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Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

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71–80 of 212 posts

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#71
post #51

I am truly surprised at the lack of enthusiasm on this thread. The Oculus is the FIRST high-fidelity consumer VR experience. And they've got the horsepower of Facebook's cash-machine as their bankroll. Zuck gets this to the degree that I suspect he believes Facebook & VR will be synonymous within a decade (1) Do I wish that Oculus was owned by some benevolent billionaire trickster like OASIS in Ready Player One? Sure…

I think the disappointment is the long and rocky road it has taken to get to this point, allowing multiple competitors (Valve, Sony, Microsoft) to be in position to leap-frog them.

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#72

Now the real question- go with Facebook and buy an Oculus Rift or go with Valve/HTC and buy a Vive? The Vive has more features (like head tracking) but maybe it will be more expensive? There's been nothing but silence in terms of pricing of either of them... I do have a hard time justifying $500+ for a screen I'll strap to my head that will probably be obsolete in a year or two. I will say though, I recently bought a…

I tried both and the HTC Vive was just years ahead. I haven't tried the new oculus touch but the simple fact that they won't ship it included tells me it's nowhere near HTC Vive.

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamers tend to own and upgrade beefy PCs.

Hmm I'm having trouble finding any type of reliable statistics. When I used to do lots of PC gaming I was in many gaming groups of which maybe 10% of them would upgrade their computers to be above mid to high end. At most (all of us always complained about how terrible our PCs were and how lower our FPS were almost as if it were a badge of honor). But this is anecdotal so I have no ground to really speak on. Having s…

Here is a good source - unfortunately down at the moment for me:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#74
post #69
post #55

Here are my thoughts on the situation: 1) First generation devices are usually flops/riddled with bugs, but usually exploitable if you don't upgrade firmware/etc. 2) I would probably need to buy a 980TI ($600) or Titan X ($1k) to make up for my i7-2600k's failure. (I want a Titan X for deep convolution neural networks anyways). 3) Nvidia is on the verge of releasing their Pascal architecture. The Titan X was just rec…

The DK2 works fine on middle-line GPUs. I'm certain this one will too. Edit: I meant "worked"

Really? My understanding was that VR required extremely high framerates to provide a satisfying experience to the user.

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#75

Probably the better link is to the announcement of the pre-orders itself: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/oculus-rift-pre-orders-to-... I'm confused though; why do a pre-announcement for an announcement about pre-purchasing a product that's only two days away? They should have simply opened up pre-orders immediately. That being said I can't imagine they expect to sell much. It requires such a beefy PC (of which few…

People have been waiting for this for years, if they had just opened the pre-orders without a pre-announcment there would have been (virtual) riots.

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#77
post #69
post #55

Here are my thoughts on the situation: 1) First generation devices are usually flops/riddled with bugs, but usually exploitable if you don't upgrade firmware/etc. 2) I would probably need to buy a 980TI ($600) or Titan X ($1k) to make up for my i7-2600k's failure. (I want a Titan X for deep convolution neural networks anyways). 3) Nvidia is on the verge of releasing their Pascal architecture. The Titan X was just rec…

The DK2 works fine on middle-line GPUs. I'm certain this one will too. Edit: I meant "worked"

Recommended GPU is an NVidia 970.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/powering-the-rift/

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#78
post #57

Ah, between this and HTC Vive... After testing both the HTC Vive was just years better than the Oculus, but I haven't tried the new Oculus iteration with touch... So hard to choose. Anyone want to discuss setups for both? I need to buy a new machine for that.

Are you sure you tested the Oculus CV1? There's been many hardware iterations from Oculus and the latest one that people have been sampling has gotten very good reviews, some better than the Vive.

I'm not saying that I know for a fact that one is better than the other, but I'm surprised that you think one is 'years better'.

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#79
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I'm having trouble finding any type of reliable statistics. When I used to do lots of PC gaming I was in many gaming groups of which maybe 10% of them would upgrade their computers to be above mid to high end. At most (all of us always complained about how terrible our PCs were and how lower our FPS were almost as if it were a badge of honor). But this is anecdotal so I have no ground to really speak on. Having s…

Here is a good source - unfortunately down at the moment for me: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Thanks I'll check it out when it comes back online later. It's been a while since I looked at the steam survey; I wonder how indicative it is compared with the PC gaming industry as a whole. I mean they practically have a monopoly so I would imagine it's at least good statistically but I don't know how many go through the survey (I'm assuming it's still opt-in like it was when I last used it which could skew the numbers).

Re: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders to Open on January 6

#80
post #51

I am truly surprised at the lack of enthusiasm on this thread. The Oculus is the FIRST high-fidelity consumer VR experience. And they've got the horsepower of Facebook's cash-machine as their bankroll. Zuck gets this to the degree that I suspect he believes Facebook & VR will be synonymous within a decade (1) Do I wish that Oculus was owned by some benevolent billionaire trickster like OASIS in Ready Player One? Sure…

I've played with a DK2. It was cool. But reasons not to be super-excited are:

1. Hardware requirements are steep (GTX 970 minimum), so plenty of hardware -- including plenty of hardware that's good for high-end gaming today -- won't be good enough for this.

2. Only Windows support. No compatibility with Linux, SteamOS, or even OSX means that the techie enthusiasts who'd play with it as a tech toy are going to be less interested.

3. But biggest of all: The games aren't there. It's become very clear, both from playing with the DK2, and listening to presentations by Valve and Oculus people, that VR games can't just be regular games with VR bolted on. "Skyrim, but with VR" sounds cool, and makes for a cool five-minute demo, but will just make you sick and be unsatisfying in the long term.

VR games need to be designed for VR in a really fundamental way. It's not clear that there are any interesting games that do this, or that there's a lot of effort going toward making games like this.

If this were a product that were coming out from Nintendo, I'd be confident that they had a good idea about how to adapt their franchises to take advantage of VR in a really cool way, and that there'd be at least a handful of games that made it an absolute must-have. But from Facebook... well, they're a tech company, not a gaming company, so they're depending on someone else to make the games that will justify this thing. Maybe that'll work in the long term, but right now, it doesn't seem like there's any must-have VR game.

Add that all up, and this is a product that won't appeal to most gamers yet, and won't appeal to a lot of tech geeks due to the Windows focus, so... yeah.

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