HP Reverb G2 (1 Viewer)

[Jeff[NL]]

To all that pre-ordered the G2 as Bestware: preorders prior to 24th September will get a 50 euro cash back from HP to compensate for the delay ;-).


Also people that ordered as Amazon.es got an email about €50,- cash back.

I dont know what to say about that really, i mean i rather had the headset sooner but at least they do something in return.

 

[MelBonkers]

Bestware posted on reddit that the first batch finally has arrived. Hopefully batch 2 will arrive as scheduled tomorrow! @Jeff[NL] , @Exited , hopefully you got the email of shipment if you're in the first batch and otherwise hopefully we'll receive it soon if it's in tomorrow's batch. Fingers crossed!

 

[Exited]

Bestware posted on reddit that the first batch finally has arrived. Hopefully batch 2 will arrive as scheduled tomorrow! @Jeff[NL] , @Exited , hopefully you got the email of shipment if you're in the first batch and otherwise hopefully we'll receive it soon if it's in tomorrow's batch. Fingers crossed!

Yup, our preorder should be in the first batch. I think we both ordered on 7th of july, yeeehhhhaaa

 

[Puffpirat]

Looking forward to your impressions!

 

[Exited]

So my G2 arrived today.
Did some testing in AC and ACC so far, mostly AC SP and ACC MP.

Unboxing and setting everything up is quite easy. I was surprised how light the G2 is, I think I read something its only 615g, did no measure it by myself in the WMR cliffhouse tutorial I could already see how sharp and how much the clarity improved to my CV1. No SDE at all, doesn't matter how close you look, you can't see any pixel at all, it's really like looking on a 2D monitor in terms of clarity. Because the cliffhouse is relatively clean with some figures standing around you can sadly see that the sweetspot is not that great. If you don't look exactly towards those figures they get a little bit blurry quite fast. Maybe this effect is exaggerated with the G2 as the sweetspot is so damn sharp, whereas in the CV1 the complete picture was always blurry, so the difference between sweetspot and outside areas was a lot less noticable. Colors do look great, very powerful like the blue sky and the grass. White spots are a little bit too shinny imo.
Cable is super long (5m), but quite stiff. Sometimes it was annoying me a bit because it got stuck on my seat and I could feel the resistance when turning my head. But when its in the right position it works perfectly fine.

First I needed to figure out how to run games with WMR. Finally found out that I need to install SteamVR and run that, to fire up AC and ACC

Firstly some AC SP races with the Porsche 919 Hybrid at Spa with 29 opponents. Holy moly, the dash in the wheel is so sharp, you can read everything perfectly. Cars around do look like on monitor aswell, you can see all those aero parts, splitters and diffusors like you would look at them in real life. For me great example how crystal clear this headset is, is when you come around the Busstop chicane and can clearly see how the front runner cars are turning into La Source. No more 3 fron left to right moving pixels, but clearly visible cars. Also the pit area when you go down to Pouhon, just wow, rubber on the various kerbs and also the single kerbstones textures are so clear now!
Performance wise it was great after I decreased the SteamVR resultion to 50% to match the native display resolution. 100% is somehow 3160x3160 pixels (9mio pixels) per eye. Before that, I needed to turn off Post Processing, otherwise I were constantly at 30-40fps. With the decreased render target I could run stable 60fps with max'ed out settings with 29 opponents at Spa and the picture wasn't any worse. Bad optimized mod tracks like Road Atlanta still brought down the frames to stuttering 45fps.

After that I tried ACC MP at Bathurst for the upcoming 2,4h race. I only decreased my pixel density from 130% to 100% and could run stable 60fps with around 70% GPU usage. I had only some cars in line of sight on the track, but also in the pitroad with more cars around I could hold 60fps with my 1080 Ti. The headset itself made also a good impression in ACC, no SDE, interior and car around are really really sharp. Big but, as soon as the cars are a little bit further away or especially trees around the track the short comings of the deferred rendering of UE4 are clearly visible. The cars and surroundings just get washed out by this type of AA and don't really look that realistic anymore. Still the picture is a lot better than the CV1, because with that you had a blurry HMD paired with a blurry AA method, now the headset is at least really sharp and gives a good picture. Atmosphere wise, dear lord, coming around Skyline at Bathurst in the morning with this sun getting into your eyes is just a pure joy and was still one of the best moments for me yesterday to put the sweet spot into perspective. The tire widget which is for me at little bit to the right bottom in VR, is blurry when you turn your head only so slightly that it comes into your vision. You can still read it, but it takes a little bit of concentration or more head movement to read the pressure numbers. I would say its CV1 quality if you turn your head only so much that the widget is visible at the bottom right, but gets sharper a lot if you turn your head a little bit more.

FOV was comparable to the CV1, I would say the vFOV is noticable bigger whereas the hFOV is quite the same to the CV1 or only slightly bigger

For now really really happy with the G2 and it is definitely the improvement I hoped for, coming from the CV1!

 

[MelBonkers]

Brilliant @Exited ! This gets me excited as well! Still haven't received my eta for now :-(

 

[Exited]

Brilliant @Exited ! This gets me excited as well! Still haven't received my eta for now :-(

Stay strong, imo it's really worth the wait!

Maybe interesting side note. I ran my ACC engine.ini yesterday modified in that way, that streaming of the textures is deactivated and all textures are loaded at joining at race session. With that line of code and the high resolution of the G2 I was constantly at 11Gb VRAM usage, so my 1080Ti was max'ed out completely. Need to test it again and see how the VRAM usage is with textures streaming enabled
But that increasey my option that a GPU with less than 16GB VRAM is a no go for me for the next buy

 

[MelBonkers]

Stay strong, imo it's really worth the wait!

Maybe interesting side note. I ran my ACC engine.ini yesterday modified in that way, that streaming of the textures is deactivated and all textures are loaded at joining at race session. With that line of code and the high resolution of the G2 I was constantly at 11Gb VRAM usage, so my 1080Ti was max'ed out completely. Need to test it again and see how the VRAM usage is with textures streaming enabled
But that increasey my option that a GPU with less than 16GB VRAM is a no go for me for the next buy

Exited, can you post your change? I'd like to try that with my 2080Ti and see how the game runs. Since last Tuesday I've been running Rf2 and ACC with my Index at 90fps constantly and cpu and gpu load was under the green line in vrfps and everything was butter smooth. Games looked and felt amazing and I didn't change anything. Would like to try your setting as well.

Btw in the meantime bestware received 33% of the headsets of batch 2 (my batch ). I hope I get a message sometime next week. I live in the Netherlands, so people outside of Germany will receive the headsets a little later than inhabitants in Germany

 

[Puffpirat]

Exited, can you post your change? I'd like to try that with my 2080Ti and see how the game runs. Since last Tuesday I've been running Rf2 and ACC with my Index at 90fps constantly and cpu and gpu load was under the green line in vrfps and everything was butter smooth. Games looked and felt amazing and I didn't change anything. Would like to try your setting as well.

Btw in the meantime bestware received 33% of the headsets of batch 2 (my batch ). I hope I get a message sometime next week. I live in the Netherlands, so people outside of Germany will receive the headsets a little later than inhabitants in Germany

Hi Mo the line in questions is
[ConsoleVariables]
r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1

Also interesting are:
r.EyeAdaptationQuality=0 (delete if the game gets too dark, it's a post processing effect)
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=1 (similar to ACC default but better performance, 0 has even better performance)
r.LensFlareQuality=0
vr.RoundRobinOcclusion=1 (see below)
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=512

Here is a list of all settings and what they do:

UE4 Console Variables and Commands

Round Robin Occlusion is one of the dynamic occlusion query methods to improve stereo rendering performance by alternating between one eye each frame instead of both. There is an added frame of latency to occlusion data which could result in incorrect rendering in the the periphery with the trade off being that Round Robin Occlusion saves an entire frame's worth of queries. The trade off in savings can help most with scenes that are draw call or visibility bound.

 

[Exited]

Exited, can you post your change? I'd like to try that with my 2080Ti and see how the game runs. Since last Tuesday I've been running Rf2 and ACC with my Index at 90fps constantly and cpu and gpu load was under the green line in vrfps and everything was butter smooth. Games looked and felt amazing and I didn't change anything. Would like to try your setting as well.

Btw in the meantime bestware received 33% of the headsets of batch 2 (my batch ). I hope I get a message sometime next week. I live in the Netherlands, so people outside of Germany will receive the headsets a little later than inhabitants in Germany

What Puffy said

Hi Mo the line in questions is
[ConsoleVariables]
r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1

Also interesting are:
r.EyeAdaptationQuality=0 (delete if the game gets too dark, it's a post processing effect)
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=1 (similar to ACC default but better performance, 0 has even better performance)
r.LensFlareQuality=0
vr.RoundRobinOcclusion=1 (see below)
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=512

Here is a list of all settings and what they do:

UE4 Console Variables and Commands

Round Robin Occlusion is one of the dynamic occlusion query methods to improve stereo rendering performance by alternating between one eye each frame instead of both. There is an added frame of latency to occlusion data which could result in incorrect rendering in the the periphery with the trade off being that Round Robin Occlusion saves an entire frame's worth of queries. The trade off in savings can help most with scenes that are draw call or visibility bound.

AmbientOcclusion = 0 does kill all the enviroment lightning, shadows and stuff or? Doesn't it look quite plain then?
Does Shadow.MaxResolution = 512 imply that the cars are floating above the track or it that purely a setting for visual appearence of the shadows?
Round Robin Occlusion sounds interesting, need to do some testing with that and see how it affects the picture quality and performance.

Did some more playing with the G2 yesterday and even did a Sim Grid Daily race at Barcelona where I started at P13 so right in the pack. Still stable 60fps or Motion Smoothing by WMR is so extremly smooth that I didn't recognise the drops to 30fps plus interpolation
But actually this race raised some questions on my side about the steamVR resolution setting I picked. 50% is according to steamVR almost G2 native resolution, so 2160x2160 per eye. Thats more than 9,3mio pixels compared to my Rift CV1 which had around 2,6mio. With the Rift I used 130% of pixel density which equals to about 3,4 mio pixels, played at 45fps + ASW and my GPU usage was around 50% with some spikes when buildings or so came in line of sight. I did not change any setting in ACC despite the pixel density to 100% since the switch to the G2 and somehow my 1080Ti sits at 70% usage with more than 2,7 times more pixels to be rendered and 60fps... That doesn't seem right to me. It rather seems that 50% resolution in SteamVR is actually really 50% of the native resolution of the G2 which equals with my settings to around 4,65mio pixels at 60fps which result in that 20% increased 1080Ti usage...
Another possibility, WMR and steamVR are extremly good optimized, but I really doubt that especially in terms of WMR

 

[Puffpirat]

AmbientOcclusion = 0 does kill all the enviroment lightning, shadows and stuff or? Doesn't it look quite plain then?
Does Shadow.MaxResolution = 512 imply that the cars are floating above the track or it that purely a setting for visual appearence of the shadows?
Round Robin Occlusion sounds interesting, need to do some testing with that and see how it affects the picture quality and performance.

Did some more playing with the G2 yesterday and even did a Sim Grid Daily race at Barcelona where I started at P13 so right in the pack. Still stable 60fps or Motion Smoothing by WMR is so extremly smooth that I didn't recognise the drops to 30fps plus interpolation
But actually this race raised some questions on my side about the steamVR resolution setting I picked. 50% is according to steamVR almost G2 native resolution, so 2160x2160 per eye. Thats more than 9,3mio pixels compared to my Rift CV1 which had around 2,6mio. With the Rift I used 130% of pixel density which equals to about 3,4 mio pixels, played at 45fps + ASW and my GPU usage was around 50% with some spikes when buildings or so came in line of sight. I did not change any setting in ACC despite the pixel density to 100% since the switch to the G2 and somehow my 1080Ti sits at 70% usage with more than 2,7 times more pixels to be rendered and 60fps... That doesn't seem right to me. It rather seems that 50% resolution in SteamVR is actually really 50% of the native resolution of the G2 which equals with my settings to around 4,65mio pixels at 60fps which result in that 20% increased 1080Ti usage...
Another possibility, WMR and steamVR are extremly good optimized, but I really doubt that especially in terms of WMR

Soooo one by one

Haven't tested 0, but AO is just another layer to the lighting so it will probably kill some shadows yes.
Shadow resolution is on top of your ingame setting. What I find odd, there are only two viable settings for Shadows. Thats low and epic. Everything in between makes the shadows pop in at medium distance which is really distracting. Try for yourself, but I find medium and high very strange (tested 17:00 Brands Hatch clear). With low you have the floaty cars, with epic you don't, the shadow resolution doesn't change this (sadly, or I'd go with low).
Havent't really noticed a negative side of Round Robin but with all the settings in my previous post I gained like 1ms in frame time on average.

Motion Smoothing in SteamVR is inferior to ASW so I'd guess you stayed above 60 You can enable a performance overlay in the advanced SteamVR settings which shows you your frame time in the headset. I lost 6 Safety rating while testing with AI god dammit xD

The render resolution is always higher than the display resolution because of the way the pictured is cropped and warped for the lenses. So you're right by setting it exactly to the native 2160x2160 your effectively upsampling the picture.

 

[Exited]

Soooo one by one

Haven't tested 0, but AO is just another layer to the lighting so it will probably kill some shadows yes.
Shadow resolution is on top of your ingame setting. What I find odd, there are only two viable settings for Shadows. Thats low and epic. Everything in between makes the shadows pop in at medium distance which is really distracting. Try for yourself, but I find medium and high very strange (tested 17:00 Brands Hatch clear). With low you have the floaty cars, with epic you don't, the shadow resolution doesn't change this (sadly, or I'd go with low).
Havent't really noticed a negative side of Round Robin but with all the settings in my previous post I gained like 1ms in frame time on average.

Motion Smoothing in SteamVR is inferior to ASW so I'd guess you stayed above 60 You can enable a performance overlay in the advanced SteamVR settings which shows you your frame time in the headset. I lost 6 Safety rating while testing with AI god dammit xD

The render resolution is always higher than the display resolution because of the way the pictured is cropped and warped for the lenses. So you're right by setting it exactly to the native 2160x2160 your effectively upsampling the picture.

Yeah at the moment I'm playing with Shadows to High and Shadow distance to Epic and have that shadows popping in medium distance which is like you said really annoying in VR and kills immersion big time... Need to test with Shadows to Epic, but actually I can't remember that this popping got adjusted by the Shadow quality setting (kind of weird, why expect that this behaviour would get adjusted with Shadow distance...)
So you recommend Shadows to Epic and Shadow resolution to 512 for a good mix of performance and picture quality? Is that resolution up or down for shadows?

Will test Round Robin, AO and shadow resolution with this steamVR performance overlay the next days!

With your last sentence you mean that I'm effectively downsampling the picture, because im rendering at 2160x2160 and then loose some pixels at the display because of the needed distortion for the lenses or? Still, the performance I see doesn't sound right to me. No way my old rusty 1080Ti can render more than 9mio pixels at 60fps with only 20% more usage than the Rift CV1... I think the displayed Render Resolution in SteamVR is buggy and 100% is actually 2160x2160 and not something like 3200x3200.

I forgot about the first real downside of the G2. In 60Hz mode white plain surfaces like the ACC setup explanation page flicker quite a bit, which is after some time quite hard on the eyes... in 90Hz mode everything is fine, need to check out 90Hz mode with motion smoothing tonight and see if its any better

 

[Havocc]

Wonder how many fps you will get with raytracing in Vr

 

[Puffpirat]

Yeah at the moment I'm playing with Shadows to High and Shadow distance to Epic and have that shadows popping in medium distance which is like you said really annoying in VR and kills immersion big time... Need to test with Shadows to Epic, but actually I can't remember that this popping got adjusted by the Shadow quality setting (kind of weird, why expect that this behaviour would get adjusted with Shadow distance...)
So you recommend Shadows to Epic and Shadow resolution to 512 for a good mix of performance and picture quality? Is that resolution up or down for shadows?

Will test Round Robin, AO and shadow resolution with this steamVR performance overlay the next days!

With your last sentence you mean that I'm effectively downsampling the picture, because im rendering at 2160x2160 and then loose some pixels at the display because of the needed distortion for the lenses or? Still, the performance I see doesn't sound right to me. No way my old rusty 1080Ti can render more than 9mio pixels at 60fps with only 20% more usage than the Rift CV1... I think the displayed Render Resolution in SteamVR is buggy and 100% is actually 2160x2160 and not something like 3200x3200.

I forgot about the first real downside of the G2. In 60Hz mode white plain surfaces like the ACC setup explanation page flicker quite a bit, which is after some time quite hard on the eyes... in 90Hz mode everything is fine, need to check out 90Hz mode with motion smoothing tonight and see if its any better

Yeah it’s strange, I would’ve also expect shadow distance to do this but it doesn’t. Epic definitely looks great but test the performance. I get worse FPS than night + rain.
The 512 should be lower than what epic uses but I can’t find how much. Could experiment and set this to 256 for example.
Yeah downsampling upsampling xD for me downsampling is rendering at a higher resolution and then displaying at a lower one. Think we mean the same

 

[Exited]

Wonder how many fps you will get with raytracing in Vr

Don't even think about it

 

[Exited]

@MelBonkers @Puffpirat did you achieve your G2's until now? ;-)

I did some more testing in ACC, because I wasn't really happy what I saw in the first days. So these are couple of infos I can share.

• 60Hz mode does not work for me, every white or brighter surface is shimmering and flickering like hell, probably of this persistance reducing thingy (showing colors, turn every pixel off, then show the next picture)
• 90Hz mode with Motion Smoothing forced by steamVR worked quite good for me
  • sadly there is some kind of bug, especially at Monza for me, that the framerate drops below 45fps but CPU and GPU aren't maxed out
  • on top the picture was a little bit washed out and didn't look to great
• 90Hz mode with Motion Smoothing disabled and locked 45-47fps by the game --> don't even think about it, the tearing in corners is just aweful
• 90Hz mode with Motion Smoothing by WMR and game locked to 46fps to force Motion Smoothing
  • for info see here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...enabling-motion-reprojection-for-steamvr-apps
  • worked quite good, stable 45fps at Nürburgring for me, some artifacts and tearing when moving your head and some dropped frames here and there (at least it felt like)
• 90Hz mode with Motion vector by WMR and game locked to 46fps to force Motion vector interpolation
  • worked really well, stable and very clear picture, no tearing, no dropped frames
  • all in all a very pleasent experience and I had a lot of fun at the 60min CP race at Misano yesterday
  • note: my framerate dropped to below 45fps as it got night and all the building on the main straight very illuminated, I could see that the picture was a little bit jerky in that spot, but nothing serious

Game looked and ran best with Motion Vector interpolation, can only recommend it to try that option out. Just start SteamVR and press the right botton in the G2 controller and then follow the instructions shown on the microsoft website.

Last but not least my settings I'm using atm for ACC. Setting Resolution Scale to 70%, Pixel Density to 140% and enable Temporal Upsampling worked also really well for me, made the picture of the game a lot sharper, the headset was always sharp

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[MelBonkers]

@MelBonkers @Puffpirat did you achieve your G2's until now? ;-)

I did some more testing in ACC, because I wasn't really happy what I saw in the first days. So these are couple of infos I can share.

• 60Hz mode does not work for me, every white or brighter surface is shimmering and flickering like hell, probably of this persistance reducing thingy (showing colors, turn every pixel off, then show the next picture)
• 90Hz mode with Motion Smoothing forced by steamVR worked quite good for me
  • sadly there is some kind of bug, especially at Monza for me, that the framerate drops below 45fps but CPU and GPU aren't maxed out
  • on top the picture was a little bit washed out and didn't look to great
• 90Hz mode with Motion Smoothing disabled and locked 45-47fps by the game --> don't even think about it, the tearing in corners is just aweful
• 90Hz mode with Motion Smoothing by WMR and game locked to 46fps to force Motion Smoothing
  • for info see here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...enabling-motion-reprojection-for-steamvr-apps
  • worked quite good, stable 45fps at Nürburgring for me, some artifacts and tearing when moving your head and some dropped frames here and there (at least it felt like)
• 90Hz mode with Motion vector by WMR and game locked to 46fps to force Motion vector interpolation
  • worked really well, stable and very clear picture, no tearing, no dropped frames
  • all in all a very pleasent experience and I had a lot of fun at the 60min CP race at Misano yesterday
  • note: my framerate dropped to below 45fps as it got night and all the building on the main straight very illuminated, I could see that the picture was a little bit jerky in that spot, but nothing serious

Game looked and ran best with Motion Vector interpolation, can only recommend it to try that option out. Just start SteamVR and press the right botton in the G2 controller and then follow the instructions shown on the microsoft website.

Last but not least my settings I'm using atm for ACC. Setting Resolution Scale to 70%, Pixel Density to 140% and enable Temporal Upsampling worked also really well for me, made the picture of the game a lot sharper, the headset was always sharp

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Thanx @Excited for sharing this comprehensive and detailed information. I will definitely check this out the moment I get the G2. Mine was sent out from Germany last Thursday and is due to arrive next Tuesday. I'm sure I'll get some time in the holidays to try it out.

@Puffpirat , did you also order the G2? Didn't know that!

 

[Puffpirat]

Yes I did indeed should arrive first week of January. At least that was the last info from Mediamarkt

 

[Exited]

Extremely informative and nice explaining video by Karl Gosling about the SteamVR render resolution and G2 native resolution topic

There is also a follow up with some more details about VR image processing, cool stuff, I liked it a lot.

After watching that I did my maths again to compare the CV1 with the G2 in terms of pixels.

• CV1
  • 1328 * 1584 * 2 * 1,3 = 5,5mio pixels (vertical resolution * horizontal resolution * 2 displays * Pixel Density in ACC)
• G2
  • steamVR render resolution set to 50%, no chance for higher with a 1080Ti
  • 2160 * 2100 * 2 = 9 mio pixels (vertical resolution * horizontal resolution * 2 displays)

So its "only" 3,5mio or 65% more pixels to calculate for my 1080Ti at the moment and not something like 240%. This also explains why my GPU load only increased by 30-40% and my 1080Ti is able to feed the G2 in first place
Also found out the hard way that my current settings only work in best case scenarios at 10-16pm ingame. As soon as I get somewhere near to sunrise or sunset, the sun is standing not so high in the sky, the shadows become extremly long and extremly big, which tanks my framerate always to around 30 Probably need to go back to 'high' shadow settings and maybe also reduced shadow distance....

 

[Havocc]

Ultra level details have always diminishing returns in terms of quality gain/performance loss