half-life alex is here my download is complete and the only thing left to
answer is how amazing is the
aaa vr gaming title to turn vr
mainstream so i'm all ready to experience it with the best vr headset
on the market the valve index and their fantastic pressure sensitive hand
presence controllers but that's not what we're going to be doing today is it oh
boy thank you instead we're going to be trying it out
at a variety of different price points so we're starting with an oculus quest a
GeForce gtx 1060 a combo of which is going to cost you about 500
and we're going to make our way up and see just what hardware is required for a
fantastic half-life alex experience
and the whole thing is brought to you by modmic modmic's lineup includes three
options the modmic usb which is usb attachable the mod mic uni which uses
three and a half millimeter jack and the mod mic wireless which is of course
wireless you can check out their lineup at the link in the video description
step one today then is to downgrade my gaming rig you can tell i built this a
while ago yes that is a mechanical hard drive
for gamers there is really not much benefit to upgrading your SSD once you
have at least an SSD loading times for games yeah it's
negligible this case is a little bit tricky the graphics card goes in from
the front we chose the GeForce gtx 1060 for a couple of reasons number one is
that valve's system requirements for the game specifically call for a gtx 1060
minimum and number two is that you can obtain these for anywhere between about
80 and 100 us dollars on ebay which we
think is a really great sort of entry-level gaming graphics card price
point that was a little different from what we usually do on this channel but the downgrade
is complete now for the headset at 400 the oculus quest isn't exactly
cheap but we still like it for our entry-level vr headset recommendation
because of how versatile it is so you can grab a link cable
perfect play desktop vr games on your computer and then unplug take it with
you on the go and you know play some beat saber while you're traveling for
our link cable we're using a high quality anker usb a to type c this sin
loon right angle adapter and this monoprice active usb extension
cable it's a bit of a clutchy solution and it will cost you about 30 bucks
but it's way way better than trying to
use the quest wirelessly on the desktop
it's just not worth it it's nauseating headsets powered on
and there we go all right so we just need to set up the oculus link beta and
we will need the oculus store for that even though we will be playing the game
through steam uh you guys can see the mouse cursor right
okay finally so in summary we had to update the firmware on the oculus quest
and then update our oculus store and we
press on steam link beta and theoretically everything's good to go
feels pretty good so as stupid as it is in order to play a steam game you just
have to go into your oculus sort of vr
experience and then you have to just launch steam vr separately i was very
surprised to find out that apparently all the support for oculus devices in
steam is valve's work not facebook's work they just seem to
not care and valve apparently put a lot of work into making the half-life alex
experience good no matter what headset you're using and it apparently cost them
some fun and interesting game mechanics that would have worked on the index
controllers with their individual finger tracking and fine control but that
weren't going to work on third party ones like these performance hey there we
go medium fidelity these are set automatically modifying these may impact
frame rate all right all right well there's our hand presence so index
finger is handled by the trigger and then the other three fingers are handled
by the side button here thumb is just from touching the top
buttons you don't actually have to press them whoa and i disconnected that's very
disorienting i'm going to try plugging into one of the rear usb ports sometimes they can be
a little bit more reliable it took a while but we finally got there
it doesn't look like we can run obs at the same time as mirroring the game and
playing the game overall 72 hertz like i
said when i did my original video about the quest really doesn't feel that bad
from a purely just like standing around and experiencing stuff standpoint the
only time it really makes a difference to me is in something really fast-paced
like especially beat saber i'm definitely noticing that the hand
presence would feel more natural with valve's controllers where it holds the
controller onto you because i find my instinct is to open up my hand and then
go and grab stuff whereas i kind of have to like hold on to it like this
i'm definitely getting a touch of stutteriness but overall oculus link is
way better than last time we used it oculus
link died again so we're just going to abandon it at this point if you have
oculus link working reliably really our main argument for the oculus quest for
this application is that you already have one and you use it for other stuff
anyway if you're specifically buying a pc gaming headset to play half-life alex
this is not necessarily the way to go and the good news is that the rift s
costs exactly the same amount anyway so let's move on to that for those who
aren't familiar the rift s is similar to the quest in a couple of ways it uses
inside out tracking so you don't need to mount any base stations on your walls
and it uses oculus touch controllers but
the key difference is that it is designed for pc use so it has a usb and
displayport cable that goes straight into the headset the resolution is
actually a touch lower than the quest but the refresh rate is higher at 80
hertz it's a good balance of price to performance and convenience honestly the
difference in resolution between these two is not especially noticeable
difference in frame rate again eight hertz it's not a night or
day difference but the difference in the feeling and
the experience is pretty big
now i heard that with the index you can actually pick up and then also crush
cans but that doesn't seem to be the case mind you that can's already crushed
maybe we can find another can later
i'm definitely seeing it chug a little bit here
this poor 1060. as things get a little bit busier i'm
getting a couple frame drops in vr feel a little bit different than normal frame
drops because the headsets are often trying to interpolate frames where they
don't have real information so it's kind of more like a
like a hitch than just a a regular stutter
really subtle touch feedback when you uh reach out and touch a wall
well that was a really ugly frame drop there let's go into the game menus and
see if dropping it down to low settings resolves that for us i gotta say the
game looks pretty good on medium apparently with a 1060 on medium you can
run into vram issues so that's probably why you got the big ol stuttery starter
there that's pretty nice now though keep following the drone we'll figure out
what to do seems like it's mostly lighting and
shadows that took a hit there i want to turn it back up
and just have a look yeah the ambience is definitely better
on medium but it's not like the game still doesn't look good
man if i wasn't looking at them side by side i wouldn't be like oh this is like
a crap looking game on low and it's a great looking game on medium and for the
smoothness i'll definitely take low on the 1060.
now our original intention had been to upgrade our GPU and our headset at the
same time going from the quest to the rift s and from the gtx 1060 to the rtx
2070 giving us nice tidy about 500
about a thousand dollars and then about 2 000 price brackets it didn't work out
that way but that's okay so we're going to be using our rift s now again but
this time with the rtx 2070 super which should allow us to turn up the details
in the game a fair bit something to keep in mind is that we're
only upgrading to the 2070 for the extra GPU horsepower half-life alex doesn't
take advantage of rtx real-time ray tracing or anything like that so if you
want to stick with the 10 series something like a 1070 1080 or 1080 ti
would be an excellent upgrade and in fact 1080 ti's are about 10 to 15
percent more powerful than a 2070 super while actually costing anywhere from 50
to 100 less on the used market one reason to go 2000 series though is if
you're a game streamer because you're going to be able to take advantage of
the new turing uh nbank encoder all right so it automatically turned us up
to high fidelity now so let's go back and have a look at low
unfortunately i don't think you guys are getting a great look at what i'm seeing
through the recording at least the first one we did the recording quality really
wasn't great but we were using the older advent encoder this one might end up
being better all right so there's low and there's high
does that look materially different to you guys
uh not really
the shadows look crisper
okay here's a soft shadow all right
high fidelity
what am i looking for here here's a texture here's the floor all
right we all looking at this performance
if we spent all this time just to find out that it really makes just no darn
lick a difference
okay it's a little blurrier it's blurry like it looks like kind of like my eyes
are a little bit out of focus you know and there's no
actual like texture in the grout lines
these these shadows here they're like they're kind of fake looking okay yeah
there's not much difference that that's
pretty similar looking does look a little bit more poppy but it is still
flat it's still fake oh shadows on the tiles there
ultra fidelity maybe instead of looking at things close
look at things really far in the distance fine okay well then let's just
look at that you know these tile walls and stuff back here all right
cool yeah all right fine and like that concrete looks pretty natural we're
gonna go all the way down to low
this does not look different to me well i would say aside from the frame rate
never dipping playing on even high actually this experience is remarkably
similar to the 1060 especially when you consider that it
costs five times as much moving up to our
highest price headset the valve index costs a cool 1 000 us dollars but comes
with some clear benefits given that it's made by the same developer as half-life
alex in the first place first is the hardware the refresh rate of the display
goes up to 144 hertz which contributes to less motion sickness and smoother
animations as you're moving around in the virtual world the speakers and
microphone are excellent if you're a streamer it means you don't have to have any additional headphones or a
third-party mic attached to it and of course there's the index controllers so
they've got pressure sensitivity and individual finger detection just by
touching the top of the controller the trigger and all along the handle here
there's like a whack ton of sensors plus the ability to let go of it completely
when you're interacting with things in the virtual world thanks to the straps
that hold onto the back of your hand one of the hidden costs for the index though
is in the additional hardware you'll need for your pc up until now our 2070
super and even our 1060 have delivered a great experience but if you're gonna run
the refresh rate of the display at 144 hertz you're going to need at minimum
144 frames per second in your game in order to not get stuttering and weird
judders that is definitely
better just being able to like
touch it's very intuitive oh wow and not having to hold on to the
controller but still being able to reach the joystick
really nice oh there we go now i just use the touchpad to switch my stuff
and that explains the interface design with the like kind of up and down motion
can i just slide it no i do actually have to physically move all right i do
really love oculus's lenses but
that is so smooth it's taking anywhere from about 4.9 to
5.2 milliseconds to dry each frame this is at 144 hertz so as long as we draw
each frame in less than 6.9 milliseconds we're good and we shouldn't see any
stutters as i move into more demanding environments though we could see some
spikes so i was still on high fidelity just now i suspect if we switch to ultra
fidelity we're going to have a problem definitely seeing some spikes above our
threshold here so i'm going to dial it back to high
so i wouldn't say that it's a huge problem but it's the kind of thing that might
manifest as feeling a little bit nauseated after playing for two hours
and so you might as well make sure that you're gonna be as comfortable as you can be vr
can be a little disorientating at the best of times like i don't have them
side by side but realistically these graphics do not look
that much better than half-life 2. out on a more open space something they've
really done a great job of is smoothing the performance
kind of no matter whether you're in a confined small space with not a lot
going on or in a big open space you can see they've kind of gracefully
uh done away with a lot of the draw distance that you might see in a game
that's not in vr but it doesn't feel unnatural just feels you know kind of
like overcast and gloomy it really fits with the tone of the game not all the
visuals are amazing for sure like obviously the textures and lighting have
come a long way since the original half-life 2 but there's
you know valve's thing isn't necessarily the most beautiful looking games like
that water this very couple generations ago
and these plants are like yeah that's a that's an older technique
you got your lit side on the lit side and your shaded side on the shaded side
it should be noted guys they're probably making a lot of these compromises for
performance reasons because it is much more demanding to render a game in vr
than it is on a desktop monitor that doesn't look like they spent that much
time on it i've seen way better graffiti now that i've seen all the different
visual fidelity levels and cranked the index up to 144 hertz which is the
highest on the market i can say with reasonable confidence that the 2070
super is darn near the best you could need for a
great half-life alex experience of course if you've got it paired with
an adequate CPU i'm actually using a ryzen 3900x in this machine but for
science we're gonna go ahead and throw the rtx 2080 ti that i normally run in
this rig back in it and see if there's any
noticeable difference sorry i misspoke i'm running a ryzen 7
3800x but my point stands as long as you've got a decent gaming processor
even going back to a 4770k especially if you throw a light
over clock on it i don't expect that to be your bottleneck okay your performance
settings are now at a recommended level performance
high put me at high nah dawg
i'm playing ultra interestingly it looks
like we were as much CPU bottlenecked as GPU bottlenecked before well there's no
doubt the game runs better on the 2080 ti that is butter smooth and i'm not
getting any spikes above that 6.9 millisecond threshold or at least
nothing that i can notice at all like there's one that touched the
line just there but that's it and we're mostly around the five 5.5 millisecond
range that's great switching back to low
though even with that said i wouldn't say that the game looks
way worse even on the very lowest settings the
lighting effects in there i think those were better let's go back to high
yeah if they were it's not by much so
it would be really hard for me to recommend spending eleven hundred
dollars on a graphics card to play this game even if you did already spend a
thousand dollars on your headset which is a funny thing to say i expected the
conclusion of today's video to be a little bit complicated but actually it
ended up being really simple as long as you've got something i would say
1070 and better you are having
pretty much the half-life alex experience so if you're gonna invest a
bunch more money in order just to play this game i would say it should really
be in your vr peripherals the index
controllers no doubt make the game better compared to any other controller
the hand presence is light years ahead of what anyone else is doing
with that said i don't think that the valve index head
mounted display is as big of a game changer as the controllers are given the
style of game that we're playing i'd say something like a rift s or probably more
likely something like a vive pro especially with the wireless adapter
would actually be a more immersive gameplay experience compared to the
higher refresh rate of the valve index so i think valve has done a great job
then of balancing their two priorities one giving a great gaming experience to
every vr player regardless of their hardware whether you're running a
Windows mixed reality headset all the way up to the valve index or a mid-range
graphics card versus a high-end one but then also giving that little bit of
extra to the people who did spend a thousand dollars on the top-of-the-line
vr headset on the market maingear's vector gaming laptop is available at 25
micro center locations as well as on amazon it features a core i7 9750h
processor NVIDIA GeForce gtx 1660 ti
graphics 16 gigs of RAM 512 gigs of NVMe
storage and a 15.6 inch 144 hertz full
hd display check out this and other micro center specials at the links below
thanks for watching then if you guys want to see my full thoughts on the valve index from my original review make
sure you check that out we're going to have that linked in the video description and
a video you shouldn't watch is my one of the vive pro because
the more i game with a tether the more that looks like a pretty good
solution with the wireless adapter by comparison even if it does mean dropping
from 144 hertz all the way down to 90.