*** HP Reverb G2 Owners Thread ***

Soldato
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Well it serves the purpose i bought it for.

I wanted a capable backup to my index, and it's delivered that. Both are plugged it, it's merely a case of clicking to start either one, with a backup which won't disappoint should either fail.

The G2 as comfortable, if not more so because it's about a third less lighter and less front heavy. The index is built like a tank out of more harden plastics, not so much the G2 which gives it an edge on usage. After a couple of hours with the Index on you tend to start to fiddle, i haven't done that in the G2.

Looks depend very much on what game you have running and what your looking at. A couple of Pinball games for an example, normally overall Zacarria pinball id laud as having the better visuals over Pinball FX. Because FX has a much sharper image you really notice the difference, obviously it isn't but it looks like twice the resolution on the playfield. Zacarria on the other hand with it's softer visual tones looks no different to me than it does on the Index, still brilliant but not the jump from pin sharp to razor sharp like as seen in FX.

Another small sample of games that have exemplified that difference are Squadrons, Smashing the battle VR, and Borderlands. Basically anything that's designed to look high fidelity and razor sharp on a monitor looks the part on this thing, there's no more dumping on VR as a downgraded experience visually when it counts like with dials, displaying small detail or popping art style experiences like BL2. I'll caveat this by saying though that while the nice shiny chrome exhausts on the 70's retro cars in AMS look stunning, trackside visually i couldn't tell the difference between that of the G2/Index.

Performance wise i've not seen a drop off when compared to over sampling my Index, AMS2 is still ultra and running sleek, Squadrons the same. Again though this is all with a 3090, results may vary.

Audio nuff said. While HMD's remain in the form factor they are, nothing beats the off ear solution. It was a reason to buy.

Field of view and the sweet vision spot. It's very much eyes front and centre with the G2, there's a drop distortion when you flick your eyes left or right. Wasn't really an issue for me when i was racing or pinballing because they're both focused front and centre, but id imagine in an open world Skyrim that could be a problem when looking around.

Controls and tracking i've little opinion on, what i tried worked ok. Beat saber, the Forest Vtol VR all worked fine. That said when it comes to Beat Saber or anything else that comes with using the more natural Index/knuckles controls, i won't be using the G2. Using the Virtual flightstick in Vtol felt much better with the dumpy weighted G2 control, but grasping a Index control is where it's at for more natural hand representation, a button to grip and pick objects takes it back to the oldschool.

Not much else to say really, it does the job for me. It'll be 100% the thing i use for 90% of the VR stuff i do, films, pinball, and racing.

Beat Saber and everything else, i just can't ignore what the Index brings with the controllers, nothing compares for more natured VR experiences.
 
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So the more I play with this the better results I'm getting,
My steam resolution setting is now 100% in the 3 games I'm currently playing,
Elite dangerous,
Ams2,
HL Alyx,
Getting 90 fps in each, on my 3080,
Maybe this is common knowledge, and with me still being a vr noob I'm learning as I go,
But I'm turning off AA in both Elite and Ams2,
The clarity and performance you get for a bit of aliasing is a fair trade off imo,
Seems to be a lot of settings in games where you really dont miss them in vr,
Cheers
 
Soldato
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Yeah I found AA was absolutely murdering my performance too. Turning it off was a huge boost in all games I’ve tried, much more so than other headsets I’ve had before... wonder why it seems to specifically be such an issue for the G2
 
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Yeah I found AA was absolutely murdering my performance too. Turning it off was a huge boost in all games I’ve tried, much more so than other headsets I’ve had before... wonder why it seems to specifically be such an issue for the G2
Turning AA off has also cured another issue i was having with AMS2,
It was very noticeable on the first lap in particular, but the cars in front when viewing them going round the corner seemed to leave a ghost trail,
Turned off AA and that went away
 
Soldato
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I don't think I posted this already
last night I hit my 1st tracking limitation where it actually did affect my gameplay a little.
I knew this would be a test, and the good news it is still more than playable and looks and plays beautifully.

In Death... and sure enough if i fire the bow completely naturally i cant quite get full power and it gets a bit janky. All it took was a slight adjustment to how you aim the bow and it is just as much fun, its not like i am using the game to learn archery so over all i am relieved at how playable it still is.

BUT definite victory here on constellation (and therefore lighthouse) tracking.... but not one to make me reconsider my purchase choice
 
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I'm really not getting on very well with this whole thing. I can do things like theBlu that aren't too intensive but I thought this evening would be a good chance to try something a little more involved. So I've setup the Microsoft re-projection stuff and disabled motion smoothing for DCS in SteamVR, thought I was good to give it all a whirl. I've set everything fairly low in terms of graphics as I only have a 2070 super, fpsVR however shows the GPU running at 100% most of the time. I'm trying to run SteamVR at 100% at the moment but I don't actually manage to get the game to run long enough to see the performance. Literally within 5 minutes every time SteamVR drops out with a critical error. Running Windows 10, all bang up to date and all I can find from Googling is to re-install SteamVR which I'm not overly optimistic about. I've enabled the betas for everything so I suppose coming off the betas would be an option.

I'm also find the SteamVR house stutters and jumps all over the place if I launch it a second time without rebooting the whole machine between sessions and fpsVR quite literally lights up red. I have currently gone for the USB C connection but I'm considering trying the adapter as a bit of an out-there clutch at straws. I have also backed Nvidia drivers back to the stable version that someone mentioned too.

Has anyone with more experience of SteamVR got any ideas on the crashing? I've owned a headset for 3 days and all I have done is setup, read and troubleshoot. Hoping I finally get things working a lot better than this as it'll be hard not to be pretty miffed at this rate.
 
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I'm really not getting on very well with this whole thing. I can do things like theBlu that aren't too intensive but I thought this evening would be a good chance to try something a little more involved. So I've setup the Microsoft re-projection stuff and disabled motion smoothing for DCS in SteamVR, thought I was good to give it all a whirl. I've set everything fairly low in terms of graphics as I only have a 2070 super, fpsVR however shows the GPU running at 100% most of the time. I'm trying to run SteamVR at 100% at the moment but I don't actually manage to get the game to run long enough to see the performance. Literally within 5 minutes every time SteamVR drops out with a critical error. Running Windows 10, all bang up to date and all I can find from Googling is to re-install SteamVR which I'm not overly optimistic about. I've enabled the betas for everything so I suppose coming off the betas would be an option.

I'm also find the SteamVR house stutters and jumps all over the place if I launch it a second time without rebooting the whole machine between sessions and fpsVR quite literally lights up red. I have currently gone for the USB C connection but I'm considering trying the adapter as a bit of an out-there clutch at straws. I have also backed Nvidia drivers back to the stable version that someone mentioned too.

Has anyone with more experience of SteamVR got any ideas on the crashing? I've owned a headset for 3 days and all I have done is setup, read and troubleshoot. Hoping I finally get things working a lot better than this as it'll be hard not to be pretty miffed at this rate.
do you have windows mixed reality installed on steam?
Some times it bugs out for me but i only have to restart steam, not pc
 
Soldato
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@BluecatR Reinstalling Steam VR is a painless task. Takes but a few minutes.

And I would opt out of the Beta Steam VR for the moment.

Did you try disabling the Nvidia Geforce Overlay? And Turning off AA in game?
 
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@BluecatR Reinstalling Steam VR is a painless task. Takes but a few minutes.

And I would opt out of the Beta Steam VR for the moment.

Did you try disabling the Nvidia Geforce Overlay? And Turning off AA in game?

Thanks for the advice guys, I'm going to revert everything back to standard, including a clean install of Nvidia drivers, SteamVR and Steam WMR. Haven't tried disabling AA no, is the idea with that thinking along the lines that the crash is related to the GPU being maxed? I don't install the Geforce experience so no overlay
 
Soldato
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Thanks for the advice guys, I'm going to revert everything back to standard, including a clean install of Nvidia drivers, SteamVR and Steam WMR. Haven't tried disabling AA no, is the idea with that thinking along the lines that the crash is related to the GPU being maxed? I don't install the Geforce experience so no overlay

Just Dave had some success with his Reverb G2 by turning off AA in games that were giving problems.
 
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Thanks for the advice guys, I'm going to revert everything back to standard, including a clean install of Nvidia drivers, SteamVR and Steam WMR. Haven't tried disabling AA no, is the idea with that thinking along the lines that the crash is related to the GPU being maxed? I don't install the Geforce experience so no overlay
See you have a 2070 super, Zeeflyboy had to use steam resolution at 50% he said, think he was also 2070 super, plus he rolled back to older nvidia driver, his post will be in this thread somewhere explaining which one,
Not sure about the crashes,
sometimes steam home environment bugs out, and a quick restart of steam works for me,
AA in games aint helping me so im turning off
 
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50% appears to equate to around the native resolution. So anything higher is supersampling right?

50% looks so much better than the quest as is, looks great to me and I'm on a 3080. I would say trying to run at 100% on a 2070S isn't the best idea (game dependent)...
 
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50% appears to equate to around the native resolution. So anything higher is supersampling right?

50% looks so much better than the quest as is, looks great to me and I'm on a 3080. I would say trying to run at 100% on a 2070S isn't the best idea (game dependent)...
Thats what i thought but zeeflyboy seems to know some good info he pointed out to me, as follows

Putting it to 50% to reduce the rendering load and make your games more playable, absolutely. But all this nonsense about the steam setting being wrong and "correcting it" by setting as close to "native" as you can needs to stop, as it is straight up mis-information. If you are running at what you believe to be native resolution you are in fact significantly under sampling and will suffer a significant downgrade in clarity as a result. At 100% all VR headsets render to a buffer at a significantly higher resolution than the panel resolution (around 140%) so that they can apply barrel distortion correction and then send the 2160x2160 distortion corrected image to the headset. If you reduce the render target you reduce the amount of data it can sample from for the corrected image and will just end up receiving an undersampled 2160x2160 distortion corrected frame to the headset.

after turning off AA in my games and running at 100% on my 3080, it is a massive difference, and more inline with what i was expecting with this headset,
Note steam auto resolution setting is 144%, that is too high
 
Soldato
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As much as it sucks still sitting here waiting for my G2, it's been quite good hearing everyone's thoughts on it plus all the tips and tricks. Really looking forward to it now. Hopefully have it nest week!
 
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Anyone had any issues with Boneworks?

I've miraculously got the sound to work today, don't know what i did it just started working
so I played some Saints and Sinners, worked absolutely fine performance wise, no idea on fps but it felt fine to me. I then load up Boneworks and the performance is so stuttery and my character is constantly kneeling and i'm about 2ft tall, the controls become unresponsive and the steam menu wont open properly as it starts to open at an angle and i can't interact with the settings

Also aside from this my resolution setting in SteamVR is set to 50% as the resolution numbers are that of the lenses, are we able to go higher than that and actually have a difference in visuals? And am not sure what to set the reprojection to, it's on auto at the moment is that a good choice? Running on a 3070.
 
Soldato
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Anyone suffering performance issues in racing games, give the mixed reality motion a try.

For the fun of it i defaulted the G2 res to 150% on ACC and enabled the WMR motion smoothing (not steamVR). All that on the epic vr in game default.

I was blown away by the clarity, on everything from the track/side, cars and the visual horizon. I dare to say it, almost as good as it looks on a monitor. Also to say i've never seen the game run so fluidly in VR, a total game changer for me.

Maybe not so mad on upscaling the rez if you've a 3080/70 or lesser with lower vram, but id be interested to hear some opinions. Personally i'm totally elated with this, i can't believe it.
 
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Following my problems I literally took everything off and started from scratch. No betas etc. I also went back to Steam motion smoothing and left the WMR reprojection off. It appeared to have stabilised and no further crashes, except me trying to get off the runway that is. I then went back to the WMR reprojection setting to auto and disabled steam motion smoothing. Up until this point I'd stuck with the 100% resolution in Steam due to the previous comments about it not being a bug etc and to try and stick as close to 100% as possible. I'd already gone back to the version of Nvidia drivers that Zeeflyboy recommended but I clean re-installed them too. On 100% with WMR reprojection I was still getting a lot of load on the GPU and after about 10 mins I got the same SteamVR crash so this is potentially a load problem. Rebooted and then took the resolution down to 50% and the GPU is coping a lot better. I guess now I see how far I can raise it up whilst keeping it stable and >=45 fps, and try with AA off as well. Has anyone had much success with the OpenXR developer setting I've seen on Youtube? After 20 mins of having my back side handed to me by the AI in DCS I now feel like I stayed in a wee bit too long. It's certainly more expensive than beer but the effects are about the same. I have much to learn in both VR configuration and air combat tactics, but also got a long way to go to earn my legs.
 
Soldato
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I’ve found 76% (on the steam VR beta) to be a good global setting on the 2070S... you can of course tweak per game settings from there for more or less demanding games.

You can install the openXR for wmr app from the windows store, not sure if any games are using it yet. It’s more of a benefit to developers than a performance win, it just allows their games to be largely hardware agnostic. I suppose the advantage for users is that as more games deploy openXR you can potentially drop steamVR runtime and play them on the WMR app natively, potentially removing a performance overhead from having to have both applications running.

OpenXR does have an even further step of reprojection though where it can do 1 in 3, so 30fps interpolated to 90 but I have no idea how well that works. I suspect we might find out when some of us plebs with last gen cards try to run MSFS2020 in VR lol.
 
Soldato
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Turning AA off has also cured another issue i was having with AMS2,
It was very noticeable on the first lap in particular, but the cars in front when viewing them going round the corner seemed to leave a ghost trail,
Turned off AA and that went away

I hope the 3080 can handle some AA with the G2's resolution after the software gets sorted.

I'm running a G1 with a 1080 Ti. (Same resolution as G2) AMS2/PC2 looks plain but sharp with 136% SS, no AA and low-ish settings. (And it holds 90fps for clear weather day races) I want a 3080 so that I can run some shadows, grass, and AA while still holding 90fps.

The grass is a small thing, detailed shadows helps with immersion, and AA is the main thing I want to get out of a GPU upgrade. Maybe stay close to 90fps when it rains. I don't expect to be able to max everything out, but i want noticeably better visuals than my 1080 Ti offers, or there's not much point in a GPU upgrade for me.
 
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