What's the best VR headset for simracing currently?

That’s is a scary thought indeed.

 

I can fully understand you. Not so long ago my audio headset became a victim of the curious cats
Now I own a wireless audio headset

 

How do you guys sleep at night?

 

I only play in VR if my wife hangs around. Or when she is not, I lock all doors etc. Keep one ear free from the headphone..

No I don't deal in narcotics

 

If the headset is purely for sims - ie stationary ( ish) seated then Reverb , Index .
The other way around if you want to prance about in a virtual world.

Of course the G2 when available will be another contender.

I have the Reverb and have had no real issues with AMS2 . But it really depends on how strong your proverbial "VR legs" are. And how much horsepower you have.
The next gen of Navi and Amperes I believe will raise the bar on VR performance.

 

Looking at your PC specs, you should've been fine for smooth VR experience with the Oculus Rift CV1. We have plenty of folks in our racing league that use PCars2 with a GTX1080 and the CV1 and hit consistent 90fps in all conditions with a 26 car grid.

GTX1080 and a 6 thread CPU is the bare minimum I would recommend for the CV1 and HTC Vive. Yes you do have to turn down a lot of the eye candy, turn OFF MSAA (or any AA) and set the VR Super Sampling to below 1.3 but the game seems to be able run @ 90fps without issues. Additionally, ASW needs to be turned OFF in the Oculus Debug Tool because if it is ON, it will drop down to 45fps for some reason occasionally.

 

And that's the killer! I can't stand aliasing! The Rift was so low res and couldn't run smooth on my PC probably because I needed to run AA. PC2 looks aliased at 4k even and needed AA on my 40" 4k monitor.
Like I said, I'm into triples for the long haul now.

 

Do you think a RTX 2080 will be enough for the Reverb G2? Or is it a headset made for the next generation video cards?

 

I'm considering getting a G2 but not until they've been out for a little while. I guess a 2080/ti will be enough to run it on low settings but fully expect I'll need to upgrade to 3080ti to get the best from it.

 

I would recommend a RTX2080 Super minimum for Sim racing with the Reverb G1 or G2 (since they have the same resolution). The good thing about the Reverb is, the resolution is so high, you don't need to run any SS in game.

 

@F1 Hero do you have the 2080 already or you upgrading as well? If I was buying right now I'd go with a 2080 Super, I wouldn't buy right now though. If you have the 2080 already you should be ok with it and a decent OC.

Remember with the G2 you'll have the option to run it at 60hz. In my experience this is totally acceptable. Solid 90 is obviously preferable but I would take solid 60 over reprojection. It really depends what's more important to you image quality vs frames. Some will swear up and down 60hz is unacceptable but tons of people get on fine with it, there was uproar when windows messed with it last year. It not optimal but for some its been the difference between borderline unplayable and a hugely enjoyable experience.

 

I dont know that this is necessarily true. Even extremely high resolution headsets will have jaggies, and most everyone supersamples to at least some extent to remove that. Essentially the native resolution of a headset doesnt matter as much, since the view of the display is extremely warped through the lens.

The key is to super sample as much as possible which is running it at extremely high resolution, and then downscaling it to the headset, which is what most people are doing. Steam VR does this automatically for most of us based on our hardware. You can fight it if you want but Ive had very mixed results.

Since all of us are already running this game at higher resolutions than is native to our headsets, Im not even sure that the higher native resolution of the Reverb G2 even matters. My 2070 Super is set to supersample AMS2 at 130% by SteamVR, and my odyssey plus is 1,440 x 1,600 per eye. Reverb G2 runs 2160x2160 per eye. Keep in mind that my Odyssey Plus run my 2070S at around 65-70 percent load at 130% super sampling. Some rough math says that its roughly equivalent to running 1750x1750. It's about halfway in between. But SteamVR can ALSO downsample!

Granted, I would get the absolutely best video card you can afford for VR. It makes a huge difference. Even if you somehow got a better card than needed, you would see directly improved visuals due to supersampling alone.

 

psone, I already have the 2080. I bought it last year. Incredible how fast things become obsolete on this PC world. People are saying the RTX 3080ti will be 40% faster than the 2080ti.

Anyway, the G2 seems to be the best VR headset in the world now. It would make no sense to me buy another, with similar price but inferior quality. It seems that I will have to save a little more money to a GPU update later.

 

Yup there is a lot of talk going around at the moment. There have been so many leaks for this series its unreal. We'll see what the exact numbers are in a couple of weeks, but seemingly this is going to be a significant increase. It could be a case where a 3070 is equivalent to a 2080ti. Which would be great, but at the same time Nvidia can do what they like with their pricing, for the moment at least, if the 3090 is a thing then maybe we see them add another price category above where the 2080ti was which is a scarey thought. They won't have anything to worry about from AMD at launch so maybe we see some brutal pricing, then AMD drop Big Navi which maybe competes at 3070/3080 levels, Nvidia do another refresh like the Supers and/or price match and somewhere in all that mess we get a card that is probably still seriously overpriced but can run a G2 well and we all spin off into VR nirvana.

So yeah, I'm hoping for minimum 2080ti performance for significantly less $$$ whether that comes from AMD or Nvidia is fine with me. Also there'll be big reshuffle of used prices as well which is always another option.

 

I've just got into VR with an Oculus Quest over Oculus Link (just a USB 3 cable!), and it works quite well. Anyway, because I'm just getting into it, I've been looking at lots of videos, and there's one that shows the Reverb G2 at half resolution, and it still looks a lot better than (I think) a Rift-S. So, if you have the money and know you're going to upgrade your CPU and/or GPU in the next year, then the G2 is still a viable option (before you ask, I didn't have the money!).

 

I don't know if this is due to a difference between how Oculus do SS and Steam does it but the best image quality for me on Rift CV1 comes from running at native res (i.e. no SS) and using MSAA as high as possible without frame loss. MSAA is much more efficient and SS (on Oculus at least) causes more shimmering of the image. Edges look smoother using MSAA alone than SS or a combination.

When I get the G2 I expect it will be the same, run at native res and use MSAA for best image quality and performance.

 

I've own/have owned the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Pro (with and without GearVR lens mod) and HP Reverb. Higher resolution absolutely changes the experience in VR. Looking through the HP Reverb is the closest thing to looking at monitor resolution in VR. The difference is stunning. The level of detail you see can't be replicated with a lower resolution headset. Sorry, no amount of Super Sampling will make up for the level of clarity you see in a higher resolution headset, trust me I have tried. I keep the Oculus CV1 as a back up headset and from time to time switchback to it and everything is a blurry mess.

Most sims feel like a completely different game with lower quality rudimentary graphics, the difference is that pronounced. Yes, with higher SS the jaggies are reduced but the details are still greatly lacking and simply can't be rendered. In the HP Reverb, I can see details that simply can't be rendered properly in the lower quality headsets, the same games feel like a completely different experience. With that being said, SS did greatly help the HTC Vive Pro over native rez (same rez as the Samsung Odessey plus) but it was still not up to the same level of clarity and detail as the HP Reverb in back to back testing. Plus when the resolution is that high, you don't need to run SS, it's actually better to run some MSAA. Games like PCars2 and AMS2 look almost picture perfect.

 

@F1 Hero if you already own a RTX 2080, you should be fine with the Reverb G2, IMHO. If you just may not be able to run any MSAA in game. I have mine on preorder, hoping they start sending units out in September.

 

Systemactive in the UK were initially saying Sep 15th for day 1 delivery but has been changed on their site to Autumn. I’m not sure whether they were told to take it down, the date has actually changed or wasn’t correct in the first place?