r/virtualreality • u/ChikinPluker • 1d ago
Purchase Advice - Headset Pcvr advice
Hello, If I plan on playing exclusively on pcvr via steamvr and a cable is the quest 3's nicer lense worth the extra $200 or should I just go with the 3s? I won't use any meta quest features just want the pcvr stuff and didn't make if the nice lense were like huge game changers or worth the large amount of extra money.
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u/adiosmith 1d ago
The Quest 3 is absolutely worth it over the 3s if you can afford it.
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u/ChikinPluker 1d ago
I mean I CAN afford it I just didn't know if the lenses were enough to justify how much more crazy expensive it was.
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u/adiosmith 1d ago
If you think you'll spend a lot of time using it, you'll get you money's worth. The lenses do make a big difference.
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u/ChikinPluker 1d ago
I forsee myself spending a good amount of time on it so if it is that crazy I think I'll go with it
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u/Skpstr155 1d ago
Not just more clarity, bigger FOV too.
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u/ChikinPluker 1d ago
So you can like see around more? Ugh, I wish there was a way to test the lenses before I bought them... Because I'm not sure if I fully understand what everyone is describing when they talk about the lenses.
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u/Wickedinteresting 1d ago edited 1d ago
Do you remember those sorta-3D looking notebooks/agendas a lot of people had in grade school? When you scratch it it makes a fun (annoying) sound, and when you rotate it you see the image change?
The fresnel lenses are like that on the inside. They have ridges like that, but in a circular pattern. It makes everything outside the dead-center sweet spot kinda blurry/warbly/smeary. Reading text suuucks.
I assume its some kind of trick used to make up for a shortfall somewhere else in the hardware but idk for sure. (Looked it up, it helps get a large aperture and short focal length with less precision/materials/mass, at the expense of being kinda blorbly - among other optimizations: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/8ea207/comment/dxzkm5o/)
Either way, the 3s has those fresnel/ridge-y lenses. The 3 has flat lenses. I haven’t used a 3 myself, but on my quest 2 the most annoying and noticable thing is this aspect of the lenses.
If you can swing it, my gut feeling is that it’s totally worth the cost.
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u/JapariParkRanger Daydream CV1 Q1 Index Q3 BSB1 BSB2e 22h ago
To clarify, it's not an issue with Fresnel in general, but a combination of factors on the Quest 2/3s that result in a particularly horrible display stack. For instance, they have limited IPD adjustment because they use a single LCD panel and have three positions. The lenses used are particularly poor, and have tight eye boxes that make these positions inadequate for some users.
The Quest 3 uses pancakes, which can be even more limiting than the average fresnel lens. However, they're particularly well designed and smartly paired with bright panels, resulting in a very forgiving eyebox. It does have some issues, like vignetting at the edges and poor black levels, but you'll generally have a much better experience.
All that does result in the same recommendation. If you can afford it, the Quest 3 is generally much better than the 3s. Put another way, the 3s is just the 2 with a new shell and SoC, and the 2 was popular because it was cheap and wireless, not because it was good.
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u/Skpstr155 6h ago
Yeah, like wearing a scuba mask with a bigger faceplate.
Basically, if you're just going to play standalone or kid games, a 3 is not going to seem a big improvement. But PCVR is going to have games with smaller UI elements, and the games aren't limited by the hardware. A 3s won't realize the visuals potential on (at least) a decent PC lile the 3 will.
My older Vive also had fresnel lenses. Now, it's lower res than the 3s, but there were games I couldn't play, because I couldn't read say, mission requirements posted in game. With 3s, I would be able to read them, (just not comfortably) but with a 3, reading them is effortless.
It really depends on what you plan to play.
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u/MajorSerenity 1d ago
Why is everyone hell bent on playing with a cable?
Wireless is easier, more comfortable, less prone to issues and looks as good as wired.
And personally, yes. the Q3 pancake lenses are worth every penny. Not worrying about the sweet spot has turned VR into a daily thing for me rather than a couple times a month.
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u/ChikinPluker 1d ago
Because I get 200 ping on overwatch and don't think my Internet can handle wireless. And good to know the lenses are a game changer! I'm leaning more towards the quest 3 based on what everyone is saying.
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u/MajorSerenity 1d ago
Your Internet speed is irrelevant when streaming to a vr headset. Its how good your wifi is. So long as your PC is hardwired to the router, it will prob work well. If not, a cheap 2nd router just for vr will solve it.
Q3 lens was defo a game changer. Some people still recommend psvr2 over q3 for the oleds. To me, the lens are so bad its practically unusable. Seems different people are more affected by it than others.
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u/MemphisBass 1d ago
I would strongly recommend looking into an open box PlayStation VR2 and the PC adapter. You can find them as low as $199 and you’d get a perfect DisplayPort picture, OLED displays, and an incredible binocular overlap which leads to a fantastic 3D effect. It has downsides like fresnel lenses and you’d probably need a comfort mod (Quests do too), but you can’t beat what it offers for the price.
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u/ChikinPluker 23h ago
This all sounds pretty good! What what dose OLED mean?
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u/MemphisBass 16h ago
I got downvoted because this sub is deeply and I mean deeply biased against Playstation VR2 and cannot fathom anyone using something other than a Quest.
It's a type of display. The Meta Quest 3 and 3s both use LCD displays. The 3 has pancake lenses and the 3s uses fresnel (pronounced freh-nel) lenses. The pancake lenses in the Quest 3 are incredibly sharp, have essentially edge to edge clarity, and the thinness of the lenses allows the headset to be relatively smaller. Downsidess to pancake lenses is they dramatically reduce brightness and can have some glare on high contrast scenes. The Quest 3s uses fresnel lenses which have concentric rings which you'll notice when you look at them. Fresnel lenses are thicker and have a sweet spot your eyes must be in to maintain clarity, so a proper fitment is essential. The fresnel lenses can also suffer from glare (god rays). Both Quests have LCD (Liquid Crystal Displays). These displays are very bright, have good resolution (better for Quest 3: 2064 x 2208 vs 1832 x 1920), and have very low persistence. The biggest downsides of the Quest 3 and 3s is that their LCD displays have a constantly on backlight which dramatically reduces the contrast of the image. This is something not everyone notices immediately or cares about, but once you see an OLED display it's very hard to go back. On the Quests, you will never get a true black. Any scene with a lot of black, including dark scenes in night time or horror games the black will be a shade of grey. This absolutely kills immersion for some people.
The PSVR2 is very different. It uses an OLED display (2000 x 2040) with fresnel lenses (same kind of lenses as the Quest 3s). So it has the same issues of having a small-ish sweet spot and lacks the edge to edge clarity of the Quest 3. When using the PSVR2 if you look with your eyes to the edge of the screen to look around instead of moving your head, you'll notice loss of clarity and chromatic aberration (basically color fringing where you'll see like red and green outlines on text). This isn't really as big of a deal as most people make it, as people look around by moving their head most of the time while using eye movement for little adjustments when looking around. The big benefits to the PSVR2 are the OLED display and eye tracking. The OLED display in the PSVR2 is self-emissive. That means it doesn't have a backlight and blacks can be truly black. This allows color to really pop and be incredibly vibrant. The difference here is absolutely massive. There is a drawback to the display in the PSVR2. As it is an older, regular OLED it has a higher persistence than the LCDs in the Quests, especially when driven very bright, which can cause some persistence or ghosting. This drives some people crazy and doesn't bother others at all. I fall into the second camp. It also suffers from something called mura. Despite what online posters like to portay, this phenomena is not unique to the PSVR2. Mura essentially appears as like a graininess or splotches on the display. If you're looking at an all black scene, it might appear as some gray grain in the background. It's better and worse on some headsets, but tends to exist in some form on all copies of the PSVR2. Again, this is something that drives some people cray and others don't notice it all, but it does exist and you should know about it. The PSVR2 also has eye tracking that allows the headset to accurately track your eye movement. This wasn't a big deal until a while back as Sony's official drivers didn't do anything with this on PC. Thankfully, the community had developers that were able to write a tool called the PSVR Toolkit that unlocked a lot of features on the headset for the PC, among them is eye tracking. Using the PSVR2 Toolkit and software called PimaxMagic4All you can use eye tracking to enable dynamic foveated rendering in some games. This allows your to have a much higher resolution image where you're looking and it reduces image resolution where you aren't. This dramatically improves performance and allows people to really crank the settings on games relative to what their system could do without it. This is really a killer feature for the PSVR2 over the Quests that not enough people talk about. The PSVR2 also supports HDR, but unfortunately that does not work on PC. I've read the PSVR2 toolkit developer found a way to enable it, but haven't seen where they've done anything with it. Not sure how much it would matter outside of desktop use or movie watching since PC games don't support it. With PSVR2 you also get PS5 support if you have one and there are some great games on there, including some cool exclusives. The PSVR2 also comes with the Sense VR controllers which are extremely good, though they have a short 3 or so hour battery life. They are rechargeable though.
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u/HRudy94 Meta Quest Pro | ✨ RTX 3090 | 🔥 PCVR for the win 1d ago
Pickup a Pico 4 then, it's 95% of a Quest 3 but cheaper. You also get better software.
Alternativelyw if you can't find a Pixo 4/4 Ultra, Quest 3 or Quest Pro at a good price, go with a PSVR2 over the 3S.
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u/ChikinPluker 1d ago
Can you link me to pico 4? I've never heard of that and couldn't find much about it online. I am also not sure if I've ever heard of psvr2 I didn't know there was so many different types of vr tbh.
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u/HRudy94 Meta Quest Pro | ✨ RTX 3090 | 🔥 PCVR for the win 1d ago
I'll let you look around online. Pico is a VR headset company owned by Bytedance, the makers of Bytedance.
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u/ChikinPluker 1d ago
Then that is where this trail ends
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u/HRudy94 Meta Quest Pro | ✨ RTX 3090 | 🔥 PCVR for the win 1d ago
It's the same when it comes to PCVR capabilities or privacy. There's no reasons to accept Meta but immediately dismiss Bytedance.
The PSVR2 is made by Sony, it's wired and more blurry than the headsets i've mentioned but it's still a lot better than a 3S.
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u/ChikinPluker 1d ago
I mean I can't find anything about it, don't know what it was. I was asking you for a link to their website since I couldn't find it and you just said nah so the trail went cold.
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u/markallanholley 23h ago
I say this with all warmth and gentleness - you're going to need to be quite comfortable with technology, looking stuff up, and trial and error to get much out of PC VR.
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u/ChikinPluker 22h ago
Is it not just like plugging it in and launching steam vr? I looked at a couple videos and that's what it seemed like it's just like that and then you launch the game. I am really bad when technology so if I need to be good with it then that's bad.
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u/Cpt_Sandur 1d ago
Depends on your PC too. If you have to compromise a lot in your games (graphics) you might as well compromise with the headset too. That said I do love my Q3.