Question: In terms of visual quality, is SteamVR better than Oculus? Has anyone tried both?
Also, what about performance? Any noticeable difference?
Picture quality-wise the rendering seems the same to me in-engine. The only difference is that it does feel slightly less responsive than the Oculus plugin, I’m guessing this is due to the lack of timewarp support as I don’t think they are using the Oculus driver but rather their own. I could be wrong. Hopefully with late-latching which applies to both Oculus and SteamVR and some other optimizations the difference won’t be as stark. I’m sure by the time both devices are out the differences will be negligible, for now though even with fast hardware timewarp does add a slight advantage in that there is one final tweak based on head orientation before rendering out to the eyes and that helps a lot.
We are building content that we would like to demo on a Vive system at some point.
Will we need any special license keys to enable Vive support when we go to hook up the HMD?
Do you have to be logged into Steam or does the new OpenVR release allow you to run without connection to Steam?
I don’t know 100% but I expect that there shouldn’t be any keys needed. With my DK2 I just needed to have the latest SteamVR beta installed through Steam, I don’t even have Steam itself running.
I did find that the plugin priority feature in the BaseEngine.ini no longer works in the latest source build so I had to disable the Oculus plugin completely to get a Vive build, but otherwise it works quite well and pretty much seamlessly like the Oculus plugin.
I have tried both HMD and in terms of visual quality they are both about the same. However the Steam controllers are amazing and I would get SteamVR just for them. It is an amazing experience to be able to interact with objects in VR and the manner in which the Steam controllers allow you to do this is unprecedented IMO.