Oculus Quest 2 Announced, higher resolution than Valve Index, 72 Hz, $299

[TedBrosby-]

https://www.theverge.com/21433030/oculus-quest-2-vr-headset-specs-comparison-htc-valve-microsoft

I’m not sure how I feel about it given I have the Rift S and it has kind of “so so” support for Open VR and Valve VR titles. If you only race iRacing, it seems to be a good value, but if you only race iRacing you probably don’t need such a high resolution anyway.
What do you guys think? Yay or nay?
Also “72Hz at launch, 90Hz to come” is a bit confusing. Apparently Oculus say they’ll push 90 Hz to the device “soon” but no idea if that means even with PC it’ll work or what that actually means.
I’m suspicious of the low price... Crazy high resolution and 90 Hz for $299 with controllers is game changing. But what’s the catch? No such thing as free lunch.
Personally I’m debating retiring VR entirely because I have a newborn and if I have time to race I need to keep my senses available so I ironically have to reduce my immersion...
Plus the G9 looks amazing.
But if I were to stay with VR I would probably sell my Rift S and buy HP Reverb or Index.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Oculus is done with PC headsets, they have made official announcement about that recently.
Tethered standalone does not work that well unfortunately.
So it's only Valve and WMR now for PC crowd, may be Pimax if they survive.

 

[girarcat]

Oculus is done with PC headsets, they have made official announcement about that recently.
Tethered standalone does not work that well unfortunately.
So it's only Valve and WMR now for PC crowd, may be Pimax if they survive.

Can you explain more on that, please? I understood from the Oculus Quest 2 presentation that if you purchased the optional USB cable you would get the same funcionatilities as the Rift S. What's the problem with the USB cable solution?
Thanks!

 

[Stevie_007]

Oculus link is still in beta, compresses data ok for some games, I doubt for sim racing from my experience

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Don't have first hand experience but from what I've read it's compression artifacts and latency.
Some discussion on original Quest tethering, may be the new one is better.
But still, it's 72hz.

 

[TedBrosby-]

Can you explain more on that, please? I understood from the Oculus Quest 2 presentation that if you purchased the optional USB cable you would get the same funcionatilities as the Rift S. What's the problem with the USB cable solution?
Thanks!

To be mildly technical, the Rift S and similar video signal based headsets use Display Port to send video signals to the headset. The bulk of the video processing is done by your GPU, hence a 1080 Ti can achieve high refresh rate. The USB cable from the headset to the PC is used to send physical information to your VR software, like head movement, changes in height, and when the headset is "on or off" (Rift detects if you take the headset off through an optical sensor inside the headset near the visor).
By using two cables, there's a higher overall data bandwidth available. The entire video signal is more or less separated from the USB connection.
Using USB-C, means that both the video signal and the tracking information have to be sent and received through the same cable.
It also means, there's a high possibility the video signal is still being "processed" by the Quest's internal processor and GPU.
Your GPU might still be decompressing textures, processing video memory instructions and "rendering" frames, but the actual VR conversion and refresh rate might be limited to the Quest 2's internal hardware.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. Quest 2 uses mobile phone hardware. This is fine for things like Beat Saber, but sim racing will probably have severe visual artifacts and tearing.

This is a no go for me. Hopefully the Valve Index is in stock when I'm back from my trip (just posted my Rift S for sale on a local marketplace, people seem to be dumping them thanks to the Quest 2 and Discontinued announcement). I'm concerned that they'll stop updating the Rift S. As is, it already has some issues that still haven't been worked out.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Quest link architecture explained.

How does Oculus Link Work? The Architecture, Pipeline and AADT Explained | Oculus

developer.oculus.com

 

[girarcat]

Thanks for the explanations. Now I see Quest is a no go. What a shame. At least they could have kept on selling the Rift S for hardcore users. I was planning to get the Rift S next Christmas and now it will be discontinued. The Valve are much more expensive and I understand they require a better hardware than the Rift. Not sure my 1070ti would be enough with the Valve.

 

[Megahowler]

As someone who actually owned a Quest 1... Sim racing via both Oculus Link and Virtual Desktop was no issue at all.. Project Cars 2 ran flawlessly with zero tearing or frame drops

I've ordered a Quest 2 and based on how it performs I will then decide if I should also grab a Reverb G2 (Index isn't an option in Australia unless you want to fork out $2000+)

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Hope G2 delivers.

 

[TedBrosby-]

Hope G2 delivers.

Hows WMR for setting up Steam VR games in practice? I know it works based on tutorials but people say the same thing about Rift and I found it to be annoying to the point of not liking to play in VR.
Sometimes games wouldn’t start and I would get infinite loading circles. Rift constantly “reset” my guardian settings even though I had guardian disabled (only set ground but no boundaries).
I also noticed that Rift controllers destroyed batteries even if I didn’t use the controllers themselves for weeks. It’s a Catch 22 because if you just don’t put batteries into the controllers you’re almost guaranteed that the Guardian will reset which sucks to deal with before a race, but if you leave batteries inside the controllers they could die and then Guardian resets. I don’t know why these third generation kits don’t have USB connected charging lithium batteries...

 

[Deleted member 197115]

I think there are tricks you need to learn with any non SteamVR native HMD.