Okay, so here we are, and about two weeks out from launch. I got mine last Friday, but then came down with what seems to be the most contagious common cold I've ever seen but I'm mostly over it now and have had some time to do various types of testing. Something I feel worth mentioning is that I used to really be heavily into 3D gaming and went all in on NVIDIA 3D Vision tech. I still have a Toshiba Qosmio Laptop which features a 3D G-Sync screen as well as an ASUS 27" 1440p 144Hz 3D (120Hz) G-Sync monitor. The problem is NVIDIA dropped 3D Vision support after the launch of the RTX 2080 Ti (although you can still get it to run on one with some effort by forcing old drivers, it's a little more complicated but doable). I still have my RTX 2080 Ti and temporarily reconfigured one of my rigs a year or two ago and had a blast revisiting the original Metro Last Light, Tomb Raider Trilogy, DOOM 3 BFG, Witcher 2+3, Crisis 1-3 (originals), to name a few.
The reason I mention 3D Vision is that ultimately my VR experience very much reminded me of the best of those times, just improved upon for today's games that natively support VR. On that note, it's a shame that NVIDIA hasn't made 3D Vision open-source for the VR community because there were some awesome games back in the day that supported it and would be incredible in VR now, and I have little doubt that today's modders wouldn't be able to do amazing things with it. To me, the 3D effect in VR is identical to what I experienced with 3D Vision.
Alrighty, one of the big elephants in the room is battery life. I'm all about image quality, so yep, cranked everything to max on the headset, including raising brightness to 125%, and then also within Steam on my PC; this all done on the 5800X3D/5090 rig. That being said, I saw anywhere from 90-120 minutes at most, so folks should plan accordingly before putting it on and have everything as ready to go as possible. The good news, even though it defeats the wireless point of these, is that you can plug in a USB Type-C cable and charge while playing. Depending on your charger, it can take around 2+ hours to fully recharge, and Valve recently released a firmware update which has improved further for those with 45W or higher chargers; I'm using an
87W, which works great.
The next elephant in the room is comfort. I'm a big guy at over 6ft tall (although down from 320+ to ~227 now) with a big head, and I often wear glasses. That being said, I could wear the headset very comfortably with room to spare on the straps when not wearing my glasses, and I do not find its weight cumbersome for 1-2 hour sessions. I found an older pair of my glasses with smaller frames (but still quite wide) and was able to fit them in, but the headset does tend to push them down on my nose a bit, causing me to periodically readjust everything. On that note, my biggest complaint, and I know Valve meant well, is the magnetic face cushion. Whether by trying to pick up the headset or adjust it on my face, d@!n thing is always coming off, so I may end up taping it or adding Velcro. One thing to note is the headset can get warm after a bit so I totally understand why they put a fan to cool its processor, but I couldn't hear it. All this aside, wireless VR is awesome.
Image quality. Acceptable, but mileage varies greatly on app usage. I wasn't familiar with "The Wall" when it comes to VR, and unfortunately, since this is tied to Steam's streaming, resolution seems capped at 1080p despite whatever settings I use, and so it looks pretty awful. I don't like "The Wall" and really wish it could support true 4K or something similar since the Steam Frame supports 2160x2160 per eye. On the plus side, native VR games look incredible! Valve includes Half-Life: Alyx, and I'm having a blast with it. I've also gotten Metro Awakening, which is more of a Metro walking sim, but it looks awesome as well. I was surprised to see No Man's Sky supports VR, and it looks great too, as does Subnautica, and now I'm on the fence about getting Forza Horizon 6.
Audio quality: Surprisingly good. Not much bass by any means, but extremely clear and, in imho, works great at creating spatial audio. Honestly, I'm very impressed with their solution.
Mods, mods, mods: Well, of course the amount of AAA VR games out there is very limited, but the VR mod community is very impressive given what they've had to work with. This morning I snagged REFrame VR for Resident Evil 4, sorry but Requiem is scary enough in 2D, but RE4 has the 2nd most modern engine update, so good visuals to work with. It looks pretty good, and I'm very much looking forward to doing another playthrough of it and Village. I started tinkering with the Luke Ross Real VR mods and found that I may need to do some additional work to get it and the Frame to play nice together because of how Valve streams to the Frame. There seems to be a VR mod for a ton of modern games out there, and looking forward to testing them.
VR Gaming on the Steam Frame w/o PC: Well, uh, kind of sucks unless you're playing something really basic that was made for a phone processor, which is what this is, and an older one at that. I tested the same games mentioned above, and those that worked needed settings lowered to the bare minimum to get above 10 FPS; that is when they weren't crashing. That said, unless you're someone who's really into a ton of the less GPU-demanding games, probably no need to get the 1TB version as I did (I'm thinking of dropping some movies and music concerts to make use of that storage now; I've installed Kodi and am curious to see how higher-quality files will look).
FPS: Well, a 5090 has no problem holding higher framerates, but I noticed the headset will often default to 72 or 90, but you can raise it to 120 to 144 (experimental), similar to as experienced with DLSS5, or games that can cause high power usage. I've seen it raise the 5090 power draw higher than I prefer, so I usually leave it at 72 or 90. Yes, I could tell the difference but was satisfied with the compromise.
Wireless: Just plain awesome. Not a single drop or added stutter that I could perceive. You can navigate via motion controllers, and once you've linked accounts/folders for GOG, you can launch a huge library of titles via Steam. The closest complaint is that VR games seem to take a bit longer to load, but maybe that's my imagination.
Interface(s): Well, there's a learning curve for 1st time users here for sure. I basically felt like I was getting used to a whole new OS and its various settings, menus, etc. Not brain surgery by any means, and most users can get up and running in no time, but if wanting to customize everything the way you want, there's some work to do; but like anything else, eventually one can get used to it. Btw, it does come with Dolphin preinstalled.
Well, that's pretty much it. Not only is this my first VR experience, but also delving into SteamVR, and once again dipping my toes into the Linux pond. There are pros and cons for sure, but overall really happy with it and will be even more so as I get more modded older games working in VR, not the wall, plus growing my native VR library.
Side note: Google VR is pretty cool even if the controls are clunky as f.
