The Index thread (please keep to subject)

Sebastian had to go through a lot of trouble, but now has gotten perfectly working Index controllers (Knuckles) and he now considers Knuckles for the very best VR controllers you can get, more here:

RuneSR2 said:

Sebastian had to go through a lot of trouble, but now has gotten perfectly working Index controllers (Knuckles) and he now considers Knuckles for the very best VR controllers you can get

How are you (personally) going with the click situation @RuneSR2? Have you needed to RMA, or? Any drift or other defects? Also, in your opinion as I know you are deep into the Index community, what percentage of Knuckles users do you think have been affected? Are we hearing from a vocal minority, or does this affect everyone to various degrees and some don't complain (or RMA) because they don't require a click based on their game library or control style.

parsecn said:

RuneSR2 said:

Sebastian had to go through a lot of trouble, but now has gotten perfectly working Index controllers (Knuckles) and he now considers Knuckles for the very best VR controllers you can get

How are you (personally) going with the click situation @RuneSR2? Have you needed to RMA, or? Any drift or other defects? Also, in your opinion as I know you are deep into the Index community, what percentage of Knuckles users do you think have been affected? Are we hearing from a vocal minority, or does this affect everyone to various degrees and some don't complain (or RMA) because they don't require a click based on their game library or control style.

I just survived watching the first 3 minutes of the video, and then read the comments. That's the first I've heard about stick drift. 
Valve sure makes it seem like thumsticks are REALLY hard to do. :lol:

parsecn said:

RuneSR2 said:

Sebastian had to go through a lot of trouble, but now has gotten perfectly working Index controllers (Knuckles) and he now considers Knuckles for the very best VR controllers you can get

How are you (personally) going with the click situation @RuneSR2? Have you needed to RMA, or? Any drift or other defects? Also, in your opinion as I know you are deep into the Index community, what percentage of Knuckles users do you think have been affected? Are we hearing from a vocal minority, or does this affect everyone to various degrees and some don't complain (or RMA) because they don't require a click based on their game library or control style.

I have not needed to RMA, but maybe I use my Knuckles less than other users - or am more careful, although I have been banging them into a wall, lol. Drift issues may suddenly occur, so not sure anything is completely safe, but you can just RMA and I've got 2 years of warranty in the EU. About 2 months ago there was a poll where about 50% had problems, maybe that's not unrealistic although persons with problems may be more inclined to participate in a poll. It does seem like the clicking problems are fixed, but some have experienced drifting problems using fully clicking Knuckles after a few weeks. Still I think it's a minor issue compared to a life without the Index. 

My most annoying problem was the columns, but Valve has now implemented column correction (new firmware required), so you can choose values from -10 to 10 (20 steps) for each eye.

Note the SDE using the Index often is described as completely gone, which may require some explanation. SDE may be caused by several factors, namely the physical pixels and especially the spaces between them. This is the real physical SDE that never can be changed. Then there're the columns, probably made up of a vertical lines of pixels, and when moving fast I guess you could say that even numbered columns could get a slightly weaker color than uneven numbered columns creating a sort of striped pattern (in contrast to CV1, this form of SDE is only seen when moving, never when you stand still). This may be very subtle and not all users may notice it. A similar phenomenon has been described on Rift-S and may be caused by the lcd tech. But using Valve's new firmware column correction can be applied to make the stripes disappear or to minimize them.
Then there's also some faint horizontal lines not always visible, probably an artifact done by the lenses. And you can see a faint dot pattern in some colors like red and orange, probably part of the lcd tech - this is an even pattern, not dead nor faulty pixels.
Many persons may never notice any of the above, but my vision is razor-sharp, I can see even individual pixels in the Index hmd if I make an effort to do so, lol.
The horizonal lines are extremely faint like described, and when column correction is set optimally, vertical SDE due to the columns aren't more noticeable than the horizonal SDE. And I don't notice it in games. 

CV1 SDE is like 20 times worse than the above, my point being that no HMD is perfect, still Index is very close to perfection when set up optimally.

This post was written on my phone, in case of spelling errors blame Samsung ;-)

VRoadRunner said:

I’ve never noticed the column problem but I have noticed the black dots on red colours maybe 2 or 3 times in total since getting the headset. A non issue for me at least.

Yup, same goes for the rest (maybe) - I'm just describing everything I've ever noticed for SDE, no matter how small and insignificant it may be. 

I guess SDE, basically, is simply everything that we may notice in an image reminding us that we're looking at a screen.

Maybe a small forgotten gem that needs more attention? The game does smell quite Valve-ish :D - it works on Index, Rift and Vive:

Borderlands 2 VR just got full Index support  <3

https://store.steampowered.com/app/991260/Borderlands_2_VR/

Too bad flight sims like xp11 have not provided 5 degree canted support yet.  Hopefully they will do this soon.

I've been sort of rediscovering CV1 the last days, and I get increasingly convinced that it's great to have both the CV1 and the Index connected to the same rig.
CV1 is special because it has similar perfect tracking like the Index - and CV1 has oled displays, awesome sound and about 99% of games in the Oculus Store were directly designed for CV1. The original Touch controllers are by many still considered the best Touch controllers available, and batteries may last a month - or longer. 

Using Index in several old games (including Arizona Sunshine) often reveals their flaws and weaknesses like low-res textures and maybe limited polys, while CV1 creates a sort of magical cover up making low res textures look much more high res and sharper. The CV1 SDE causes rather large black spaces between lines of pixels where your brain fills in the blanks, lol. - Like scanlines in MAME - and old CRT screens - the CV1 SDE creates some illusion of higher res than you have. This also means that temporal antialiasing (TAA) used in games like Asgard's Wrath and Lone Echo makes these games look perfect on the CV1, because all/most jaggies are gone and TAA has very little impact on performance. In comparison TAA looks very blurry and reduces image quality and presence on new high-res lcd hmds.  

Having native Oculus driver support should not be underestimated - some months ago (before I got the Index) I got Job Simulator on Steam, but refunded because I didn't get solid 90 fps using ss 2.0 (on the CV1). Today I bought the game in the Oculus Store, but now I get solid 90 fps ss 2.0! (Still comparing CV1.) So same game runs much better on the CV1 when bought in the Oculus Store. I experienced the same first buying Trover on Steam and then in the Oculus Store, the performance difference felt like upgrading my 1080 to 2080 Ti, and I'm not trying to be funny. 
For very demanding games like Asgard's Wrath - and maybe Stormland - I'm not convinced there's anything better than CV1 at the moment. Robinson The Journey is maybe the best examples of a game that looks just perfect using CV1 ss 2.0 and TAA, but looks so bad on the Index that I'm simply not going to play it using the Index. Crytek used a lot of tricks to make Robinson shine on CV1, like reducing background quality, which you cannot see using the CV1 - but Index reveals everything - and it ruins that game. 
Besides performance reasons, oled blacks are sometimes what you need in certain games - again I think Asgard's Wrath is a nice example of a game that shines on an oled screen. 

Index will be greatly superior in games designed to take advantage of high-res lcd screens. Or for (simple) games where you can crank up super sampling a lot. Bright games with no or limited textures like Lucky's Tale also look *much* better on the Index than CV1, so it's not like all of the old games look better on CV1. Wilson's Heart and Chronos look awesome on the Index, but Mage's Tales looks much better on CV1, primarily because the textures look more low-res and fake on the Index, while everything shines and looks real on the CV1 - also due to the deep oled blacks. Scary games like Affected The Manor are like totally ruined on lcd hmds, you need oled for the pitch-black horror games: 


One dev wrote that you need 4K texture res for the 2nd gen lcd hmds, while 2K was fine for the original 1st gen (CV1 and Vive). CV1 is still a great solution for most VR games that don't use very high-res textures, actually even including Asgard's Wrath (textures in that game look 2K-ish at best). 
Although Quest (=oled) with Oculus Link may soon replace the CV1 completely, CV1 is still a great choice for those who already own CV1 and don't plan on buying Quest - maybe because they rather save up for a high-res lcd hmd (Index, Reverb, Cosmos etc.). 

In short - don't throw out your old oled HMD, or sell it for scraps, it may still be of great value!