PSVR2 App for PC Now Live on Steam

Well yes, but without the eye tracking tech online for PC it really is a disappointment for those who own it already and takes away a lot of the advantage it has over other PC compatible headsets for those who don’t.

@Yousef- Steam Deck isn't really capable of VR, you need a fairly good GPU and the Steam Deck doesn't quite make it.

That‘s a bit like when the relationship with your partner was not great in the last couple of months, and now they have a new, separate flat in another town for their new job. So, what happens next…

@thefourfoldroot1 totally agree, the lack of eye tracking and foveated rendering on pc are slightly disappointing. I guess it’s still a nice bonus for those that have a decent gaming pc and only own a psvr2 headset.

I do also wonder if Sony might port call of the mountain to pc at some point in the future.

Why can't I order the adapter yet :I

For the price, without special features, surely nobody would buy this over a Quest for PCVR, or not just pay a bit more and get something better, but it's an awkward heaset. For the price it's not exactly a BAD headset for PCVR, but it's also not a particularly good on either. Being "third best budget headset behind Quest and Pico but more expensive than either" isn't a great place to be. (Albeit, for Quest you really need to buy another strap to make it equal so then it becomes a bit more expensive again and it's compressed video output gives PSVR2 a feather in it's cap comparatively.)

@FuriousMachine Basically all PCVR goes through Steam in general. Windows Mixed Reality is being discontinued shortly and will be removed from Win11, and Occulus Link is of course for Meta headsets only. There's Virtual Desktop that's maybe the MOST common tool but that's software you generally buy....on Steam, for wired PCVR sets (you buy it on the headset platform for stand-alones.) So Steam is pretty much Windows' VR engine short of the popular paid option ,or the Meta exclusive one.

So my Ryzen 7 7800x3d rtx 4070 with 32gb ram should be okay?

I just want F1 in VR.

I was going to ask if it would work through a MacBook running windows and steam but then realised it does not have a display port
My bad

As others have said, the PSVR2 headset has one advantage over say a Quest 3, and that is the eye tracking foveated rendering.

Being able to use the power of your PC more efficiently has obvious benefits. It's essentially like paying hundreds of pounds more for a better GPU. PSVR2 could give you that boost for free.

Without that, what are you left with?

An annoying wired system when Quest 3 is wireless (or just has one simple USB C cable if you wish to play for longer than a couple of hours and need it charging).

Dire image quality due to the last-gen fresnel lenses, which despite the OLED panels, create worse dark and bright scenes than on a Quest 3, due to all the light smearing flares and the mura grain.

Plus those same dated lenses cause a narrow sweet spot, meaning you have to precisely fit the headset, and hammer that strap up real tight, because if it shifts just a fraction when moving your head around, it's like squirting glue in your eyes.

That tightness adds to VR fatigue, where as Quest 3 can just be lobbed on your head any old how, and barely tightened, allowing for hours of use with no fatigue.

@Xeno_Aura You don't exactly need a fairly good GPU. People have been playing VR on potato PC for the last decade. Steam Deck will probably easily handle most of the lighter games like Beat Saber, Job simulator... etc If you are expecting to play Half Life Alyx or sims then no the Steam Deck wouldn't handle that well.

You can find plenty of videos of Steam Deck running VR. The real issue is that setup to get it running is not going to worth it.

The only real advantage PSVR2 has over PC competitors is Gran Turismo 7 exclusivity. I haven't played Alyx yet but GT7 is my favorite VR game by a country mile

@CrashBandicoat The two (and only two) advantages PSVR2 would have over Quest 3 is, better colors with true blacks via OLED (with the pros and cons that entails.) , and the fact that it's a "true" PCVR, dispalyport direct connection.

Quest 3 may be wireless, which is great, but that does come at a cost of having streamed video with compression instead of a raw video signal to the headset. There's also all the issues with radio being radio, and issues with the 6GHz band having had off and on problems with the XR2 firmware. Quest 3 then has the wired option, but it actually isn't displayport over USB, it's still sending the same exact compressed streamed video that wireless does, so you still get compression artifacts, decoding latency, and extra GPU (and VRAM!) utilization. PSVR2 at least is a "real" PCVR wired set with direct DP connection. That's a real advantage, however, the terrible lenses kind of throw away those advantages. PSVR2PCVR would have the latency advantage and could squeeze a little more from a GPU than Quest due to not having to encode the video. And has better blacks. So it's not worthless, but still dollar for dollar the worse option given the total versatility of the quest (and quality optics.)

@VaultGuy415 I agree that GT7 is by far the biggest reason to buy a PSVR2. To be fair though, Sony's headset has a few other exclusives that, IMHO, make it the best headset for hardcore gamers: RE4, RE8, Synapse and Call of The Mountain. Horizon might be the most contentious, but I think all of these are better than anything on Quest or even SteamVR, except for Alyx.

@Art_Vandelay " all of these are better than anything on Quest or even SteamVR, except for Alyx."

Other than Alyx, Some of the best VR games of the PSVR1 from the VR goldrush era never made it to PSVR2, but are on Steam. Skyrim, DoomVFR, Hitman, Sniper, Borderlands 2, Fallout4 (I think that skipped VR1 anyway.) Then there's Vivecraft (minecraft), Flight Simulator, DCS, etc. There's this unfortunate trap where the peak of VR games was in the mid to late PSVR1 era. but as those games never made it to PSVR2 they're trapped on either a woefully inadequate PS4/VR1 or PC only, and on PC with mod support they've continued to evolve (beyond what even high end PCs can fully handle yet.)

I still have my beautiful VR1 bundle box with Skyrim plastered all over it. And the only way to play it in a modern headset is on PC now. Of course, that was kind of always true because it ran horribly on PS4, and it needs like 60+ mods to really sing on VR in general...but still

Okay, so my 4070 equipped laptop has USB Type-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 which supports up to DisplayPort 2.0. Will this adapter work with it? It says USB Direct Connection Only, but it also says must have DisplayPort or Mini DisplayPort output port.

Are most laptop users out of luck?

@NEStalgia Fair point. I guess it's a matter of taste, at the end of the day. Those games do appeal to an audience, but not to me as they mostly look quite dated or janky in VR. RE8 is just on another level IMHO.

The exception being Flight Simulator, and that is indeed a niche where PCVR does have a clear edge: sims in general, especially of the airborne kind. But again, I'd take GT7 over any racer on PC, so...

And of course, if you're willing to fiddle with mods and stuff, PC is the place to be. I'm strictly talking about the "official" library. So yeah, to each their own.

@FuriousMachine Not really a walled garden, just sort of a patchwork of utilities. SteamLink/SteamVR isn't limited to Steam games, it just functionality attached to the Steam client, but works for non-Steam games, except, obviously, Oculus Store which is a walled garden (and kind of semi legacy from the Rift era.) On the Quest side, people tend to use all 3 depending on which does better for a specific game, with Virtual Desktop being the most popular, and Airlink/Oculus Link the least. SteamLink tends to be better latency and is free, VD tends to be better visual fidelity but is paid (cheap though), Airlink is the easiest to use (for Meta.) Then there's different support libraries, OpenXR, SteamVR (different from SteamLink), OpenVR.

And this is why PCVR is niche lol....

@Art_Vandelay Fair enough, as I'm not into horror, I haven't actually seen RE8, and I love GT7 in VR, but it definitely could have benefited from some more power behind it.

Though, yeah, mods, well for Skyrim and Minecraft that's just part of the terrain even on console pancake, but if stepping outside the official library and going into the unofficial mods and injectors, then you get a lot of interesting major modern games. Might end up being the only way to get anything not indie that's newer than Skyrim in VR these days lol.

@FuriousMachine LOL, yeah pretty much, yep! Assuming Sony isn't providing their own link application, then you're mostly just going to use SteamLink to run everything for the free/easy solution. You can also buy Virtual Desktop (I think it's like $20 US on Steam, not sure if they sell it outside steam, I think they list it only on Steam for wired sets, and only on the individual stores for stand alone sets (Eg meta store for meta, Pico store for Pico, etc.), and then you have two connection methods.

VD of course has uses beyond playing games while SteamLink is just for gaming. VD it also for generating a big screen mode for watching video, virtual desktops of multiple virtual displays for productivity, i.e. actually using your PC in your headset (not really doable on the PSVR2 set with those lenses, anyway) etc, so VD is more of an all around utility suite for VR owners than just being a way to get Alyx beamed into your retinas.

@FuriousMachine LOL!

Yeah, the issue with PSVR2 for productivity work is the resolution and the lenses. The lenses are the famous part, Fresnel lenses where everything off-center is somewhat increasingly blurry by design makes it much less ideal than any of the "professional" grade headsets or even the very sharp Quest 3 (that uses the same lenses as the pro grade Quest Pro), and also the display itself, not just the dreaded "mura" but the screen door effect is greater than the paper resolution would imply because it uses the "pentile" pixel arrangement. That's a whole essay on its own, but the net result is it's much lower resolution than the paper spec sheet implies while not actually lying. (The TLDR is Pentile is a cost-cutting pixel design for OLED that does happen to have longer life before failure, and works fine for ultra-dense pixel displays like "retina" style phone displays > 100ppd where the human eye can only discern 60ppd, but PSVR2 is like 22ppd. Pentile's weak point is worse IQ when examined closely in low res....which is precisely what using it in VR under magnifying lenses highlights!) To combat the pattern of the pentile, Sony applied a blurring filter over the display to "smooth" it over. It gives everything a softened focus look but also hides what would otherwise be nasty, nasty screendoor. For entertainment use it works fine, but for fine work like text on virtual desktop displays.... I don't think that'll be a great time, where, ironically the Quest 3 outperforms Quest Pro at half the cost for text/productivity work due to the higher resolution displays on the same lenses. Text is the PSVR2's greatest weakness.

@CrashBandicoat How many games on PCVR use eye tracking and foveated rendering? So whilst I understand what you wrote there isn't exactly anything on the PCVR space that takes advantage of it apart from a few patched games made for specifically for higher prices headsets

@NEStalgia PSVR 2 does not have true blacks.

That’s Sony marketing twaddle that shill access journalists repeat.

With those trash Fresnel lenses you are getting a smearing mess as light bleeds and flares everywhere. That the panels can do true blacks is irrelevant, because that ain’t what you see once it’s been through the trash tier lenses.

Plus the awful grain.

The only thing the OLED delivers in that headset are some highlights with impressive brightness (car headlights in GT7) albeit again suffering from utter garbage fresnel smearing.

Lens choice in that headset was the dumbest move Sony has ever made.

@CrashBandicoat LOL, I can't totally disagree with that. The panel definitely does true blacks. And honestly depending on the scene, you DO get true blacks, better than local dimming even, but yeah, there's a mess of glares from the trash lenses, for sure.

I have my Quest 3 on the way, I'm looking forward to comparing. Moving toward PCVR, I'm really actually considering a Pimax Crystal Super - was going for Light but the super has the eye tracking....insane res, insane FOV. IDK might be worth it. Only debate is if for $600 more it's worth ALSO getting the micro OLED optical engine with the pancackes. But according to even Pimax, it's basically worse in every way except blacks and tighter pixel density, and also more expensive. Sounds like they made it "because Apple did it and people asked for it" more than "because it's useful." But curiosity is a factor at the price difference.

I agree completely though. The lenses are deplorable, and it's probably the one thing other than price that killed the headset. I know cost is a huge factor, but they had to put a better foot forward than that. It's reasonable if you get it on right, but it's a major limitation.