First half day with the G2

[Truls Engebakken-Fjell]

I got my HP reverb G2 VR headset,  this will be my 3rd VR headset in a year.

The G2 has the best lenses you can get on a mass produced VR headset,  not only is it 4k,  but the colour,  light and depth is amazing.

I tried half life Alyx a game I’ve played both with Rift S and Quest 2. The G2 has well over twice the resolution of rift s but only about 13% higher than the Q2, but still the differences are huge, Alyx looks fantastic in any VR headset. But even the into is far superior in G2, right away to notice the red is much richer and the black is much blacker, giving a fantastic feeling of depth and 3d.

When the actual game starts and you are walking through an eastern European city, it looks real. Photorealism is a word thrown around a lot in gaming. But man it looks real. Walking through damp wet basements feels real creepy.

Another game that got a serious bump in fidelity was Onward my favourite VR shooter. This game doesn’t hold a candle to Alyx graphically,  but here you see improvement in clarity, and the problem that plagued VR headsets,  namely as soon as you look at things from a distance it gets blurry/pixelated. And on onward maps this was noticable,  buildings and particularly enemies a few hundred yards away looked pixelated even through scopes.  Not with the G2, perfect clarity across the map.

 

But the G2 is problematic,  with the extremely good lenses it also requires a beast of a PC. You can’t expect to run all games full power, my PC was tippety top 18 months ago, and som games are way over it’s power, and even those who bought the best of the best yesterday,  can’t run all games on full.

The G2 is also buggy,  lots of problems,  stuff don’t work great,  some games it just doesn’t like, controllers loose tracking, when the headset slumbers after use, sometimes it doesn’t wake up right and you have to restart the entire PC.  Not a beginning headset.

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