Similarly, improvements to the weight distribution and the addition of the built-on earphones help the Pro sound – and feel – as good as it makes games look. Similarly, improvements to the weight distribution and the addition of the built-on earphones help the Pro sound – and feel – as good as it makes games look. However, that doesn’t mean the HTC Vive Pro isn’t still one of the best, professional-grade VR experiences money can buy – even if we don’t think it’s the option that makes sense for most people.
This argument is now a little dated considering we have the next-gen Xbox Series X, but the comparison still stands for those trying to get their heads around where the HTC Vive Pro sits in the small but powerful line-up for VR headsets nowadays. Tack on the price of the recommended GPUs (that’s the processor you’d need in your PC for the VR headset to work) – either the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070/Quadro P500 or AMD Radeon Vega 56 graphics cards – and the HTC Vive Pro, although reduced since launch, still isn’t cheap. When it’s firing on all cylinders on high-end PC hardware, the HTC Vive Pro continues to offer one of the most beautiful, visually rich games we’ve seen in virtual reality.
The harness keeps the headset from moving during particularly intense moments in games like DOOM VFR or Arizona Sunshine, and wards off the infamous head strain that could occur after wearing the original HTC Vive for an extended period of time. Spin the headset around to the back and you’ll find the new turn knob – a carry-over from the Vive Deluxe Audio Strap that HTC released last year.
On the front of the headset you’ll now find a second front-facing camera which will offer improved tracking for developers looking to make AR experiences.
HTC Vive Pro Review: An Expensive VR Upgrade
That prototype Vive sent me down to the bottom of the ocean to walk around for the first time and let me stare a blue whale in the eye. Facebook launched the Oculus Go this month, which doesn’t require a phone or computer to run and cost a scant $200. It starts at $800 for the headset alone, boasts double the resolution of its predecessor (2,880 x 1,600 pixels combined with one AMOLED screen for each eye), and comes with built-in on-ear headphones and microphones.
It has a bevy of small wearability upgrades that make it more comfortable to put on and wear for longer periods of time.
HTC Vive Pro 2 review: The ultimate VR experience
(Pocket-lint) – The HTC Vive Pro 2 has arrived – and you could easily be forgiven for thinking it’s virtually the same VR headset that the company released back in 2018. The most significant upgrade to the Vive Pro 2 over the previous generation comes in the form of the visuals on offer.
The screen door effect is essentially a thing of the past, too, and you’ll just find yourself getting lost in the experience. HTC also has used a dual-stack lens design this time around, with two lenses redirecting the image for a wider field of view.
This means that prescription lens adapters for previous headsets don’t fit the Vive Pro 2. We quickly noticed we could see the edges of the lenses more easily when playing and we sadly found this quite distracting. Of course, you need a pretty significant gaming machine in order to run it at this resolution and at the 120Hz available refresh rate, but if you can manage it from that perspective then things will truly look magnificent. It’s worth noting that you do need a DisplayPort connection on your gaming machine or laptop in order to run this headset. It’s essentially the best headset on the market in that department, but in other ways, the Vive Pro 2 is still stuck in the past. With the Vive Cosmos, HTC tried to take on the Oculus Rift S by adding inside-out tracking cameras to allow users to ditch the classic base stations and opt for an easier setup.
This feels old school at this point – with the need to have tracking stations setup in your play space, preferably in opposite corners of your room, plugged into the mains power and monitoring your movement. It’s soft and plush, meaning you don’t have any unnecessary pressure on your face, nose or eyes when playing.
With a couple of clicks on the settings menu you can turn on a camera view that pops out from your controller and lets you see your real world. A triple-click of the menu button on a controller also activates another passthrough system which enables you to see the room around you with a green haze. These two systems are great for not falling over objects in the real-world and make VR life easier in general. This is a great improvement as it means you rarely have to take the headset off in order to mess around with your PC to do something simple like launching a new game or agree to a firewall change.
The Vive Pro 2 has built-in adjustable Hi-Res certified headphones which can be repositioned until they’re in a comfortable spot. Yes, they offer great sound, are easy to position, and block out a surprising amount of surrounding noise.
Generally speaking, we get hot while gaming in VR anyway, but the Vive Pro 2 is particularly steamy thanks to both the headphones and the copious amounts of comfortable padding. The full kit (which includes the headset, base station 2.0, and Vive Wand controllers v2) – available from 4 June for £1299 / $1399 / €1399.
These now sport a nifty blue colour scheme that matches the Pro 2 headset, but otherwise they control the same as ever.
HTC has made a point of saying that the Vive Pro 2 will work with Valve’s Knuckle controllers as an alternative though.
The HTC Vive Pro 2 is undeniably the current leader in the virtual reality headset space. So if you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket or you’re a Vive fan and want the upgraded experience then there’s nothing else that can compete.
Read our review squirrel_widget_2679961 It might be a bit older now, but it’s still a great headset if you can find it at a bargain price. Its tracking certainly isn’t as good, but there’s no hassle of base stations to setup and it’s also surprisingly comfortable and fun to game on.
HTC Vive Pro 2 Review
Despite its name, the Vive Pro 2 is intended for both professional VR and consumers, offering the same SteamVR compatibility as the Valve Index along with HTC’s own Viveport ecosystem. That headset section can be pushed forward or backward against the facemask part with the press of a button on the lower-left corner, letting you adjust the distance between the lenses and your eyes to improve focus. A knob on the front panel’s lower-right area lets you tweak pupillary distance (how far apart the lenses are horizontally, to best align with how far apart your eyes are). The back of the harness is heavily padded, and features a dial for tightening that section against the side arms, while the top strap can be manually adjusted with velcro fasteners.
The box is a rectangular, gray, plastic enclosure, about the size of a wallet, with a port for the headset cable on the front along with a power button. The Valve Index’s controllers feature individual finger tracking that the Vive ones lack, and feel much more natural and immersive to use than the stiff HTC wands. Besides those components, the Vive Pro 2 works with several optional accessories, such as the $349 Wireless Adapter Pack that lets you use the headset with a wireless connection to your PC instead of a physical cable, and the $130 Facial Tracker that reads facial expressions (though you’ll obviously need to find software that takes advantage of that, or use it for development). The resolution is the headset’s main draw, a fairly massive bump from the Valve Index’s 1,440 by 1,600 pixels per eye.
It requires a PC with at least an Intel Core i5-4590 or AMD Ryzen 1500 CPU and a GeForce 1060 or Radeon 480 graphics card, along with a DisplayPort 1.4 interface for full resolution. Considering the Vive Pro 2’s price, a year-long subscription would have been more generous, though (especially since some games are only available with an annual membership to Viveport Infinity). The game looks fantastic at the Vive Pro 2’s higher resolution, showing more detail and cleaner edges than on the Index. Motion was also smooth as I moved my head, with the headset and base stations accurately tracking my position and orientation and translating them to the in-game picture with fluid graphics.
Broadly, the Vive Pro 2 simply offers a sharper picture than the Valve Index or other headsets we’ve tested. That makes it much more expensive than the Valve Index (an Editors’ Choice pick for VR headsets), which we already found to be pricey at $1,000 for its full, everything-included package.
If you’re really open to splurging for the best VR experience you can get, you can buy the Vive Pro 2 and supplement it with the Valve Index base stations and controllers. Doesn’t include necessary base stations or controllers The Bottom Line The Vive Pro 2 is the highest-resolution VR headset we’ve seen yet, with a price to match.
HTC Vive Pro 2 review: The best VR headset for non-gamers
You could fill an entire room with imagination, something that took the competition multiple years and more than one hardware revision to catch up with. But its rich price tag — $1,200 (roughly £870 or AU$1,605) for the full system, $799 for the headset alone — confirm its target audience is strictly the capex crowd.
HTC’s external tracking system, the two base stations with a sync box connected to your computer, has been the way this company has done things from the beginning. Put simply, there’s a reason most of the top-ranking Beat Saber players don’t use the headset made by the company that owns the game. This is super important, both because these headsets are designed to be worn for hours at a time and because HTC relies on hybrid fresnel lenses to deliver its visual quality. I’m aware of the top and bottom of the screen when I’m in the headset doing things, but I have to stop and think about where the left and right edges of the display are because the panel and lenses do such a good job together. While something like Half Life: Alyx looked incredible, the Vive Pro 2 revealed some of the weaker visuals in Star Trek: Bridge Crew. They work great, and the batteries last plenty long, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t eager to pick up my Valve Knuckles to use them instead.
While HTC dominates when it comes to hardware quality and those killer in-app visuals, there is no such thing as being able to just pop the headset on and jump into an app. SteamVR told me I needed to update my video card, Viveport gave me a notification about restarting to resolve a displayport issue, and it turned out neither of these were the actual problem. Many of the issues I’ve encountered are in software environments HTC’s primary clients, the businesses using VR for development and training, aren’t going to experience. Prosumer streamers can enjoy the experience, for sure, but most gamers won’t be firing this up for a quick session.
HTC has done an incredible job making the headset comfortable enough that I actually want to wear it for longer periods of time.
HTC Vive Pro 2 review
With a high-resolution screen, speedy refresh rate, and powerful built-in audio, it’s enthusiast-grade hardware that rivals the Valve Index and would represent a significant visual upgrade for someone jumping from an Oculus Quest 2. With a few caveats in mind, there’s lots to love here, and a truly immersive experience awaits those that can accommodate the demands of the HTC Vive Pro 2.
Though the mainstream VR industry seems to be heading towards a future where all-in-one, wireless headsets like the Oculus Quest 2 are the norm, HTC’s Vive Pro 2 is very much aimed instead at the enthusiast-level player – the sort of person who doesn’t blush at the price of a high-end gaming PC, and values higher resolution and refresh rates over portability. And that’s to be expected, given the specs here – the Vive Pro 2 targets a 5K resolution (its display is 4896 x 2448, something akin to 2.5K for each eye), and a silky smooth 120Hz refresh rate. A dial-and-lock system on its strap makes it quick to adjust to your head size, and the facial interface inside is wide enough so as not to be a problem for glasses wearers. Also, it’s worth praising the inclusion of a physical IPD slider – that’s interpupillary distance, measuring the space between the pupils of your eyes.
It’s an unavoidable part of the high-end VR experience at present – onboard mobile processors just couldn’t handle this kind of resolution – but it’s still a pain. That allows for high-resolution textures and assets to be compressed and recompiled at speed, making sure that DisplayPort 1.2 standards can handle the large amounts of data traveling from your PC to the headset. If you think you’re going to get the HTC Vive Pro 2 home and jump straight into the VR action, think again – there’s a substantial setup process to carry out before you can enjoy the virtual reality fun it can deliver. And in both cases, the payoff is worthwhile, with the hardware here delivering a really immersive experience – tracking is reliable, visuals are impressive, and you’ve no battery concerns to worry about. Once you’ve put the time in to get everything set up for the HTC Vive Pro 2, the reason why you bought it in the first place will become clear. Integrating with the Steam VR ecosystem, you’ve access to a vast number of virtual reality games for PC.
And though it’s not natively supported, you’ll have a good time playing with what should be Oculus-exclusive titles too – providing you’re prepared to set up the third-party compatibility app called Revive. We’d recommend at least giving the trial a go – different players will find different VR game styles more or less comfortable, depending on your susceptibility to motion sickness. This is a premium VR option then, sitting in the same rough price bracket as the high-end Valve Index virtual reality kit. You’re also going to need a highly-specced computer to make the most of the HTC Vive Pro 2, as its high-resolution screen demands a decent processor and powerful graphics card to run at its best.
If visual fidelity is the most important part of the virtual reality experience for you, and you have a substantial amount of money to invest in your VR setup, the HTC Vive Pro is definitely worth your time. It requires plenty of space to enjoy, and set-up can be a pain, but if you’ve access to a high-end desktop PC, the HTC Vive Pro 2 is hard to beat. Its Vive controller wands feel very unintuitive by today’s standards and lack the ergonomic features more recent VR input devices offer. It’s also a shame not to find HTC experimenting with inside-out tracking – reliant on onboard cameras rather than external base stations.
Completely standalone thanks to its built-in battery and wireless without the need for a PC, it’s comfortable to wear, impressive to use, and boasts an increasingly large library of superb gaming and productivity apps.
HTC Vive Pro 2 review: An excellent 5K headset for the VR faithful
For them, spending $1,399 on the entire Vive Pro 2 package would be worth it to play Half Life: Alyx in the best quality possible. The Pro 2 features a black and purple color scheme, but its front facia, strap and headphones all look the same as before. The screen can also refresh at up to a 120Hz, which is noticeably smoother than the previous 90Hz panel, and I appreciated the wider 120-degree field of view, which makes virtual worlds feel all the more immersive. The Focus 3, meanwhile, has a limited selection of mobile titles, and I was never able to successfully stream higher-end VR from my gaming PC.
I kept getting distracted by the detailed environments in Half Life Alyx — a game that looked great on the Index, but has an extra level of polish with the Pro 2’s resolution bump. You might not notice the difference at first glance, but once you start inspecting the finer details like grass and wood grain you can tell you’re working with more pixels.
That game already looked impressive on a normal monitor, but in 5K VR I could appreciate Senua’s intricate character model even more. Near-field speakers would have been a solid upgrade from on-ear headphones, especially since the Pro 2’s cans tended to make my head feel warm.
The headset’s displays also generate a decent amount of heat as well, which led to some sweaty play sessions.
HTC Vive Pro 2 review: Virtual reality for the fortunate few
Building upon the successes of its predecessor, HTC’s next-gen headset is once again the most expensive way to access virtual reality right now – and that’s before you take into consideration the beefy gaming PC needed to enjoy it to the fullest. Clearly, the Vive Pro 2 is geared more towards gamers with high-end rigs, using modern graphics cards capable of pushing VR to its limits. If you aren’t planning on upgrading from the original headset you’ll also need to buy a pair of base stations and two controllers – either Vive’s own or any others from Oculus or Valve. As I’ve mentioned, perhaps the most well-known is the Oculus Quest 2, which costs £300 and can either be used on its own or connected to your PC via a single USB-C to USB 3.1 cable for some extra processing grunt.
Finally, the Valve Index – like the Vive Pro 2 – needs a pair of base stations, costs £919 for the full bundle (with a free copy of Half-Life: Alyx) and has a higher maximum refresh rate of 144Hz, as well as a wider 130-degree FOV. However, HTC has added a matte black faceplate on the front, which to my eyes looks a bit out of place next to the rest of the headset’s blue/navy colour.
You’re still going to look a bit silly with one of these strapped to your face (as my pictures show), but the Vive Pro 2 does a good job of evenly distributing weight across your head, and the adjustable headband can accommodate a wide range of noggin sizes as well. On that note, the Vive Pro 2 is just as well suited to glasses wearers and, like the previous model, you’re also able to adjust the interpupillary distance (the space between both lenses) by between 57mm and 72mm in order to get the image correctly in focus.
It’s easy enough to do this, too: you simply hold down a small button on the left side of the headset and pull the front either towards or away from your face until everything looks clear. This grants access to all sorts of extra settings, however, allowing you to manually adjust per-eye resolution, maximum refresh rate and apply motion compensation. As a frame of reference, my testing rig consists of a Ryzen 7 1700 (close to the minimum), an Nvidia RTX 3070 FE graphics card and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Wacky wobbly-weapon-waving colosseum battler Gorn also ran without any noticeable performance hiccups, as did time-stopping shooter Superhot VR.
The Vive Pro 2’s headsets and controllers support both first- and second-gen SteamVR base stations, and I tested both – neither failed to register my head/body movements and arm waggles. Provided you’ve got the hardware to support it, the Vive Pro 2 offers a truly exceptional VR experience, with an as-yet-unmatched maximum rendering resolution, as well as a handful of added gaming-friendly benefits. The Vive Pro 2’s starting price is hard to stomach, especially when you can pick up a standalone VR headset such as the Oculus Quest 2 for a fraction of the cost.
Pair the high cost with the lack of any meaningful design changes and the absence of new controllers, and it’s ultimately a bit of a head-scratching update.
HTC Vive Pro: de beste VR-headset, maar voor wie?
HTC’s Vive met bijbehorende controllers en basisstations kostte bij introductie in Nederland net geen 1000 euro, inmiddels koop je dezelfde set voor ongeveer 600 euro. Wil je de complete HTC Vive Pro Full Kit met de eveneens benodigde base stations en controllers dan moet er maar liefst 1400 euro neergeteld worden. Voor wie is deze headset bedoeld, en is hij zijn enorme meerprijs ook echt waard is dus de vraag. Een complete stand alone kit is sinds kort ook te koop.
Het grootste optische verschil zit hem echter in de headstrap. De Vive Pro is voorzien van een verstelbare kunststof hoofdband waardoor het op- en afzetten van de headset een heel stuk gemakkelijker maakt.
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