy the SteamVR content into before we send it off to our system compositor. The change we’re working on will eliminate that set of intermediate buffers. Since each buffer is (generally) sized to match the resolution of the headset, the memory savings potential is huge.

The fix won’t affect performance that much, unless your current settings have you running out of VRAM:

It probably reduces the frame time slightly by removing that extra operation, but the copy shouldn’t be impacting performance that much. But at the same time reducing memory pressure can help a lot if stuff is getting paged out. We’ve definitely seen performance improvements in that scenario in our limited testing.

I’d think in games like DCS or MS Flight Sim it should help a bit (Steam version)? Or does MS Flight Sim skip Steam VR entirely?

Flight Sim doesn’t use SteamVR. But it will definitely help in DCS, which has memory issues in VR.

The real fix is for everyone to hurry up and use OpenXR exclusively! :)

Can a game like DCS switch to OpenXR rather easily?

I don’t know… with engines like Unreal and Unity it would be easier, but with something bespoke like DCS I imagine it’s a bunch of extra work for the devs.

I’m looking at an Oculus Quest 2 for the family, but also for myself to use Link Cable for games.

Is the $80 cable the one I’m looking for?

just use any normal usb3 cable.

Reviewing the threads above, but any other hardware that’s a “must-buy?”

Consider the Elite strap, but you can wait and see how comfortable you find the included strap.

Also you can use a 3rd party cable, but the official one is ideal if your budget swings that far, given it’d be a bit lighter.

I just picked up a Quest 2 and ended up buying this cable. So far it seems to work fine. 16 feet is plenty to give me room to move near my PC.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MZFS4SY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

In general though I’m super impressed with the hardware. I was around for the birth of this generation of VR and worked on all the various generations of Rift hardware starting from the first dev kit, but this is just a totally different level. Untethered VR with inside-out tracking is really the Holy Grail.

Thanks all. I have the 64G version and a link cable on the way.

Time to read up on side loading and more advanced stuff.

The hardware is mature enough that you mostly don’t need to sideload. I’d only sideload to do:

  • Virtual Desktop wireless VR streaming. (Note: VD desktop streaming works without sideloading. And VR streaming from desktop works with Oculus Link. You only need sideloading to have both.)
  • Beat Saber mods. These are both really cool and too much trouble to be worth it. Every time BS updates, your mods will break and you’ll spend an hour figuring out how to update your library and make everything work again.
  • The weird, wonderful world of indie VR apps. There’s some interesting stuff out there, but you can also sample a bunch of this stuff using WebVR through Firefox Reality or Oculus’s native VR web browser.

For my engineer brain, it’s hard not to jailbreak new toys if that’s an option.

Also, I want to use bluetooth headphones and that seems to only be available as sideload/dev mode?

VD new version :

• The ability to stream PCVR games is now part of the official app in the store, no patch needed!
• Added multi-account support in the Streamer app (Windows only for now)
• Screenshots taken on your Quest are now automatically transferred to your desktop (Windows only for now)
• Added voice-over for notifications
• Added Wi-Fi speed information, runtime used by game and GPU name to the Performance Overlay
• Changed Sliced Encoding and Microphone Passthrough to be enabled by default