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The Index thread (please keep to subject)

Techy111
MVP
MVP
As per the title, please respect the users who post here and keep it on topic, any nonsense and......grrr
A PC with lots of gadgets inside and a thing to see in 3D that you put on your head.

2,973 REPLIES 2,973

Anonymous
Not applicable
I'm in Van myself...Strathcona. Thanks for the review. I was considering it for the 120Hz, and originally the off-the-ear headphones sounded cool, but then I got to thinking that I'd just hear my fridge hum, and my neighbours' noise, taking me out of that immersion. I'm in a bachelor suite, with thin walls. I usually keep a spot fan running just for white noise to drown it out. And as cool as the Knuckles are, how much does it really add to the game to be able to use each finger individually? Except for hand gestures, not much. I'll pass.

Borscht4eVR
Heroic Explorer

Spuzzum said:

.as.. cool as the Knuckles are, how much does it really add to the game to be able to use each finger individually? Except for hand gestures, not much. I'll pass.


We'll see if Half Life Alyx has something special to offer for finger tracking (once it comes out), but for now I agree wholeheartedly.
Btw, Strathcona isn't all that far from here. I'm in West End (Robson & Bute area). If you'd like to give Index a solid test, you're welcome to check it out. Just ping me a message; I wish I had a chance to do a test before I bought mine.
This forum has direct messaging, I hope. I never really checked

RuneSR2
Grand Champion


Clickgate is back =(

Just received my Index kit, and the left controller's thumbstick doesn't click in the leftmost position. All other positions work. Right thumbstick is OK too.

Kinda bites, especially given that here in Canada the kit costs $1,477 after all is said and done.

Oh, and 28 cents too, if anyone is counting pennies 😛


You can check in SteamVR that all button presses register. According to Valve, thumbstick pressed down may not click, but it must register. You should be able to press down the thumbstick and get registration in the periphery (like positions north-south-east-west etc.). Or try some Arizona Sunshine - does everything work, can you sprint (requires thumbstick pressed down)?

Clicks may not be important (unless they don't register), it's more the drifting that may develop later on.

If you have GTX 1080 or better you may be able to increase res to 150 or even higher in several games. And remember to check out Revive (Stormland is not yet supported, the Revive dev just moved and it may take some weeks before he's back): 

 https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive/releases

You could try Pistol Whip, Vanishing Realms and Lucky's Tale using res 200% for a start 😉 

Find games with full Index support here - note that not all support full finger tracking:

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/valve_index_featured_games/

Looks like you've got no disturbing inverted vertical pixel lines, so there's that B)

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"

Anonymous
Not applicable
Wow...you live in the ritzy part of town. 😛 Nice and close to the beach. 🙂 I was actually down that way yesterday...well, Robson and Thurlow, anyway, walking to Thurlow and Davie area...Dana Larsen's Dispensary. 🙂 I wouldn't mind seeing what the hype is about...maybe after Christmas, when everything's all settled down. 🙂

Cheers.

Anonymous
Not applicable
Yes, that is one of the cons in plus about the Index controllers - force grip and all finger tracking - but at a super high cost to what the Touch controllers cost $250 vs $75 that has a button and only tracks a few.

Honestly - at 1k$ the big cost is the controllers and the base-stations witch is what is holding me back from purchasing it. The headset cost seems fine and reasonable for what is inside it. The value of what the controllers really offer seems a bit weird for the price.

RuneSR2
Grand Champion


the one to rule them doesn't yet exist. They all have a different edge where they shine. 




Like I previously wrote about CV1, this is an important observation.

Many older games, which were designed for CV1 (and this includes Asgard's Wrath due to the build-in temporal antialiasing), shine much more using oled and CV1 (where the SDE magically makes low-res textures look much more high-res). I'm guessing Quest + Oculus Link might fill in for those who don't own CV1 here. 
A lot of new Index users on Reddit seem not to understand this, and I'm getting really tired of trying to explain it on Reddit - but Index isn't the cure for everything. In fact it might reduce immersion and the quality of the experience by revealing too much or by requiring too much gpu power. Because due to lack of ASW 2.0 Index doesn't perform great when performance goes below the chosen refresh rate. So you need 120 fps in 120 Hz, and 90 fps in 90 Hz etc. Using CV1 I often don't have a problem with 45 fps, because everything feels much like 90 fps - not so with the Index. 
For games where I can get solid 90 fps using res 150 - 200% the Index usually wins hands down, but you need oled for the dark horror games. As a rule of thumb, in games where you can see the CV1 spud effect (=really dark games), Index will look too bright and reduce immersion. Such games or apps are rare, but this illustrates that you need more than 1 hmd for optimal VR enjoyment.
Index will probably shine more when games arrive, like Pistol Whip, which have been optimized - and tested - thoroughly using the Index. But until Boneworks arrives, such games are few (and based on the early trailers, much of Boneworks may have been designed using the Vive Pro = oled, but devs have now had 6 months to check that the game looks great using the Index). 

I'm sure Alyx will play awesomely using even the CV1 too. Due to it's development since 2016 I'm guessing a lot of textures may have been chosen based on the image quality with the original Vive (oled + a lot of SDE), but interesting how that will turn out - maybe Valve is right now working on improving textures that don't look good with the Index 😉

I played Doom VFR using the Index res 200% (not sure it's working due to Vulkan) yesterday, usually got 90 fps even forcing 8xTSSAA, and Ultra settings for textures and shadows. But many textures aren't looking good anymore - again, Index reveals everything. That said the game is still awesome and several textures still look great - but you start to understand the need for much higher textures res when using the Index. I guess that's why it's called the Index - it allows users to see

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"

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
Just saw this on Reddit - and it illustrates spot on what happens if you think Index is the cure for everything:

__________________

How is Lone Echo on the Index?

I have a 1080 and an i7 9700k and Echo VR runs incredibly bad for me, which is a shame as it used to be my favourite game until I got the Index. I guess the higher index panel resolution is just pushing too many pixels for the gpu's liking...

Anyone try Lone Echo with similar specs? I really want to play through the campaign but if motion smoothing is going to be on 100% of the time I don't really feel like that's worth $45

Thanks in advance!

__________________

- and my reply o:) 

"You need to turn off temporal antialiasing (TAA), because that'll look super-blurry using the Index. Problem is that you now need MSAA, and MSAA requires tons of gpu performance compared to TAA. An ideal solution would be 4xMSAA and SteamVR res 150+ %, but for that you'll need a 3080 Ti or maybe 4080 Ti 😉


If you deactivate MSAA (and of course TAA) and using 100% res the game performs great, but jaggies are everywhere.


Lone Echo was made for CV1, and Lone Echo with CV1 truly shines using super sampling 2.0 and temporal antialiasing. For now I have not been able to achieve similar image quality and performance using the Index - but using at least 2080 Ti or 3080 Ti may help. I use an oc'ed GTX 1080. And I've got more than 2 years of experience optimizing Lone Echo ;-)"

Not sure Lone Echo 2 will work any better on Index - and Rift-S will also have problems if TAA is needed again (TAA looks very blurry on current LCD hmds), while Quest + Oculus Link may shine. The Lone Echo 2 Trailer Experience looks nice using CV1, but it sure looks awful using the Index (and you've got no graphics setting in the trailer). Thus the final version will be interesting - and asw 2.0 may prove very important too 😉

The problem is that although we all what high res and awesome games, just running good old Lone Echo using the CV1 ss 2.0 and TAA (and no MSAA) will require a faster video card than 2080 Ti, because not even 2080 Ti can get solid 90 fps under those conditions (as tested in here about a year ago in a different thread).
Devs even had to disable shadows in Boneworks to get acceptable performance, lol. Getting 90 fps in Stormland with all settings maxed (including the dreaded real time shadows) and forcing ss 2.0 with CV1 may again require a 3080 Ti or the like... when Revive works with Stormland, I'm sure we'll hear a lot of Index users complain about how badly Stormland is optimized, lol.

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"

Anonymous
Not applicable
Too bad VR isnt big enough to support two different products - one with OLED and one with LCD for different price points xD

RuneSR2
Grand Champion

Mradr said:

Too bad VR isnt big enough to support two different products - one with OLED and one with LCD for different price points xD



That's why I'm thinking that Vive Pro with Knuckles may be close to an optimal solution for now - but then again you'll lack asw 2.0 and have reduced fov... 

I've said it before - we need Index with Quest (or Vive Pro) displays and fully supported by Oculus software, how hard can that be? 😄 And again for some games the high res would still be a problem at least until we get the 3080 Ti...

I'm sure Valve is aware of such performance problems and that's why I like seeing GTX 1060 6GB as the recommended card for Alyx - but Valve may be able to create performance like only previously seen in Lone Echo and maybe Stormland...  

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"

Anonymous
Not applicable
Soo many hardware improvements to be made in 2020 its hard to say what we will have by 2021. Even in 2021 another jump will happen from DDR4 to DDR5 and other PCI improvements and memory bandwidth. Next year will be the 7-10nm rush for GPU makers thus we should see some pretty big IPC gains of around 15-30%. With rumors of MCM designs to help with pricing and yields.

Really, the big change will happen when AMD finally releases something that can support Variable Rate Shading. This will open the door for all VR headsets to go forth with hardware acceleration base Eye tracking and FOVR. Even static FOVR should improve by another 5-10%. Granted that isn't much - but free performance is free performance.