Samsung Odyssey & Odyssey Plus News

And so the upgrade leapfrog begins! VR is very much a hobby that benefits the users who stay one generation behind and use Ebay.

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Absolutely true.
But this is nothing new when dealing with tech gadgets. Mobile phones, tablets, gfx cards, cpu, etc. Why should VR be different? :wink:

All true. No regrets. But I will argue that each item that gets placed on Life’s upgrade list exerts further stress on that life. I avoid it where I can and usually find myself happier as a result–most recently by changing out some parts and replacing the battery on my iphone 6. It was a tiny little victory but it felt wonderful.

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Same here. I’m all for life extension programmes.
I do fly Dash8s at work, after all… :wink:
But I can also be very persuasive when I need to convince my self that I need something new because of that single, yet incredibly important, improvement or feature.
And, there’s no question about it. I will replace the Rift, someday. Question is, with what, and when…
And herein lies the problem. :thinking:

Thanks for the write up Dan. How was DCS 2.5? That’s the big question for me. For now, I will be sticking with the Rift, but I am now coming up on the 2 year point of owning it (I got mine in April 2016 as a bundle with my PC), so I’m at the point where I feel an upgrade is not out of the question. I have certainly had my money’s worth from the Rift CV1.

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I fly mostly the AV-8B these days, and it’s enough of an improvement that I can read the individual LSK labels without zooming, something that I couldn’t do with the rift. However, I think that the view outside the pit while zooming by at low level might not be as good due to the loss of ASW. What’s so confounding is how much better the BoX team has done with their VR implementation. If the other sims looked that good, we’d all be dancing on the tables wearing neckties as bandanas, and a lime wedge between our teeth.

If you or @BeachAV8R have an overnight in ATL, I’ll let you guys have a test drive.

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And all of a sudden they just had to do a technical diversion to ATL… :wink:

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Well, BoX is effectively a newer product, and the aircraft modeled are far less complex than those in DCS.

Great to hear that the text on the Harrier is ledgible without zooming! I wish Razbam had made the text just a little bit larger (or at least have it as an option). The MFD’s are not exactly cluttered, so there is ample space for that.

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For the BoX vs DCS thing, I wonder if it’s just because BoX only uses OpenVR (SteamVR) as its only VR interface? When using a Rift on BoX we are using the compatibility that Valve put in for the Rift, while on DCS we are using the Oculus SDK calls direct.

It could be the case that OpenVR is the main thing the BoX team use all the time and tune for it, while for DCS it’s just one of the two things they support (Oculus and OpenVR) - plus I wonder if the Rift was the primary thing tested/tuned with DCS (until recently, I think Wags is using an Odyssey now). So it could be that using a Rift you never saw BoX working to full potential before, because of the compatibility with Rift ‘layer’ it uses? Either that or the DCS OpenVR implementation just isn’t as tuned as their Oculus one? Not sure. :thinking:

As for ASW (Async Space Warp), then OpenVR does have a form of projection (make sure it is ticked on @chipwich in your SteamVR dialog, it’s called ‘Async Reprojection’ if you haven’t used it already (apologies if you have (and now I have to balance my brackets (but leave Interleaved ticked off always)))). The difference between Rift ASW and Valve AsR is more that ASW deals better with the vertical changes in head movement. AsR is sort of like the old Rift Async Time Warp (ATW) we used to have.

Valve are still on the horse of wanting developers to try to hit pure 90 fps on VR titles, and are still pushing the ‘reprojection is a crutch that delays native optimizations’ mantra. They worry developers will now just target 45 fps as ‘good enough’ and that longer term hurts VR. I think they should play flight-sims a bit more and see how that mantra doesn’t help so much though :slight_smile:

If you get fed up of having to set Reprojection on the desktop mini-window in SteamVR then you can add a in-HMD helper from here that’s pretty good: GitHub - matzman666/OpenVR-AdvancedSettings: OpenVR Advanced Settings Dashboard Overlay

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Soooooo, anyone dropping their Oculus? :grin:

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It sure seems that way, which would make sense, BoX being a SteamVR app in the first place. Still, it feels like there is some fresh thinking here.

Yes, that’s on thanks. I see that Supersampling is also set to 2.5:Res/eye=2256x2811. Not sure if that’s a good thing. I suppose that we are a long way from PnP.

BTW, Revive works pretty well with the Oculus library games.

Is it that set by default? It sounds a bit high (like values 1.7, 1.8 on a Vive with a 1080 is good, but then the Odyssey screen resolution is different so it might be fine). It could be worth playing with (you can change it dynamically in-game), especially since something like DCS has a ‘pixel density’ setting as well. I think that if PD is not 1 then super sampling in OpenVR is ignored, but not 100% sure (as they do the same thing, but in-app takes priority I think).

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In BoM, I did some testing and landed on 2.0. I couldn’t tell the difference between 2.0 and 2.5 visually, and there was a high price in FPS. 2.0 seems to look better than 1.7, but can still hold 45 fps with the HUD on, which I use in VR when hopelessly lost or getting my ass kicked :slight_smile: Now to play around with graphic settings.

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I jumped in and bought the Odyssey. Need to design new mounting for the Warthog and MFCDs. Plan to clear them off the desk/table and put them on small side tables, and an extension (5"?) on the stick for finer control. My GTX 980 Ti has 4(?) HDMI outputs so think the big tv monitor can stay in place for now. WOOT!
Edit - one HDMI on the GTX.

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Is that your first VR headset or did you have the Rift already?

My first.
The big tv approach looks good but isnt fast enough. I was thinking of a gaming monitor, but VR is more economical. Looks like my GTX 980 has just one HDMI.

Do you find that with the higher pixel density you can run lower supersampling for the same visual quality?

That’s a fair statement, but in DCS, which is what I’m flying more these days, I only run a PD of 1.2 with and in-game MSAA at 2x. Currently my SteamVR Supersampling is set on 2.0 after trying some frame rate testing in BoX. I really need to do this in DCS, because somewhere is the sweet spot for the 3 settings. And all of this is so subjective.

Updated my original mini review above with a one week follow-up.

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I can’t re-like your post again…but I appreciate the updated info!

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