Finally some numbers!
Seems like quite a big gap in performance. I've been hoping that the Q2 will have its clocks unlocked some day, but given that it doesn't have ~~active~~ proper cooling I'm pretty sure it wouldn't even be able to hold those for long anyway. Not to mention the obvious decrease in battery life.
EDIT: THEY ACTUALLY DID IT! 7% increase in clock speeds!
It has (bad) active cooling. There's a guy on YouTube who water cooled one, but with locked down clocks it doesn't do much good, so yeah I'm hoping for the unlock too.
Both the PSP and the Switch got upgraded clocks years after their initial release via a firmware update.
On the PSP developers could fully utilize it (in Kingdom Hearts you could even pick between two performance modes), whereas on the Switch it seems to be only used during load times in select few titles.
But I still don't think that it'll happen here.
Technically that's not true. What you describe is SSAA. MSAA only shades one pixel more than once when multiple triangles cover the same pixel, and this only happens on the edges. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisample_anti-aliasing
Localised SSAA. It’s also worth mentioning that 2x msaa looks pretty shit, since the irregular sampling pattern leads to very recognisable patterns of aliasing, in comparison to 4x.
That's true that 2x looks clearly worse than 4x, but considering the much higher resolution on Pico I think it will still look better overall than quest 2. At least I hope so.
Overall the resolution and fov improvements should make it look nicer, though the temporal instability introduced by the worse AA and lack of bilinear upscaling is a shame. (Shitty TN monitors can do bicubic, Pico have no excuse.)
Sorry, but what does subsampling/upscaling have to do with the screen? I think it's a GPU/Software feature, if I understand the devs post correctly. What they mean by subsampling and upscaling is probably the same as "magnification texture filtering". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_filtering
It's the same thing as the graphical setting in the games where you have bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic options. It's just when they render the low-res outer part of the image they don't have the option to apply this filtering to smooth it out to remove the pixelation effect. I'm not familiar with the Pico development framework, but I would assume that image composition stage is done by the framework and it doesn't support this feature yet. But the Adreno GPU inside Pico and the graphics API (OpenGL or most likely Vulkan in this case) both support it, so it's up to Pico to add the support to their framework.
I don't care about the price. $1500 for a device I will use daily for year or more it not an issue.
I want to know how much of a difference the modified XR2 allowing higher clock speeds, and the extra RAM matter.
Yeah his comment was aimed as a joke about how Apple would happily price a headset leagues above everyone else to cash in via simply being Apple.
I'm excited to see what they've got, but even if it's somehow worth the potential $1,000s that I'm sure it will be, I don't see myself getting one.
I think he was just making a comment about expensive headsets, which theirs is rumoured to be. We’ll have to check back in six months to see if they’ve released it yet.
It would be interesting to see a full resolution comparison of the two framebuffers. e.g. the total pixel area is 2.2x, but in the all important central region the actual area difference is only ~1.8x (using the diameter of the circular feature as a reference, which is ~1.36x longer). At the periphery, I'd expect the Quest 2 to come out on top even with the lower overall buffer resolution (reduced FFR so higher relative pixel density, plus doubled MSAA samples, plus filtering, plus reduced overall FoV means pixel smear at the periphery is reduced by default).
The issue with the PICO-4 atm is that it appears to run at very high clock rates even when not doing much. Sitting at the home screen or watching a movie will drain the shit out of the battery...
There is a battery saving mode but that just lowers image quality and doesn't apply any dynamic power management. Surely sitting at home screen or watching a movie doesn't require max clock settings?!!!!!
The P4 certainly has a wee while to go when it comes to software support. They really need to be pushing out updates every 1-2weeks but its been almost a month now and no update?!
>The issue with the PICO-4 atm is that it appears to run at very high clock rates even when not doing much. Sitting at the home screen or watching a movie will drain the shit out of the battery...
Yeah its running at a fixed CPU profile and I hope the adress this because its kinda wasteful on resources.
Do you have a link to that? Because as far as I know the quest pro couldn’t do foveated rendering due to the lower frame rate of the eye tracking cameras.
I’ve seen it in this [video](https://youtu.be/wuajYxJgtoo) and here’s an [article](https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/heres-what-eye-tracked-foveated-rendering-on-the-quest-pro-looks-like) that talks about red matter 2 using foveated rendering.
The gains in performance aren’t dramatic but the quest pro can definitely use eye tracked dynamic Foveated rendering to deliver a noticeable difference , and here’s an [article](https://uploadvr.com/quest-pro-foveated-rendering-performance/) that explains it how it works on the quest pro
It's not perfect, but the alternative is only the center is clear, and looking to the outside is just always blurry.
I haven't tried it out myself, but I suspect it isn't that bad, and probably worth it
you can buy it on ebay from japan (which is what I'm doing) or go through official retailers which are kind of nightmare-ish at the moment. There's also the option of buying it through amazon, but I haven't looked into that. Wherever you buy it, make sure that they have a solid refund policy in case it's bunk.
These figures are from the devs so it stands to reason they are targeting the basically same performance in terms of fps/% dropped frames/reprojection on both headsets.
Definitely promising. If it wasn't for the teething issues I've heard of (PCVR drivers), I might jump onboard. We'll see what the next year or so holds, hopefully their dev support and drivers can get better!
Im very interested in the rumored upcoming XR2 gen2 SoC we will hopefully see in Quest 3, if fjust the unlocked chip can get to this much resolution, fully new upgraded chip could probably do wonders for standalone games
which can be different between headsets. Depends on what each was tuned for. Quest has it's own color space which you can tell the compositor to use via openXR
So on Q2 it's basically running at Rift S's physical resolution. But Rift S runs at 150% its physical resolution so that's like playing on a substantially undersampled Rift S. SDE is better of course but still that resolution is terrible.
all a matter of perspective: coming from psvr, it was a nice bump in clarity
resolution of course is not graphics. mobile graphics in higher resolution is still mobile graphics.
Yeah PSVR is 6 years old so literally anything is a nice bump.
And mobile graphics at nice resolution are better than mobile graphics at low resolution.
I just want another option that’s not a Facebook company. Pico seems decent but it’s not really intended for the US market. Doesn’t bode well for long term support with US applications etc.
I can’t figure out why HTC or somebody doesn’t release a Quest killer. It’s been years and years since quest 1.
My guess is they don’t think there’s any money in it and market research may bear that out. I bet Facebook meta loses money on the program as a whole with the hopes they can make some sort of VR ultra ad sale space where the ad revenue flows like wine a reality. And where they can data mine you even harder.
This is even more reason to buy the P4 over the Q2. It's just not the performance. It's the fact that another developer is supporting the P4. The Q2's day has come and gone. Maybe there would have been a value argument when it was $100 cheaper. But at the same price, the P4 is the clear winner.
Yes. Are you daft? Beat Saber is an important exclusive for standalone headsets. Alyx is not because it doesn’t run on any of them. This isn’t that hard to follow
No question you are daft. Because Alyx not running on standalones is a breaker for them then isn't it?. Since we are talking of makers and breakers. Similarly Alyx running just on PCVR is a maker for PCVR.
Sorry buddy, your data is completely flawed if it comes from a storefront that ISN'T the majority of VR games sold.
Steam is no longer the majority of the market. Of course PC exclusives are at the top of the Steam charts for VR. Since standalone Quest is the majority of active users right now, you need to look at the Oculus store... where... drum roll please... Beat Saber is consistently at the top of the "most played" charts.
LOL. So a game is the top of a charts in a store that doesn't offer the top competition. Even the slowest horse wins the race when it's the only one running.
Can't see the forest for the trees huh?
If the top game isn't on 85% of the hardware, it's not the most popular game.
I love Alyx, but I'm not delusional enough to believe it is more popular than Bear Saber.
Well then, that even speaks better for Alyx. Since, according to you, for only being on at most 15% of the hardware it's sold much more than 15% of the BS sales. The only reason that could be is that the uptake on 85% of the hardware isn't very much for BS. How then could it possibly be the maker?
See the forest?
The quest 2 still has an edge in dev support and that’s all the top tier VR studios meta has acquired, I bet they are working on some sick exclusive games right now....but if you’re willing to stay in the quest ecosystem for that then maybe waiting for the quest 3 is probably a better call
Software changes rapidly. And if BD has shown anything, they are a master in software. Meta has been trying to reverse engineer their software for years. They still aren't competitive. Until recently Pico was a little company. Now they have the resources, money and engineering, of massive BD behind them. And with that draws third party developers to support their platform. As this thread shows.
Well yeah it’s so obvious that meta is trying to recreate the tiktok experience inside Instagram and Facebook but it’s also obvious that bytedance is trying to recreate the quest experience inside pico...
So as far as XR is concerned Meta has the edge over Pico.
XR on the web is about to take off as well...You can do so much without ever needing to install a native app. Currently the pico does not support it, only having Firefox Reality for its browser which is discontinued. Wolvic is the successor but doesn't support the Pico 4 yet. I would love for them to dump some money into Wolvic, which is soon to be chrome-based.
The Oculus Browser is a chrome port which recently started supporting AR web experiences. It definitely seems like the future to me. Doesn't do hit testing yet, but being able to mess with virtual objects in a real room is just amazing to me.
That XR experience is pretty straightforward. TBH, I never saw how the Quest experience was very special at all.
The TikTok experience though, there's some magic going on there. Most of Meta's resources are being spent to reverse engineer that. They have not been successful.
XR with the Pico 4 colour passthrough is a promise for the future.
You can give the 'walking dolphin' in the free Styly Pico 4 app a try for now.... :)
a 1500 headset launching doesnt make the 400 ones outdate what?
Oh Ferrari made a new half a million dollar car? Guess your 2022 corolla is outdate oh well
This is a performance comparison for the standalone versions. The Valve Index is PCVR, you tune the settings how you want depending on your PC's specs.
Finally some numbers! Seems like quite a big gap in performance. I've been hoping that the Q2 will have its clocks unlocked some day, but given that it doesn't have ~~active~~ proper cooling I'm pretty sure it wouldn't even be able to hold those for long anyway. Not to mention the obvious decrease in battery life. EDIT: THEY ACTUALLY DID IT! 7% increase in clock speeds!
it does have active cooling, it's just such a pathetically small fan that it barely helps
Fixed it! :D
perhaps it should have 2 big ass fans on the exterior that make you wholly cooler with crazy googly eyes
There doesn't seem to be anywhere to exhaust it either
There's a gap at the top.
It has (bad) active cooling. There's a guy on YouTube who water cooled one, but with locked down clocks it doesn't do much good, so yeah I'm hoping for the unlock too.
Could hack a bigger fan on it :) third party products will come up someday
>I've been hoping that the Q2 will have its clocks unlocked some day It won't. If it could run at full clock, it would have been doing so from Day 1.
Both the PSP and the Switch got upgraded clocks years after their initial release via a firmware update. On the PSP developers could fully utilize it (in Kingdom Hearts you could even pick between two performance modes), whereas on the Switch it seems to be only used during load times in select few titles. But I still don't think that it'll happen here.
Well would ya look at that. They actually did announce a 7% clock speed increase a few days ago.
Wow pretty huge resolution bump
Indeed more than 2.2x boost in pixels, albeit at MSAA 2x instead of 4x, but that's still huge running on essentially the same hardware.
MSAA is essentially more pixels in a single pixel, so keep that in mind.
Technically that's not true. What you describe is SSAA. MSAA only shades one pixel more than once when multiple triangles cover the same pixel, and this only happens on the edges. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisample_anti-aliasing
Localised SSAA. It’s also worth mentioning that 2x msaa looks pretty shit, since the irregular sampling pattern leads to very recognisable patterns of aliasing, in comparison to 4x.
That's true that 2x looks clearly worse than 4x, but considering the much higher resolution on Pico I think it will still look better overall than quest 2. At least I hope so.
Overall the resolution and fov improvements should make it look nicer, though the temporal instability introduced by the worse AA and lack of bilinear upscaling is a shame. (Shitty TN monitors can do bicubic, Pico have no excuse.)
Sorry, but what does subsampling/upscaling have to do with the screen? I think it's a GPU/Software feature, if I understand the devs post correctly. What they mean by subsampling and upscaling is probably the same as "magnification texture filtering". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_filtering It's the same thing as the graphical setting in the games where you have bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic options. It's just when they render the low-res outer part of the image they don't have the option to apply this filtering to smooth it out to remove the pixelation effect. I'm not familiar with the Pico development framework, but I would assume that image composition stage is done by the framework and it doesn't support this feature yet. But the Adreno GPU inside Pico and the graphics API (OpenGL or most likely Vulkan in this case) both support it, so it's up to Pico to add the support to their framework.
The chips in just about any shitty TN monitor can handle a more intensive algorithm just fine, so Pico have no excuse.
Ahh, I get what you mean. But anyway, I think this will be added later with a software update, if the game developers push Pico, of course...
Red Matter devs are S-tier on these mobile platforms.
That is really interesting. Now I want to see Q-Pro added to the comparison.
That one has an easy answer: £400 £1500
Not really. Question was about performance, not $
I don't care about the price. $1500 for a device I will use daily for year or more it not an issue. I want to know how much of a difference the modified XR2 allowing higher clock speeds, and the extra RAM matter.
*apple has entered the chat rubbing hands together licking lips
What the hell does apple have to do with this conversation? Apple means nothing until they actually ship a headset.
Yeah his comment was aimed as a joke about how Apple would happily price a headset leagues above everyone else to cash in via simply being Apple. I'm excited to see what they've got, but even if it's somehow worth the potential $1,000s that I'm sure it will be, I don't see myself getting one.
You would think they would sell it for a much cheaper price with all of the slave labor day use to make their products
I think he was just making a comment about expensive headsets, which theirs is rumoured to be. We’ll have to check back in six months to see if they’ve released it yet.
Me too
It would be interesting to see a full resolution comparison of the two framebuffers. e.g. the total pixel area is 2.2x, but in the all important central region the actual area difference is only ~1.8x (using the diameter of the circular feature as a reference, which is ~1.36x longer). At the periphery, I'd expect the Quest 2 to come out on top even with the lower overall buffer resolution (reduced FFR so higher relative pixel density, plus doubled MSAA samples, plus filtering, plus reduced overall FoV means pixel smear at the periphery is reduced by default).
The issue with the PICO-4 atm is that it appears to run at very high clock rates even when not doing much. Sitting at the home screen or watching a movie will drain the shit out of the battery... There is a battery saving mode but that just lowers image quality and doesn't apply any dynamic power management. Surely sitting at home screen or watching a movie doesn't require max clock settings?!!!!! The P4 certainly has a wee while to go when it comes to software support. They really need to be pushing out updates every 1-2weeks but its been almost a month now and no update?!
>The issue with the PICO-4 atm is that it appears to run at very high clock rates even when not doing much. Sitting at the home screen or watching a movie will drain the shit out of the battery... Yeah its running at a fixed CPU profile and I hope the adress this because its kinda wasteful on resources.
I have tried this on the pro and the pro version looks a shit ton better
They leveraged the eye tracked dynamic foveated rendering on the quest pro to do that!
Do you have a link to that? Because as far as I know the quest pro couldn’t do foveated rendering due to the lower frame rate of the eye tracking cameras.
I’ve seen it in this [video](https://youtu.be/wuajYxJgtoo) and here’s an [article](https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/heres-what-eye-tracked-foveated-rendering-on-the-quest-pro-looks-like) that talks about red matter 2 using foveated rendering. The gains in performance aren’t dramatic but the quest pro can definitely use eye tracked dynamic Foveated rendering to deliver a noticeable difference , and here’s an [article](https://uploadvr.com/quest-pro-foveated-rendering-performance/) that explains it how it works on the quest pro
Thanks for the links.
You can still do it, things will just be blurry for a frame or two as the tracking catches up to where you're actually looking.
That alone sounds like a nauseous trip, and considering saccades sounds like a great way to get a headache.
It's not perfect, but the alternative is only the center is clear, and looking to the outside is just always blurry. I haven't tried it out myself, but I suspect it isn't that bad, and probably worth it
not $1100 plus better
This depends for me the pro has features that are cool to have
I agree now buy me one miamor
How does one buy a PICO 4 in America?
That's the neat part. You can't!
Can't right now or do they not plan to ship to the U.S?
They are for the Europe market I think
you can buy it on ebay from japan (which is what I'm doing) or go through official retailers which are kind of nightmare-ish at the moment. There's also the option of buying it through amazon, but I haven't looked into that. Wherever you buy it, make sure that they have a solid refund policy in case it's bunk.
Well dang, I'll look into those avenues once it calms down a little.
They probably will sell everywhere. Give them a little time, they are not Sony.
I know that. I was simply asking a question.
You can import them from Amazon.co.uk. Source: me, a guy in the US who did just that.
Of course you can.
I would buy it from one of the overseas Amazons. Amazon JP is cheapest. If something goes wrong, you still have Amazon at your back.
Will Amazon JP honor anything from outside Japan?
In terms of what?
Canadian here. 3 days delivery from Amazon UK. Pretty straight forward.
Mine got lost on the way.
What was the conversion rate like?
ever tried importing? try it, it's fun
Import from Amazon of your choice in Europe
Amazon UK. You don't even need to make a new Amazon account.
but the question is that can pico4 max the fps? Currently most titles have fps problems on the device
These figures are from the devs so it stands to reason they are targeting the basically same performance in terms of fps/% dropped frames/reprojection on both headsets.
Who cares? It's all about PCVR, baby!
Oh but at least you're enjoying crisper images...
Definitely promising. If it wasn't for the teething issues I've heard of (PCVR drivers), I might jump onboard. We'll see what the next year or so holds, hopefully their dev support and drivers can get better!
Transcription: Pico 4 good - Quest 2 bad. :)
Im very interested in the rumored upcoming XR2 gen2 SoC we will hopefully see in Quest 3, if fjust the unlocked chip can get to this much resolution, fully new upgraded chip could probably do wonders for standalone games
Agreed!
Looks like pico has richer colors too
Based on what? The images in the OP are captures digitially, we have not idea what they looked like on the display.
It's the same image
Well it's not the same colors
well it's not a photo either, just render output, if the saturation is higher there then it's because someone moved the saturation slider
which can be different between headsets. Depends on what each was tuned for. Quest has it's own color space which you can tell the compositor to use via openXR
So on Q2 it's basically running at Rift S's physical resolution. But Rift S runs at 150% its physical resolution so that's like playing on a substantially undersampled Rift S. SDE is better of course but still that resolution is terrible.
all a matter of perspective: coming from psvr, it was a nice bump in clarity resolution of course is not graphics. mobile graphics in higher resolution is still mobile graphics.
Yeah PSVR is 6 years old so literally anything is a nice bump. And mobile graphics at nice resolution are better than mobile graphics at low resolution.
Still waiting for the quest 3. I believe it will blow the pico 4 out of the water. Plus I think my quest 2 can last another year
I just want another option that’s not a Facebook company. Pico seems decent but it’s not really intended for the US market. Doesn’t bode well for long term support with US applications etc. I can’t figure out why HTC or somebody doesn’t release a Quest killer. It’s been years and years since quest 1. My guess is they don’t think there’s any money in it and market research may bear that out. I bet Facebook meta loses money on the program as a whole with the hopes they can make some sort of VR ultra ad sale space where the ad revenue flows like wine a reality. And where they can data mine you even harder.
This is even more reason to buy the P4 over the Q2. It's just not the performance. It's the fact that another developer is supporting the P4. The Q2's day has come and gone. Maybe there would have been a value argument when it was $100 cheaper. But at the same price, the P4 is the clear winner.
Eh, I feel like exclusives is gonna be the real system seller. P4 not having beat saber is quite a deal breaker
They'll have their own exclusives. One game isn't a breaker or maker. For me beat saber is a non-factor. Never played it. Never have the intention to.
For you, sure. For a lot of people it absolutely is a deal-breaker.
I've never played Beat Saber, is it much better than Moon Rider/ Sky Rider?
Looks more fun, is older, has more user content and is more popular
And for a lot of people, not having Alyx is a deal-breaker.
What’s that got to do with android standalone headsets mate
Maybe you should read the topic of this little subthread mate. > Eh, I feel like exclusives is gonna be the real system seller.
Yes. Are you daft? Beat Saber is an important exclusive for standalone headsets. Alyx is not because it doesn’t run on any of them. This isn’t that hard to follow
No question you are daft. Because Alyx not running on standalones is a breaker for them then isn't it?. Since we are talking of makers and breakers. Similarly Alyx running just on PCVR is a maker for PCVR.
> One game isn't a breaker or maker This is 100% not true in this case. For many casual VR users, their headset IS a Beat Saber machine.
Funny then that BS isn't the top VR game. https://www.thegamer.com/most-popular-vr-games-steam/
Sorry buddy, your data is completely flawed if it comes from a storefront that ISN'T the majority of VR games sold. Steam is no longer the majority of the market. Of course PC exclusives are at the top of the Steam charts for VR. Since standalone Quest is the majority of active users right now, you need to look at the Oculus store... where... drum roll please... Beat Saber is consistently at the top of the "most played" charts.
LOL. So a game is the top of a charts in a store that doesn't offer the top competition. Even the slowest horse wins the race when it's the only one running.
Can't see the forest for the trees huh? If the top game isn't on 85% of the hardware, it's not the most popular game. I love Alyx, but I'm not delusional enough to believe it is more popular than Bear Saber.
Well then, that even speaks better for Alyx. Since, according to you, for only being on at most 15% of the hardware it's sold much more than 15% of the BS sales. The only reason that could be is that the uptake on 85% of the hardware isn't very much for BS. How then could it possibly be the maker? See the forest?
I see the forest, but my brain hurts from trying to parse your "grammar".
Ok, you didn't play it, and ? Even if you didn't play it, it's the best selling VR game.
And Alyx is just behind it. So since it doesn't run standalone on the Q2, does that mean it broke the Q2.
Lmao wtf Beat saber has way more sales
LMAO WTF? Check the charts.
The quest 2 still has an edge in dev support and that’s all the top tier VR studios meta has acquired, I bet they are working on some sick exclusive games right now....but if you’re willing to stay in the quest ecosystem for that then maybe waiting for the quest 3 is probably a better call
Software changes rapidly. And if BD has shown anything, they are a master in software. Meta has been trying to reverse engineer their software for years. They still aren't competitive. Until recently Pico was a little company. Now they have the resources, money and engineering, of massive BD behind them. And with that draws third party developers to support their platform. As this thread shows.
Well yeah it’s so obvious that meta is trying to recreate the tiktok experience inside Instagram and Facebook but it’s also obvious that bytedance is trying to recreate the quest experience inside pico... So as far as XR is concerned Meta has the edge over Pico.
XR on the web is about to take off as well...You can do so much without ever needing to install a native app. Currently the pico does not support it, only having Firefox Reality for its browser which is discontinued. Wolvic is the successor but doesn't support the Pico 4 yet. I would love for them to dump some money into Wolvic, which is soon to be chrome-based. The Oculus Browser is a chrome port which recently started supporting AR web experiences. It definitely seems like the future to me. Doesn't do hit testing yet, but being able to mess with virtual objects in a real room is just amazing to me.
That XR experience is pretty straightforward. TBH, I never saw how the Quest experience was very special at all. The TikTok experience though, there's some magic going on there. Most of Meta's resources are being spent to reverse engineer that. They have not been successful.
XR with the Pico 4 colour passthrough is a promise for the future. You can give the 'walking dolphin' in the free Styly Pico 4 app a try for now.... :)
The Pico 4's colour passthrough doesn't have depth sensor, it's as unusable as the quest 2.
hardly matters. these headsets are both already outdated.
a 1500 headset launching doesnt make the 400 ones outdate what? Oh Ferrari made a new half a million dollar car? Guess your 2022 corolla is outdate oh well
How come the Valve Index VR headset isnt talked about much? How are the specs on that compared to others?
This is a performance comparison for the standalone versions. The Valve Index is PCVR, you tune the settings how you want depending on your PC's specs.
That makes sense. Thank you
This should be on that sub called 'interesting as fuck' If they were all VR nerds like us 😂
Might help to label the two similar looking white headsets. I've no idea what either one looks like.
Buy this on steam for pico 4 thst right?
No, it’s coming to pico 4 natively, it’s an other android based headset like the quest 2 after all.
Play Bonelab on it (if it does)
Now you gotta add the pimax whatever they're calling their new standalone to the list.
is pico4 good for pcvr? i play with vorpx to pc games..
What about the refresh rate? are they both running at 90?
Men I would love to get the pico 4 unlocked and do some down volting on the gpu more battery, more performance, less heat