Joku tyyppi iRacing-foorumilta oli saanut käsiinsä Valven Indexin.
I got to spend some hands on time with a Valve Index headset and controllers this weekend.
My friend who works for Valve has one of the shipping units and I'm pretty sure its the same device they will send to customers next month.
We looked at some general VR content, and I did bring a USB thumb drive with cars/tracks/replays to check out with iRacing specifically.
Just for some context, I have been using my original Oculus Rift with iRacing for a couple years and have done over a thousand races with it. We also own a regular Vive which I have used for iRacing but have preferred the Rift for the way it fits on my head. I've also kickstarted the Fove headset, auditioned the Odyssey+ and used Vive Pros (but I don't own one). In March I got my Pimax 5K+ and have been using that a lot since then.
High Refresh Rate
I want to say right up front that all the stuff we played with was at 90Hz. In the SteamVR settings on the Video tab there was a message saying something to the effect of "There are higher frequency refresh rates supported by your HMD but they are not enabled in your graphics driver". We did update the GeForce drivers to the current ones from Nvidia, but that didn't change the SteamVR message. We went through all the pages in the GeForce graphics control panel and couldn't find anything to enable or change for the HMD. I know its disappointing, I was disappointed and sad that we couldn't try stuff at 120Hz. I do believe it works and maybe there is a beta or hot fix driver that would have the support, but we couldn't find it easily. Googling didn't help since nobody has these yet...
Resolution and Displays
It looks good, very good - particularly in terms of edge to edge focus. I'm accustomed to having to move my head to look directly at gauges and black boxes to be able to read them clearly, but with the Index it seemed like I could just look around the scene and keep my head stationary and still see things clearly that are blurry on other headsets. It is still a digital display and I can see pixel structure, but I would say its better in terms of the pixels blending into each other than the Pimax and lack of screen door. I haven't spent enough time with WMR/Vive-Pro to say with certainty that its the best, but I think the combination of the lenses, edge to edge focus and and sub-pixel structure looks really really good.
FOV
I was honestly hoping for more. Maybe I've been spoiled by the Pimax and if I had come directly from the CV1 it would have seemed like a better bump, but it looked to me like it was comparable with the other first gen headsets. It also has something that I noticed from the Rift S that when I look straight ahead I perceive the flat vertical edge off to the sides in my peripheral vision. But when I look over to that edge with my eyes, I don't see the same flat edge (its round to the edge of the lens). I think this must be an aspect of pupil swim, where what you see when your eye is looking straight ahead shifts as your eyeball rotates to the side? I did experiment with moving the display forward/backward and you see the most when its as close to your eyes as possible, but that's also where I see the edge artifacts the most. So I would say its probably marginally better than 1st gen headsets but not a big step or anything that puts it in league with the Pimax for FOV.
Audio
The speakers were good, but I'm not sure I like the off ear design. The sound was rich and it did drown out other noises from the room, but I think you could still hear things going on (like my 12 year old playing Fortnite on the other side of my studio while I'm racing). They were certainly better sounding than the audio from the Rift S headstrap and maybe if you dont have other sounds around you they would be fine and perhaps even more immersive in terms of not having he obvious physical sensation of wearing headphones? For things like Beat Saber the frequency range seemed totally fine in terms of bass response as well as highs. My only personal concern is whether I'd be distracted by other things happening in the real world around me while racing.
Tracking and Controllers
No problems. My friend had three lighthouse 2.0 stations set up around his room and the tracking for the headset and the controllers was fine.
IPD
The physical IPD adjustment goes all the way down to 58mm and even that close nothing hit my nose or made it uncomfortable. This is a huge thing for me as my IPD is very narrow and I always have to dial whatever adjustment there is all the way down. With my Pimax I can get it down to 59mm and then use -0.5 on the software and that seems good - but the lenses did hit my nose with the stock facial interface. I've been able to get it more comfortable with a few extra strips of velcro and a VR Cover. On the Index, that is not a problem and it was comfortable the way it comes. I'm very glad there is a physical IPD adjustment.
Headstrap and Comfort
It felt fine, well balanced and had all the adjustments you would want. The headstrap has a dial to tighten and it stayed put when I got it where I wanted it. You can change the angle of the HMD on your face. Moving the lens thing in/out may be important if you need to wear glasses with it, but I think most people will want it as close as possible. Overall, I'd say it was very good in terms of how it felt to wear. The build quality seems very high (particularly compared to the Pimax) and for people sensitive to having something that is just obviously well designed, the Index seems to be about as good as it gets.
Cord
The cord is there. For a seated experience like sim racing, I dont think its an issue at all. In fact, for iRacing I would prefer the quality and reliability of a tethered VR setup and not suffer the risk of battery, disconnect, or visual artifacts from a wireless solution. But for room scale games, it is obvious and I expect people in my house are going to balk at it a little since they have gotten used to the wireless adapter on our OG Vive. The cords also go directly to the PC without a link box, which I actually see as a bad thing. For the Vive Pro people have had success doing long distance (10M) cable extensions. But the Index (and Pimax) expect to plug directly into the PC and at least with the Pimax I have been unable to find anything that works reliably for DisplayPort beyond 4.5M. And trust me, I've tried pretty much everything I could get my hands on.
iRacing
My friend does not have a rig, but we were able to setup and run iRacing and watch replays to get a sense of performance. I'm sad we were unable to try it at 120Hz as that is a key feature for the headset. Running at 90Hz, it seemed like he was getting pretty solid performance considering his PC is not a beast. His GPU was a 1080Ti and I dont remember which CPU he has specifically, but it was some i7 and I think TaskManager was reporting it as 3.8Ghz. Just out of the box with a fresh iRacing install I turned up most of the normal options and ran with 100% in SteamVR with no changes to the iRaicng Resolution Scale Percentage and it kept 90Hz. When I turned on self shadowing it wasn't able to keep up, but that wasn't a big surprise. But from my recent experience with the Pimax range of resolutions, I would say that the performance seemed as good or better pushing a whole lot of pixels. But it would have been much more interesting to see if I could have gotten that system to run at 120Hz or see how far back we would have to turn the options and resolution to make it work...
As it was, watching replays at 90Hz the iRacing experience was fine. Especially being able to see the whole image clearly and glance down or over to see gauges and stuff in the cockpit clearly.
So overall, I liked it and am glad I ordered one. I expect for me and my iRacing stuff I will continue to use the Pimax because of the FOV but I expect the Index will replace the OG Vive we've been using for other games.
