Hi everyone! Been a user of Rift S for quite some while now but the headset is showing sights of wear and is just not comfortable to use so I decided to look for an upgrade. I currently can't decide between the Pico 4 and the Quest 3. The specs of the Quest 3 alone make me want to pick it up but at the same time I am purely looking for a PCVR headset. Should I go for Quest 3 or Pico 4? I don't mind spending a little bit extra money if it's worth it though.
Can't decide what VR headset to buy (PCVR purely)
Purchase Advice - HeadsetQuest 3 is the superior PCVR headset to the Pico 4. Especially if you have a GPU capable of AV1.
Pico 4 is the superior headset if you want to do PCVR, its way cheaper and have much better ergonomics. And less of a screen door effect, as Quest3 has tilted panels, so you get jagged lines and clear SDE.
But you might as well consider Pimax Light, as its about to start shipping. As its pure PCVR headset, and has twice the pixels at 8.3MP per eye.
Its miles ahead of either of Quest3 or PIco4 :
I have both, the Pico 4 is a good headset, but the Quest 3 is easily the better of the two.
Better panels, better optics, better decoding performance, more reliable tracking, especially when it's being used with space calibration. More supported features in general when being used with Virtual Desktop.
Poorer panels, poorer ergonomics and more expensive.
I see, I recently built my 4070 ti SUPER rig which is why I wanted to take my VR to next level as well. I guess the main concern I have is the battery life of Quest 3
the battery life of Quest 3
I bought two 10k amp hour battery banks that are the size of a pack of smokes but with nice rounded edges.. I can either slip it in my pocket or put it in the holster strap thing I made for it but each one is good for 2-3 hrs on max settings (plus 1-2hr onboard) and they can be hotswapped during long sessions.
That's a nice alternative, thanks for the suggestion!
This is the specific one I use
edit: fixed link
You sure about that? 😄
Heh I think my mouse's buttons are getting flakey because even when I tried to copy the corrected link it still pasted the same Alps switch :p
That card is an ideal paring with a Q3.
You can extend the battery life in any way you wish. The battery life difference between a stock Q3 and a stock P4 is negligible, both need extending in the same way.
A battery headstrap will do so, as well as better balance the weight.
If you intend to lay down often and don't want anything protruding from the back, then a pocket battery does the job. If you don't want to carry any battery, then you can just usb it to a wall socket as well. 5 meter braided usb cables are cheap and durable.
I see, thank you for the feedback! Something I will def consider. Battery headstrap does feel super handy but will have to find a way to get it shipped where i live haha.
Big screen beyond
No inside out tracking kinda kills it.
This is super situational. I personally much prefer inside out but I know a lot of people that prefer base stations.
costing as much as a used 2003 ford focus kinda kills it
other than that it would be SO PERFECT
..but it's not, because again, it costs as much as a used 2003 ford focus
What makes Quest 3 better than Pico 4 for PCVR though, apart from the refresh rate perhaps? Because it's not obvious from this comparison.
Quest 3 supports WiFi6E, Pico doesn't. If you live in an area where you can't get a stable 5ghz WiFi connection then having 6ghz is a big deal.
Q3's pancake lens are better.
Q3's video decoder is more powerful/flexible.
Full body estimation on Q3 actually leverages the cameras to estimate your pose lower body where on Pico doesn't.
Pico 4 is more ergonomic and has far less of a screen door effect as Quest3 has tilted panels, and its way cheaper.
For PCVR, there is really no reason to get Quest3 and pay more for it. Most who have used both, prefer Pico4 over Quest3
I'd argue the lens alone are probably worth paying extra for a Quest 3. I also consider ergonomics is non issue because you'll want to tune it for your specific needs and Quest has plenty of accessories in that regard.
WIFi6E isn't required but boy can it make things easier when you don't (at least for now since very few people use 6ghz) have to worry about your neighbors and what they're doing with their WiFi.
Once you start paying for the accessories, the price starts to be so high that there is no sense in it anymore. Pico4 is ergonomic stock, and considerably cheaper. Also, it has less SDE so thats a big thing. The tilted panels & mura on Quest3 are a know issue, also the poor quality control.
It's 150 euro cheaper where I live (probably 230-ish including the quest 3 accesories I would have to get) That being said I think I will pay more and get the Quest 3
Better pass through and UI fluidity as well, more powerful chipset allows for better sharpening/SSW in pcvr too
I see, what about the battery life of it and other acessories. Anything I should know?
Bobo VR S3 Pro is killer for comfort and battery life.
Agreed. Did it and never went back
Another post asking for recommendations that is going to bring the same usual Quest platform supporters, and I still maintain my stance that there are Oculus/Meta astroturfing accounts that are here on reddit to do nothing but disparage PCVR users who want to have actual options and choices of where to spend money. Then all the fighting because of how Oculus/Meta has created division with their loss leading, game/software gatekeeping approach. Every time someone makes a post asking what VR kit to get, the fighting and arguing continues.
The cognitive dissonance also continues. I say again, competition and choice is good. What is happening now is not good. Watch the downvotes. The mass market and VR means certain people want the cheapest and simplest to use with no care for anything else, this is viewed in the narrow light of "people voted with their wallets". Except they were manipulated into it through social engineering of Quest being sold below value, and a consequence is where we are now. Very few new PCVR kits at or nearby the Quest platform cost. Very few quality PCVR games, and many are downgraded Quest ports (Bonelab being just one example with lackluster developer support despite their 2 year promise) with many corners cut to make it work standalone at the cost of everyone playing PCVR through SteamVR.
Then there are many Quest users who take the "refuse to see a problem" approach, of acting as if compression does not exist and that if they cannot see it, then no one can see it and anyone who does must be insane and also apparently the ones who can see it, get their eyesight insulted, but not the ones who sit there defending compression as something that is not there, because they cannot see it.
For PCVR, the newest and most affordable (relatively speaking) that is not Oculus/Meta is the DPVR E4 and that is if your IPD matches the 63 to 64mm or so fixed IPD that it is. But it is native 3664x1920 at 120hz through displayport for $599 plus tax from the DPVR store. You also have to download their DPVR software to setup the headset as well.
Besides that, I hate how the choices of PCVR only kits, is still just old discontinued kits like Vive Cosmos (Elite also) and soon to be WMR, old expensive kits like the Index which there has been discussion of the BOE panels being discontinued over in the Valve Index reddit forum and Vive Pro 2 with its ridiculous price and outdated wand controllers. The Vive Pro 2's lack of new controllers only hurts its value for money when I or anyone who buys the kit, then has to spend more money on Index controllers. Yet, HTC couldn't be bothered to make SteamVR versions of its Focus 3 controllers (or new Cosmos style SteamVR controllers) bundled with the Vive Pro 2, at a minimum?
As I said before, all I want is for there to be a variety of choices of whether a customer can choose Oculus/Meta, Valve, HTC, etc; I don't understand why people get so angry about PCVR customers wanting to have a choice of more normal displayport (or even HDMI 2.1 48gbps) simple VR kits to use on their PCs. At MicroCenter, there is only a few choices for brand new (not old/refurbished/used ) VR kits at the store I go to. Quest 3, PSVR2, HTC XR Elite and Vive Pro 2. Nothing new below the Quest 3's $500 plus tax price. That is where some older WMR kits used to be on sale. Nothing new between the $800 XR Elite and the $1400 Pro 2.
All of this fighting because we have so few options and alternatives. The Pimax Crystal Light is yet to be proven and Pimax has been unreliable in the past, with many of their HMDs being cheaply made and the plastic cracking. They should have just called it the Pimax Crystal S, and used the S designation to mean PCVR only.
Quest 3 is amazing Imo. I use it for dev work, personal game play, media, even fb and manwha.
at least for me, my main pcvr set is the index, but i have a rift s for oculus games and stuff, with a quest 2 for standalone. i got a psvr2. my suggestion would be index if you dont care about the price, because its pricey as all hell at 1000 clams, and requires the placing of base stations in your area to track the headset and controllers. but it does let you use every finger in gameplay individually and you get a free copy of half life alyx. it also does not have as good a resolution. but facebook, last i checked, is selling the quest 2 at 300 dollars for the 128gb model, so for a budget headset now would be the time to get one of those. that would just be my choice though, so dont take my word as proof and go research some stuff about them and see what you like best. just my advice. g'day
I have the valve index and I fucking love it
same. my favorite headset. why is it the only one that lets you use every finger
The safe bet is Quest 3 with link cable. Other than that:
The Index is great in many places but the panels are too low res.
The Bigscreen Beyond seems a hit or miss. It is a miss for me as it’s way too dim, has a somewhat low FOV and about 20% of that FOV is so blurry you really cant see anything.
The last candidate would be the Pimax Crystal Light. I’ve pre ordered one hoping it would replace my Index. I’d wait for reviews on this one before pulling the trigger on a Quest 3
The index is great, but I recommend ceiling wire anchors.
I see, I am thinking of the ''Syntech Link Cable'' that seems to be a good third party one.
I went for the cable made by Meta. It’s more expensive but it is tinner and less stiff than the cheaper Amazon one I tried.
If you can't decide, the answer is almost always the Quest 3.
If you go with the Quest 3 be prepared for artifacts and input latency on PCVR.
Do you even own a quest 3
No, and this is why I will never. I tried it at a friends place, and while yes, the resolution and the lenses are superior, the latency and artifacts ruined it for me.
You need to include this if you are giving advice. You tried it at a friends place and didn’t have the best experience but your initial comment sounds like this is something you experience daily
I mean, using it daily won’t change how it works. And if I don’t enjoy using it, why would I use it daily?
How bad is it? Is it something that would be very noticable for lets say rythm games like beat saber?
Some people say it’s unnoticable, but it’s still streaming. I noticed it and it bothered me a lot.
It's noticible and annoying on everything, and makes high level games like Beat Saber and competitive shooters very difficult.
It works OK if you have nothing else, but any real pcvr headset will work better than a quest.
I see, is that even the case if I use a cable for PCVR?
Yes. It'll be a better, but still there. If your goal is to play exclusively pcvr games, get a headset that's exclusively pcvr, or you're in for a mediocre experiance.
Thanks for the feedback I appreciate it!
I disagree, I’ve used exclusively pcvr headsets vive/index as well as quest 2/pro/quest 3. I would not call the quest 3 a mediocre experience at all, it is superior than the index in my experience.
I play exclusively pcvr games wirelessly, and if you just tinker with the settings in the oculus tool you can get it close to wired quality. Depends on your router / gpu though
Wired is the only way for me (at least for now) since i don't have a good enough router to have minimal latency.
No you can’t get it close to wired quality. Just because you’re not capable of noticing it doesn’t mean compression and latency isn’t there affecting things. Good for you. But anyone who cares about visuals and good response time will be bothered.
Like I said, hard disagree. You might not think so but I’m not the only person saying this like it or hate it
Yeah people who need to check their eyes will say Quest 3 is close to wired quality. People who can actually properly look at things and used actual PCVR headsets will notice the compression regardless of the settings used. Claiming that 500mbit/s of data is of equal quality than an image streamed through bandwidth of 30gbit/s is just unreal no matter how you look at it.
Honestly do yourself a favor and wait for pimax crystal light reviews. The cheapest version isn’t that much more expensive than quest 3 and will be a significant upgrade in quality of the image.
If you play with a cable with at least a bitrate of 500 the compression is less noticeable and the input lag unnoticeable (at least to me). I still get color banding though.
I can tell you that my 4080 with virtual desktop 10 bit codec , wireless has flawless image quality on the Quest 3. latency is about 35 ms which is not on par with my index but close enough for beatsaber on expert and eve4y other game so far. Pico 4 has awful latency wireless and over cable with its native software.
It doesn’t have flawless image quality. Just because you personally cant see it, it doesn’t mean compression artifacts aren’t there for most to see. Also 10bit codec even at 200 will convey details worse than h.264 at 300 and above.
Sorry that I'm a 3d graphics professional artist/developer with more than 20 years in the field and I'm VERY picky about image quality and compression artefacts. I very sure I can see quite weak artefacts in any images. I was and still am blown away by the wireless transmission quality of Virtual Desktop with AV-1 10-bit to the Quest 3. Metas own solution and SteamLink deliver way worse quality over cable or wireless. The Quest 2 had really bad compression artefacts so I prefered my trusty uncompressed Index. But the Quest 3 had made the Index graphics wise even for PCVR obsolete.
If you are seeing Q3 bad compression artefacts with virtual desktop, the AV-1 10bit codec even with 300 mbit and a RTX 40XX then perhaps you should check your settings/hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7GuLXflypA
XD. There are 3 reasons why I know your "3d graphics professional artist with 20+ years expeirence" is just bullshit.
AV1-10 bit is barely better than HEVC 10-bit. There is almost no difference. Only in specific situations it's better and those are still not big enough of differences to care. High bit rate H.264 still looks better overall.
AV-1 cannot be run at 300mbit. The hard cap is 200 - you don't even know the basic config limitations in VD - you're bullshitting all around
settings/hardware? Sure. Maxed out bit rate and resolution accounting for lens distortion. What else is there to set? ah yes nothing. Hardware doesn't matter. Unless we're talking AMD vs NVIDIA. AMD has worse VMAF score. Nvidia cards overall (all series) has same/super close VMAF score. Drivers also don't matter when it comes to compression quality. So no. Hardware is irrelevant. Nothing from hardware would make compression artifact worse that I could check. If GPU was faulty it wouldn't show as worse compression quality. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
So you found a youtube video where you can see that the native Quest H.264+ codec is showing artefacts. That's exactly what I'm saying, it's trash compared to VDs AV-1 10 bit.
- VD is cooking with it's own tricks on top of AV1
- Yes you are right 200 MBit is the maximum for AV1 in VD, you got me here, sorry I have a life and my setup is giving me amazing image quality so I don't need to look into the exact setting daily.
- NVIDIA RTX 4000 cards have as a first native hardware AV1 ENCODING which together with VD are amazing for VR: https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-design-viz-stories-ep/rtx-4000-ada-datashe?lx=CCKW39&contentType=data-sheet
https://www.reddit.com/r/obs/comments/xlfr8r/av1_on_nvidia_4000_series_the_future_of_recording/
The VD developer changelog:
https://github.com/guygodin/VirtualDesktop/releases/tag/v1.29.0
stating that AV1 only works for Quest 3 with NVIDIA 4000 or AMD 7000 series.
Go out and get a 4000 card, the Quest 3, Virtual Desktop and a decent WIFI router and see for yourself how amazing image quality got. Stop spilling your incompetent wrong bullshit on the internet. Ask your mama to buy you a RTX 4000 card so you can play with the big boys (if you aren't too dumb to understand technology details that matter).
You’re the one spouting bullshit without understanding that your “AV-1 encoder on nvidia reeeeeeee” argument doesn’t mean shit.
- I recorded that video for another asinine user who also was talking crap how compression is not an issue yada yada.
2.I have rtx 4080. Second of all I bought quest 3 on release and used it for a month (before eventually returning it) and tried it with all settings using VD and oculus link too. In every case the compression was still there. Latency was still there.
I have top end WiFi 6E router setup correctly for wireless play.
I said it already. AV1 doesn’t even look that much better than hevc if at all. In most cases and as well in this particular game/video when I run quest 3 with 200mbit av1 it would look even worse in the distance than 400 and even 300 h.264.
Your beloved hardware encoder is a dual one in 4070ti and above and its main goal is for productivity to offload tasks from one to another for more multitasking and possible video streams/encoding to run at the same time and make things generally faster when encoding videos. The compression/encoding algorithm used is still a preset that is set in VD (or any other software to play pcvr). It’s not encoder that has a better quality capabilities itself. The software feeds the encoder and tells it in what way to encode the video stream. Yes at the same bit rate av1 will be better than h.264 and depending on the scene slightly better than h.265. It’s a more space efficient codec. But it’s not some magical solution that suddenly makes all the difference. It’s also slower to encode decode. For encoding is not an issue for vr. Decoding has additional few ms compared to hevc depending on the scene. Needless latency increase for little additional benfits. The encoders in 4000 series have exactly the same or nearly the same VMAF score as previous series cards. The only thing that gets better series after series is speed efficiency when it comes to high quality presets and overall. But those are used for video rendering and streaming and for VR it’s not relevant because all encoding presets for vr are already encoding in 3-5 milliseconds so you can’t shave off even more from that in a meaningful way. Those are ultra low latency fast presets that sacrifice image quality for real time encoding capabilities. It’s really not that hard of a concept. You want quality encoding? You have to wait longer for the encoding to happen. You want real time super fast encoding as the rendering happens frame after frame? You sacrifice image quality. The higher the ratio of compression the more compression artifacts there are. In case of vr the compression ratio is around 30:1 if you use oculus link with 960 bit rate. 60:1 if you use 500bitrate in VD and 150:1 when using av1 at 200 bit rate. The only real time compression that is considered visually lossless is DSC. DSC compression ratio is 3:1. Quite a small number compared to 30, 60 or 150 :)
I really had a good laugh seeing how you tell me to ask my mom to buy me a gpu. But what else can I expect from a person that has 0 knowledge, uses arguments they don’t even understand and self defeat themselves by using them. Don’t spread disinformation cause you’ll make people waste their time and money for a headset that has blatant visual and responsiveness flaws
I develop on the Quest 3. It’s the best all around headset, hands-down. I love the Vision Pro, but it isn’t versatile or well supported yet, and it’s way too expensive for the time being.
Quest 3 for budget
BSB for top of the line
Index for somewhere in between, even if the display is low res nowadays.
Any time people recommend these 3 headsets, i know they are in a cult.
No one with any brains would recommend Index in 2024. Its a 2MP retro headset that requires external trackers to be installed in your room.
External trackers have pros and cons. If you only play pcvr, and you don't mind putting holes in your walls, or having tripods around your room, then lighthouse tracking is very good.
More like cons & cons. They cost more, you are stuck in one room, need to install devices.
Its just outdated tech at this point, much like the whole Index.
I only stay in one room, and device installation is a one time thing, in exchange for a minor inconvenience you get the best tracking possible. Doesn't sound too bad to me.
You might be interested in the Quest Pro if it's purely for PCVR and if you can find it at a good price. The Quest Pro has better colors and contrast due to being QLED. It's also a lot more comfortable than the Quest 3. Finally, it has eye-tracking which you can use for eye-tracked foveated rendering/encoding.
Though between those two, it depends what you can afford. The Quest 3 will have a better image than the Pico 4 as it has better lenses and often less compression, the Pico 4 will be cheaper and more comfortable. Other than that they're pretty similar for PCVR.
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14d
I have a steam library of vr games which is why its important. I have a rift S and never really done standalone vr
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Wait for the reviews of the new Pimax headset to come out, since that's in the same price range as the Quest 3 and is a PCVR headset.