cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

HP Reverb First Impressions Thread (Gen 1)

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
Some very quick first impressions and that's without experimenting with Super-sampling.

Ok, well I have that horrible vertical line in my headset which hopefully I'll get fixed or replaced but despite that. Wow, just wow. One word..."clarity".

More words.

Very nice headset all-round. Reasonably comfy but that cable is awful. I mean really bad and terribly distracting. Needs to be fixed to something to not become a hindrance. Headphones feel cheap  and the red smear is not very good when you abnormally move your head from side to side all fast like. In normal situations you won't notice it so much. SDE is so minimal it's the finest mesh like silk. Mura is there for sure such as looking at the sky you will notice it quite a bit.

Fallout 4 VR - Holy crap. Now this is how it's meant to be seen. Mindblowing, and I rarely use such hyperbolic phrases. Up close detail you'll see the textures as you would playing on a monitor. Distance details are just perfect now. NO MORE BLUR you can easily define medium range and long range objects which gives the game a complete overhaul on the visuals. Wonderful and if you're a FO4VR fan then nothing beats this crisp display.  Period. 

PCARS 2 - Ok I struggled a little to find the right sweetspot and keep it there. But once there this is it guys. The game just looks like it's meant to be on this headset. Nice details on the track and close up cars. Distant cars also look much better, they still can get fuzzy but none of that blur you might be used to. This is pretty awesome now and just looks great.

SLR APP/Movie viewing - Nice sharp visuals but you are restricted to the quality of the source material. The SLR thumbnails look fantastically crisp and the videos great. I ran a 4K gameplay video from one of my recordings and it looks really nice, so much clearer than any other VR headset. So if you have 4K movies then they are going to shine on this headset. I tried some older 1080p 3D movies but they didn't look much different to other headsets.

Desktop - wow now this is really nice. You can actually work with this now. Comfortably. See all the text and no shimmer or SDE to mess up your view. Really workable as an alternative to a monitor now. Nice vibrant colours and good contrast. I do notice what seems to be a fixed foveted rendering technique though where the center focus is incredibly sharp and when you move your eyes and head to another part of the screen it seems to catch up and then focus really sharp.I think HP talked about this with the way the screens are calibrated. 

Elite Dangerous: OK you're still getting these LCD blacks but the text readability is fantastic now without a shadow of a doubt. No distorted letters even in the info pane which has the smallest text it's easy to read, no leaning in. I just docked with one of the space stations and whilst there is still some shimmer on some finer lines/edges (there's a technical name for that which escapes me) it's nice a crisp and looks like a space station rather than a blurry mess of lights and protracting parts. Really clean. Upon entering the opening into the docking area...mind-blown! I really loved the extended FOV of the Pimax 8K in Elite D, made it feel more real, but I think I would sacrifice that for this wonderful clarity. I'll say it again if Pimax 8K X delivers the FOV and the same clarity then wowsers. I'm not holding my breath though, focusing on the here and now.

Even with the negatives, I can see this being a really great headset for the VR connoisseur. I am wondering how close the Pimax 8KX can match this as its increased FOV will stretch the pixel density. Either way, £600 well spent thus far and I will no doubt get lots of use from this headset and sadly the Pimax 8K will get boxed. Quest/Reverb combo for the win here for anyone serious about VR.



System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.
376 REPLIES 376

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
yeh I fully intend to buy it again once it's back in stock. I just can't get it out of my head how dreamy Fallout 4 looked.


System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.

Luciferous
Consultant
Well now you have spoiled yourselves, no going back now ?

Techy111
MVP
MVP
My unit has been authorised for return, haven't said anything about stock to me yet.
A PC with lots of gadgets inside and a thing to see in 3D that you put on your head.

RuneSR2
Grand Champion


Well now you have spoiled yourselves, no going back now ?


Spoiled or soiled?  😄 (sorry, bad joke from a CV1 owner - but I couldn't resist writing this post :blush: )

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

hoppingbunny123
Rising Star
too bad about the lack of ipd adjustment though. and the tight fit so glasses are a no no.

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
After hearing how much the 8KX is likely to cost, that seems like a pipe-dream for now and even then, It might not offer the same visual clarity as the Reverb. I am hoping to dive in again in a few weeks. I really don't think any other headset in this price range will compete for a while despite some serious contenders on the horizon.


System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.

forestguy
Expert Protege
Yes the clarity is the best ever I've seen, however, the issues outweigh the pros with the HP Reverb, I was so enthusiastic about it pre and during, basic things like having a Max IPD of 67 (forget about it being software only for a minute) limits a lot of people having a comfortable experience regardless of the clarity.

RedRizla
Honored Visionary
This is another company that is getting added to my list of joke companies. The people at HP seem to change their minds from one day to the next or even minute by minute. I cancelled my HP Reverb after hearing about the disconnects and other problems people were experiencing, but then thought I need to try it out for myself because not everyone has these issues.
Not only did I get it £25 cheaper on my previous order (price error I think), but they now tell me I can't even pre-order this headset anymore. They previously told me they would be getting more stock at the end of June and then they told me it would be July. Now they say they don't know when they are getting them in again. Just before I end the call, they then tell me they could be getting them in at the end of June again?
I don't think I've ever dealt with a company that seem so clueless about their own product. Maybe something is telling me not to order this headset when it's back in stock at the end of June, July, this year or next year. I've never known a company that know so little about their own products.

FX2K
Heroic Explorer

Techy111 said:

My unit has been authorised for return, haven't said anything about stock to me yet.


Same here, except its been returned now and arrived at HP today... will begin hassling them tomorrow 🙂
CV1: Ordered 6th Jan 2016 - Est Delivery Some time in May... DK2: Ordered: 8th of Aug 2014 - Delivered: 14 Oct 2014

Globespy
Expert Protege

RedRizla said:

@kevinw729 -  I have to wonder why Oculus didn't just build and design Rift S themselves. Nobody told Oculus to release a PC -VR headset right now. But even if they were listening to the Pc -VR crowd getting restless for a new headset, then why didn't they just build something like the Oculus Quest for PC?
What I can't get my head around is that it must cost more to build an Oculus Quest then it does to build a Rift S. If it's just the halo design of the Rift S that brings it to the price of the Oculus Quest, then I'm sure people would have preferred the Oculus Quest design with speakers included etc.
Anyways, I'm having fun with my Rift CV1 and hopefully we will see something as good as this with an increase in resolution in the future.


I honestly don't think Oculus has any focus on moving the PC enthusiast level hardware forwards.
And from a business perspective, you can't blame them as the hardware requirements to get a great VR experience in the absence of true eye-tracked foveated rendering are outside the grasp of the majority of customers.

It's simple math, you can't add millions of pixels to be rendered and just expect it to work on the same 'recommended' hardware requirements, which are always a joke anyway.

You need minimum 8700K and 1080ti for Reverb, and you will be making compromises.
Ideally a 9900k and 2080ti, but right now there's little advantage to the 2080ti over the 1080ti to make it worth the double price.
I have both and until we see more native DX12 games, the DX11 CPU bottleneck is going to limit what the GPU can do.

The only way Oculus can move the dial on next gen VR is to have eye tracked foveated rendering and/or with game developer DX12 adoption - Pimax at least tried with 'fixed foveated rendering, but that means you have to move your head to ensure you are in the sweet spot and that's hardly ideal.

The reverb is a nice idea, but ultimately it's not going to take over the market in the consumer space simply because of the hardware specs needed to realize its potential. It was really designed as a professional headset for business use where being able to read text clearly was the priority.
It was never rally designed with the sole purpose of driving the extremely intensive computer games many of us use VR for, they just thought they would make some extra money selling to consumers who wanted it.

I can understand the feedback that will come from my post, there's a natural tendency to defend one's financial purchase and the bias that comes with that. 
But at the end of the day, can the average user who owns a low-mid range PC have a great VR experience?
The answer is no, and that's why it will fail as a consumer product - not because of it's capabilities.
It's a nice headset (with a few issues of course), but it caters to at best 5% of the PC home user/gamer community with regards to hardware, and those numbers don't move tech forwards.