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Review on HTC Vive Pro 2 Standalone Headset by Mike Groover

Revainrating 3 out of 5

Too many problems and the price is a joke for what you get

This thing had so many problems before I could get it to work and it still doesn't work in many games. Also, it's backwards, the headset is only sold if you need the whole set. And I just bought and installed a 3080ti hoping it would fix the buggy VR I had when upgrading from the 1060. Well, it didn't fix the crash, but the frame rate did noticeably increase, as expected. But still the FPS for DCS World is below 30. All I tried was playing the DCS World in VR with near max graphics settings and resolution on my VIVE Pro 2. I've spent a lot of time fixing the bad display, but made little progress. I think it could be the game engine itself or SteamVR and not a hardware issue. However, the problem is that it looks like a corrupted video. It doesn't always shine because sometimes it's worse than the other. I can't figure out why it's behaving this way, but it seems to be worse when loading screens. When I put the headset on for the first time, I was totally disappointed. As if this thing, so expensive, didn't have the quality I expected. Build quality is just average and the display isn't as sharp as I expected. I'm not even sure if it's really 5k resolution. I felt like there was a lot of resolution lost at the edges because to get the maximum viewing angle to see as much of your headset as possible you have to tighten it to the point where it feels like you can You press 50 pounds force on your face. . Basically it's like a lens that crops a 5k display so you only see the center area while losing most of the edge of the display due to the type of lens used. Compared to Oculus, if you gave someone a test in between, Oculus would probably look better at first. The Pro's lens has a rather odd shape and emits an annoying glow that always seems to be there. Can definitely ruin your experience if you focus too close. But just relaxing and enjoying the full VR experience isn't so bad...if only it didn't cost as much as they sell. Comfort is manageable for me, but I can imagine that gives a lot of headaches. The most important thing is to make sure you have base stations. This headset is still only on sale at the time of writing this, which is silly. This will only give you a white screen. I learned it the hard way, but after installing the base station everything worked. But you should use 2 for better tracking. I still haven't received my controllers so I'll limit myself to a few games. I feel like the technology is turning into a huge mess. This should be sold as a set. But now, after all the problems I've had, it tells me that this headset isn't ready to be released yet. As if that was something they would leave to beta testers. I got the error message so many times my headset can't be detected. Sometimes it sometimes doesn't work. I was just so upset that this thing worked. At the moment I have not managed to get this headset to work perfectly without bugs and dropouts. You will surely make a lot of money from it because I feel like I got rubbish compared to what I paid for. They better use my money to fix all these glitches because if they release another headset with all these bugs that basically make VR unplayable then it's game over for them. But in my experience it's completely unplayable in most cases. How disappointed would you be if you bought an $800 headset and then found that you had to spend $400 on base stations and then another $400 on controllers, and then found that it was riddled with glitches and mostly unplayable. I believe virtual reality is the future for almost everything, but right now there's going to be a lot of frustration trying to make everything work. A lot of money will be spent and there will be few improvements. Much of this is likely due to comparability issues as every PC is different. All-in-One VR is definitely what I recommend for VR beginners. And those trying to make the jump to PC VR should just wait, unless they're willing to shell out big bucks for a headset that leads to nothing but trouble.

Pros
  • Handsfree
Cons
  • Compatibility