I got the G2!

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

So, eventually, my G2 arrived today. I was so excited. 
To start with, we played some silly rollercoaster games on steam VR and played around in the WMR room. Wow. Few moments of literally falling out of the chair. Amazing stuff. 
 

So, once the kids and wife left (the wife with dizziness ha!) it was time to setup MSFS VR! 
I run a 9900KS water cooled at 5GHz. 3090. 32GB RAM and normally run it at ultra settings at 4K. It’s smooth. And looks stunning. 
On to VR then, I left open XR and all default settings and loaded the sim. Setup the controls. It had auto reduced my render scale down to 80. So I popped that back up to 100, and then reduced it using open XR down to 80. 
Ive set my settings from ranging medium up to high up to ultra. Depending on the particular setting. I’ve no idea what FPS I’m getting as I haven’t checked. However it is *kind of smooth*. Well it appears that way with the headset on. Sometimes you get kind of a ground skipping effect. Not sure how that can be mitigated. 
 

The feeling is surreal. I wouldn’t quite say it was like real life. It was sort of being like in an alternate reality. Hard to describe really. The lighting effects are unbelievable, especially at night. You actually feel like you’ve turned the light on! Overall (when it is smooth) it’s stunning! 
 

issues:- I find the blurriness a bit too much. Outside of the sweet spot (which I now know what that is!) it’s like I’ve taken my glasses off. Or my contact lenses are stuck. I naturally keep blinking to re focus, which obviously doesn’t help. So that’s a bit of a shame. 
 

I think Asobo have got some serious work ahead if they want people to use VR. Does it work? Yeah, barely. My system isn’t exactly cheap. 
 

Overall, I’ll probably test it out over the next few weeks and see how I get on. I’ll have to get used to the bluriness though. I wonder if the nvidia sharpening tool would have any effect on it? 
Overall I’d say, if you can afFord it, it’s well worth it. Although there is some adjustment required. 
 

PS I’ve never used VR before. 

[Nedo68 533]

hehe very nice first experince 😁 you will fine tune it the next days i am sure.

VR is really special, i still cant play Alien Isolation on Steam for a longer time, its to scary,

you have to try this one day by yourself. It is a difference to sit in front of a monitor and feel safe

or to be inside the monitor in the VR world 😅

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

20 minutes ago, Nedo68 said:

you will fine tune it the next days i am sure.

I hope so, I keep getting random CTD’s. Think it might be related to honeycomb bravo with vjoy setup. 

[bszuch 95]

Glad you got it!.. We have fairly similar builds.   Ultra settings I use for building, textures, windshield effects and clouds.  both LOD settings for me are at 175.  I absolutely recommend using the Nvidia sharpening.  It's too grainy in 2D. but works well in VR.  Sounds like you've got the basics between OpenXR / WMR and the sim (Win store version for me) setup correctly.   BTW,  (for the scary entertaining department...) you need Face Your Fears (free from the Oculus store).  You can setup an Oculus account and there's a converter on the web to run it through Steam VR Beta.

[threexgreen 3,156]

I remember you asking a few questions about VR and the G2 in another thread some time ago. Good to see you're enjoying it.

The sweet spot is indeed rather small and it's definitely a downside with this headset, although I don't mind it anymore now that I've been using my G2 for simming and other games for 1 1/2 months. It's a matter of getting used to. Other than that the G2 is very solid, especially the clear picture (in the sweet spot) is an actual leap forward for VR. The days of not being able to read something or seeing pixels everywhere you look are over with this headset. The sweet spot compromise is the only thing keeping me from agreeing with the PR slogan of this being a next generation headset.

As for settings and performance, VR in general is very demanding even on the highest-end GPUs and while it runs smoothly nevertheless in other VR games, flight sims are a tough one, VR or not. You will definitely have to lower settings and make compromises and even then there will be times (densely populated areas, approaching a large 3rd party airport with loads of traffic, etc.) when it's not going to be as smooth as other VR games.

I've been flying in VR for at least a year now and it's undoubtedly one, if not the, best investment in hardware I've made. Same old praise of VR you see all over the forums I know, but it's true. It's propelled my simming experience from simulating a 737 flight on my PC to 'excuse me while I go take my 737 for a spin'. The wow-effect never really wears off for me, every time I put on the headset or put it back on after taking a break during cruise I feel like I'm truly in a cockpit at 35000 feet.

The immersion is one thing, the other is what flying the aircraft is like. I have full sense of distance, height, speed, even momentum. I 'feel' the mass of the airliner and its size. Upon rotation, touch down or even in-flight whenever the nose is at a higher angle I feel how I'm higher than the rest of the aircraft sitting in the cockpit. Landing in higher crosswinds is especially impressive because you can clearly see and feel how you, sitting in your seat, are offset from the runway, not just the plane on the screen. Handling the aircraft is so natural and intuitive it's unreal (or, rather, real).

Edited February 12, 2021 by threegreen
Added paragraph.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

13 minutes ago, bszuch said:

Ultra settings I use for building, textures, windshield effects and clouds.  both LOD settings for me are at 175. 

How you managing to run such high settings?! 

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

4 minutes ago, threegreen said:

The immersion is one thing, the other is what flying the aircraft is like. I have full sense of distance, height, speed, even momentum.

The only thing I wish is that the FOV was bigger.....

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

42 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

hope so, I keep getting random CTD’s. Think it might be related to honeycomb bravo with vjoy setup. 

It is Sim connect causing this, guess ill wait for the update...

[threexgreen 3,156]

16 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

The only thing I wish is that the FOV was bigger.....

Me too. That's one aspect in which VR still has a way to go, we're just not quite there yet. There are headsets with a wider FOV horizontally like the Index for example, but that is still not near the FOV the human eyes have and it's much less clear/sharp than the G2. Personally, I think resolution and clarity are what's most important for VR headsets to improve on at the moment because a human-like FOV in itself is amazing, but if the compromise is that I can't read what's in front of me I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that amazing FOV then. There's also the Pimax 8K which has the widest FOV of all consumer headsets at the moment (though not as wide as they advertise it to be) but it's not as clear as the G2 and it's very expensive. That's where the issue is: bigger FOV means more pixels which means more computing power needed. There are no headsets with the resolution and clarity of the G2 and at the same time a very wide, if not human-like, FOV and even if there were, even the highest end GPUs we currently have wouldn't be able to handle that. We are still a few generations away from that, so it's a bit of a compromise for now.

Edited February 12, 2021 by threegreen

[bszuch 95]

I don't pay attention to FPS for one, but simply is it smooth.  VR in MSFS seems to take about 10-20 seconds once in the cockpit to get sorted out, so don't make adjustments based on the that.  I assume some of that is weather loading, and AI updating in the scene, but is good to go after that.  I am running 80 in OpenXR, no motion reprojection, and 100 in the sim (as I think you are as well..)  I can't believe my 10900KF (OC'd to 5.0) is that different than your CPU oc'd to the same.  The biggest thing that affects smoothness for me is the LOD settings.  As much as I would love to push 200, I've found 175 is the sweet spot, where the inherent lack of clarity in VR blends well with the terrain beyond that point, trees and buildings don't pop in and out (trees at MED btw) and there isn't this abrupt cutoff of where they stop in the distance.  I fly the 172, TBM, C4J, and FBW A320 and don't have an issue with any of them.  There are some decent posts both in this MSFS VR forum and vids about general PC settings that have had a positive effect on VR performance. Also I believe I'm running an older Nvidia driver that was touted as more beneficial. A lot of what I tried seemed placebo, but I've gotten to where I'm happy with the setting.  You're one day in....  Mine wasn't running that great on day one.

So, how many times did you say OMG in the first ten minutes of flying with it though?.... Anyone with a multimonitor setup that says it "feels" like I'm in the plane, has no idea.  Threegreen very eloquently described the subtle things (crosswind landing etc.) that you miss in 2D.  Won't ever go back....

I'll review all my settings and see if anything jumps out that I haven't mentioned and will post back, but it sounds like you've got the big stuff, and absolutely have the hardware to handle it.  

[Nedo68 533]

1 hour ago, threegreen said:

There are headsets with a wider FOV horizontally like the Index for example,

That, and people should know you can read everything inside the cockpit with the Index too, it sounds as it is only possible with the new G2, it is way overrated 😄

i tested the G2 and it makes no sense to upgrade if you are coming from the Index.

But the price of the G2 is good for VR starters!

 

[rickjake 247]

1 hour ago, bszuch said:

 

You can setup an Oculus account and there's a converter on the web to run it through Steam VR Beta.

The converter is called Revive. Basically allows games on Oculus account to be played through Steam VR.  I played Oculus's "Lone Echo" on my G2.   Awesome space game.

[rickjake 247]

I can only fly my simulators in VR. Just cannot go back to a monitor, even my 47" curved 4K monitor does not give you that feeling of being inside the cockpit looking out feeling. 

As others have said, the feeling of depth, speed, angle of attack, how high off the round you are, etc,  is far more immersive in VR.  I find landing much easier in VR.

I did find that in MSFS, I was not getting the clarity I usually get, say in P3D or DCS. I found that changing the setting in your Windows 10 Mixed reality area, under Headset display, and changing the Experience options from "Let Windows decide" to "Best visual quality" made a big difference. 

[threexgreen 3,156]

39 minutes ago, Nedo68 said:

That, and people should know you can read everything inside the cockpit with the Index too, it sounds as it is only possible with the new G2, it is way overrated 😄

i tested the G2 and it makes no sense to upgrade if you are coming from the Index.

That's not what I said, obviously there are other headsets providing a clear enough picture. However, the G2 does offer the clearest picture. The resolution is 2160x2160 which alone is sharper than the Index e. g. at 1440x1600. What adds to the clarity are the new lenses which make the G2 even sharper than the G1 even though it has the same resolution and without any extra super sampling. With the G2 I can read zoomed out chart details that I cannot read with any other headset I've tried and I don't believe I would be able to do so with any other headset currently available. It's not just about what you can read though, it's also about how sharp what you're reading is.

The G2 is no actual next gen headset like the PR slogan would have you believe, rather it's another good addition to an early albeit solid group of VR headsets. It excels however in its strength, which is resolution/clarity, and is ahead of the competition in this regard.

[MooneyDriver 1]

I've had my G2 a couple of weeks now and agree with another poster this is a close to real life as it gets, especially if you are doing "seat of the pants" flying.  Flying in IMC I go back to the monitor as it is sharper, focused and the mouse hits its hotspots as expected.  But aerobatics and sight-seeing VR is absolutely the best.

I try to avoid using the mouse when in VR and hope voice recognition is coming soon.  Imagine being in full VR and saying "flaps down 1"..."gear down"..."flap down full" instead of trying to fumble around to find a key or get the mouse to hit something on the panel?

For you experts: I'm looking for tips to record video of VR flights.  YouTube has several, mostly suggesting OBS that is raggedy and nasty. I'd like to record full screen through Windows Mixed Reality Portal but haven't found the right setting to create a smooth experience.

Suggestions?