OK, It seems that the VR wars are going to start really gaining momentum now that Oculus Rift has (or in some cases hasn't) been shipping and that HTC Vive is now starting to ship to customers.

While there are already "x vs. y" battles brewing on the internet regarding one over the other, the ultimate goal for the end-user is to have a really good experience. Hopefully in some way, shape or form, the technology itself coalesces into something standards-based where not only any competitor could follow up, but the game developers only have a single set of APIs for which to develop.

I ended up investing in the HTC Vive, only because I felt the hardware was a bit more advanced than what the mainstream Oculus out of the box. However, I am looking forward to both of these headsets actually bringing VR to more mainstream channels than old solutions did.

I used to have a Forte VFX-1 headset and I used it to play the original half-life and watch movies. Unfortunately, it was only better at the latter, but made watching movies almost like the experience of going to the movie theater. However, the hardware at the time was not advanced enough to catch attention.

I've posted this before, I don't care, it's timeless!

Nobody laughs unfortunately.

I have a Samsung GearVR headset and a Galaxy S7 to use with it, and it has led me to draw a conclusion:

VR is not yet good enough to actually be usable.

In the end, it comes down to a single factor: resolution. In the current generation, it is much too low. I can see the sub-pixel structures in the image, that is the individual red, green and blue LEDs in the screen, which pretty much ruins the entire experience for me. At first I thought "Well, this is a bootstrapped solution using a phone for a screen, I'm sure the dedicated headsets coming out have much higher resolutions than this". Then I checked up on the specs of the other various VR headsets and was mortified to find out that out of all the current (and near-future) VR headsets, mine has the highest resolution.

The Galaxy VR headsets are a good cheap solution, but you will get what you pay for. The sensors and hardware just aren't there for a great experience. It's good for watching movies or a quick light tech demo, but remember: it's still run on phone hardware. Phone hardware is decent, but no where near as good as a desktop PC with a dedicated GPU, powerful CPU and cooling system. The sensors in the phone really don't do the VR headsets justice. You'll need a real headset anda good PC to really determine what VR can do for you.

I had this problem with the DK2, but not on phones using the Homido headset. I can attribute this to one of several things: higher res of the phones, getting used to it, or having to use them without my glasses due to the headset's limitation. Can't really tell, but the phone experience for me was pretty good, and made me feel like VR has a future, something that the DK2 couldn't convince me of.

I don't have hardware to effectively render a game twice on high resolution at stable floor of 90 frames per second, and my hardware consists of GTX970, i5 and 8 gigs of RAM. To get into reasonable hi quality VR, I'd have to purchase entirely new rig for about 2000 euro if not more than that and an expensive headset itself - and even then I'm not sure it would run games of today's quality well enough. I think I'll wait for the technology to evolve for mainstream market first before dropping ungodly amounts of cash on it.

But now the age-old question, did it roll downhill?

I've just read this article about the Oculus eula..

Effin' Facebook, I knew it.

(unless it's bait, hopefully)

I have a GTX970 (which was a required bump I needed to play Witcher 3), but I have one of the 8-core AMD processors. There's a VR test application they have on Steam (I was interested in purchasing the Vive) which does a performance test of your system and lets you know whether or not it's capable of VR.

You may want to try it if you haven't already.

from what i've heard SamsungVR is shit. It just won't compete with the expensive devices and ESPECIALLY with HTC Vive. Everyone that has used Vive has got their minds blown. I've yet to read a review that is not awestruck by the experience of the Vive.

Wow. Pay for the hard ware, pay for the software, and after they've taken your money, they sell you to their advertisers for even more cash. Beautiful.

Not me, I don't give a flying fuck about VR.

I want more cinematic platformers, fuck the "immersive experience" and other hype-prone bullshit.

Waiting for that, and some true killer application which makes VR headset really important to have. Plus investing to a pair of HEV-filtering glasses I guess.

My PC is apparantly VR ready except for the processor. Though it's only a few months old. I just didn't want to pay more for the processor. Oh well. I wasn't going to get into VR anyway