Oculus Rift CV1 Review - Sim Racing Immersion 

Editor's Note: Apparently the "Bundle" with the Xbox One controller has ended recently, but it is still available at most places for $399, just without the controller!

Saw a video about upcoming VR technology that will incorporate pupil tracking within the headset to concentrate hi-res rendering only where they eyes are directly looking while the rest of the image is only low-res (which is a facsimile of how we see the world anyway). With accurate tracking at 90 fps, lower-res portions of the frame would be imperceptible. So, the GPU only has to process hi-res for a small portion of any given frame meaning the graphic card technology won't have to be nearly as powerful as one running full frames at 8k. Pretty cool idea.

Best piece for Sim (and gaming) gear I have bought in the last 10 years.

Got the Oculus bundle about a week ago. It's truly amazing. I watched a bunch of YT videos about motion sickness with VR and went into it with a game plan. And I must say, the first few times using it, I did get woozy. But, as recommended, I only did short 5~15 minute drives until I felt it coming on and took long breaks in between. Within 3~4 days, I was able to do 60 minutes plus with no ill effects. It just takes a bit for your visual cortex to adapt to it. But once you do, it starts to feel even more immersive and real. I have a fan blowing at my face to help with cooling (and fogging up from sweating) and I think it helped with motion issues too. Running on GTX 1080 with 2.0 super sampling & ASW set to auto. Beyond the VR stuff that comes with Oculus, I'm mostly running Assetto Corsa. And running with SimVibe & butt-kicker. And one cool thing I didn't know about is you can actually get out of the car and stand next to it. It's totally life size as well as the surroundings. It actually looks like you're standing next to a real car. It's so cool to pull over, get out of the car next to the track and watch the AI racing by a 160+ mph!

Just got my bundle last week. Spot on review, 100% agree with you thoughts! Screen door really sucks. But once you get used to that, I am having a hard time to go back to my triples!

One of the most complete reviews in general. Bravissimo!

2:20 really good way of explaining it. and i agree, in vr you can see through a dirty windscreen or a cracked windscreen or windows covered in rain, or moving wipers far more easily/ clearly. as yo can focus on the distance. sort of look through the windscreen, instead of just 'at' it. the hand between the eyes explains it perfectly.

Really nice review - as usual. Keep it up please. Some thoughts from my side. It is kind a must to have a fan in front of you racing. The wind goes through your "nose-gap" in the CV1 and usually the sweatiness problem is gone. For people with glasses, google "john lennon" reading glasses. They are small enough to fit under a CV1 (and cheap) and least try out the VR Cover (vrcover.com). The v2 is just great, with 2 different adapter (e.g. for people with glasses) and the foam replacement is clean and well thought. For those who would only race with the CV1, they could sell the Touch controller instantly on Ebay and get back around USD 100.-. So the price for the CV1 would be even better!!

Nice review William. I finally had a chance to demo a Rift. The immersion is great, but the screen door effect is quite pronounced. I currently run a 27 inch 3D stereo monitor with nVidia 3D Vision, plus a TrackIR head tracking system. Where I sit, I have a 40 degree field of view, so at 1920 pixel HD, I have 48 pixels per angular degree. With the Rift at 1080 pixels over 110 degree field of view, the resolution is 9.8 pixels per degree. So, I'm used to seeing 3D stereo at almost 5 times the resolution of the Rift. A VR headset would need something between 4k and 8k per eye to match the nVidia 3D shutter glasses. So, the VR headsets have a way to go to match the older technology. And as you say, people would need some heavy duty video cards to run high resolution headsets. But, if people can adapt to the screen door view, the Rift is really pretty good. For some games, you might not even notice the pixels. The immersion is really quite convincing. But, if you're searching for tiny objects in the distance, like in a racing game or combat flight sim, high resolution is really needed.

hey man great video. I love my rift but i was curious what your AC video settings were.

Thanks for the review!

I have the psvr and the oculus cv1,the screendoor is less on the psvr and the fit on your head is the best off all vr headsets. But when you try lone echo on the oculus rift you will be blown away its that immersive! I did remove the faceplate from the oculus rift and put a gear vr face plate inside.So i am closer to the screen and it makes the field of view bigger.(because for me the field of view for me was bigger on the psvr) I do use 4 sensors on the rift for complete roomscale. And also supersampling does do wonders for the rift to get a clearer picture. I cant wait for project cars 2 for the oculus rift!

Been viving it up for a long while now. I approve even in motion simulators.

VR Cover extended(long) face pad works great for eyewear. I just got mine, yesterday.

Hello! Great review btw. Can you show your assetto corsa and pCars graphics settings? I have gtx 1080 but i need to lower graphics a lot to get solid 90fps. And sorry for my english ,im not from english speaking country =)

450,- with the touch controllers here in austria via amazon. well i guess thats the days, lets order this before sanity kicks in...

What I've heard PSVR has less visible screen door effect than Oculus thanks to different subpixel composition even though it has probably even lower resolution.

Excellent review.

ASW works fine in forward facing motion. ASW struggles with fast motion... I.e looking sideways while driving.. scenery can have artifacting... But it is so fast that the next frame corrects it and you don't see it anyway. What it does do though it's compensate for nearly half the gpu load and gives you 90fps when you need it. And it works very very well

Almost bought a Rift, spent several days trying to decide between it and a 1080 ti. I ended up going with the 1080 ti and keeping my triples. Probably for the better because the time I was trying to make this decision was about two weeks before they dropped the price on the Oculus Rift and I would have been pretty bummed. I'm paying close attention to VR tech, and when its up to snuff I'll go for it, but I don't think its ready yet. (yes I have actually used VR)

Being the TV technology fanatic that I am. To me it is the same argument as 3D glasses - in other words, when you go to sit in whatever chair you sit in to go sim-racing, does the "immersion factor" override all other negatives you might have, and so you nd up reaching for the Rift headset more often then you don't? (for the record, I don't own one, so I would have no idea)

The screen door effect is extremely blown out of proportion. Once you put it on and start gaming it practically disappears. The immersion from VR is amazing especially in cockpit games like sim racing. I don't think I could ever go back to racing with monitors again!

I thought i get all problems, but at least no nausea here even i got it on screen in games like The Talos Principle. But even with Elite Dangerous and stuttering-issues after a while i've no problems (maybe because of the zero-gravity-setting) and SimVibe is certainly the other must-have IMO, for having this 3D-visuals with a 3D-like FFB. Higher resolution would be great, but coming from a big 4k-display with great graphics i prefer VR so far. The sweat is more of a problem and wearing glasses doesn´t help i can tell. I hope that the ordered VR-Cover is helping a bit, but i guess they are sold out and have to wait some while, because the German supplier is out of stock as well. And one good tip: Install VoiceAttack for pressing keys by voice-recognition. The free version is fully working with 20 commands should be enough first and it´s easy to setup.

What stand are you using? I bought a Next Level Racing stand and I have a lot of deck wobble. I am looking for something more solid.

I bought one recently, the biggest issue for me is the resolution, it needs to be at least 8k before it will have mass market appeal. They may be able to achieve that sooner than people think with the use of eye tracking.

The Rift doesn´t have a higher than 1080p resolution, not even effectively! You can not add up both displays resolution! You have to take both "pictures" and overlap them to an great extent, then you have the effective resolution. It´s more like 1400x1200 resolution (rough estimation) That said, you have to add them up, to get an idea of how much processing power it takes, to render both displays at the same time.

I'm racing a lot with the CV1 and Assetto Corsa and I'm loving it very much! The reprojection from Oculus works now so good, that its no problem if your grafics card could only render at least 45 fps during online races! I see only very little jitterings or such at all. If there is less render power needed while driving the game renders 90 fps until it switches back to 45 fps. I'm using a i7 4790 with a gforce 970 gtx clocked at 1420mhz and it's working realy fine. But later I will also upgrade to a 1070 or 1080. I'm locking forward for future headsets with 4k or even 8k just for the display, to get rid of the screendoor effect. But for now, racing with these actual headsets is already really great and your driving will improve massivly espacially for races with a lot of cars around you and your tight positioning at corners will improve too. :)

+1 for the San Jose Sharks shirt ;)

upping the pixel density makes a massive difference to sharpness but i'm sure you know this.

Tip: Set playback speed to x2..

I understand the experience but does this actually enhance your sim racing skills? Also what was causing you to jerk up and down in your chair? Lol like I know my feedback is strong but it looked rough.

I'm not even sure I could sim race anymore without it being in vr. Screen door effect isn't that bad, especially after using it for a while. I have to make myself see it now. 1st day or two I was getting motion sickness but now I can go hours at a time and it doesn't bother me a bit. VR and sim racing are a match made in heaven.

Well, you know....if Nvidia/Developers would implement SMP (Simultaneous Multi-Projection) in upcoming VR titles/add support to older games. Users would see a performance improvement by at least 1.5x That reduced usage could then be applied to supersampling thus reducing the screen door effect. What I want to be improved is the FOV. #StarVR

The screendoor isn't quite as bad as that. I have had VR since the DK2, and that is more like what it looked back on the DK2, with the CV1 I don't really notice the screendoor anymore.

The screen door effect is due to the extended fov. With a monitor, you get around 25 degrees FOV. With an Oculus (or Vive), the FOV is over 100 degrees. And that's not even quite enough (ideally, over 120). It's like putting a magnifying lens on a smartphone screen, and looking at it really, really close. But yeah, 8K (or dual 4K panels), and the resolution will be almost like looking at a 27'' 1080p monitor. And the problem with Sim racing (versus other games), viewing distance is really important, while close up details are not. So the screen door effect... it's a problem. And we don't have enough GPU power to drive 2 4K panels at around 100 fps. What makes matters even worse, is that the Oculus and Vive over-sample, to correct for the barrel distortion, so the 'virtual display' is around 25-50% higher than the actual screen resolution. A LOT of horsepower needed to get even near a 8K headset!

Hey, William thanks for the video! One interesting topic to test while you are still covering VR is how true that VR users claim that they have gone faster as far as lap time is concerned? Is it a placebo effect?

Personally, I can't (or don't) want to return to 2D (monitors) sim-racing. The 3D VR experience is so powerful that returning to 2D is not an option for me any longer. VR is to Sim-racing what cheese is to pizza -- without the cheese, are you really eating a pizza? Thanks for the video, and BTW, I run the NVidea 980ti and with some tweaks available from Oculus Research, I maintain a 90 fps rate with IRacing over 95% of the time. Yes, I have some graphics settings turned down or off, but they don't effect much when racing and the eye-candy graphics are still very, very good. I plan to purchase the next generation NVidea card when it's released in the future. Doing every other top-rated card word well for me...cua

Excellent! You pretty much covered everything, except I don't think you mentioned the benefit Motion rigs have with VR in driving/flight sims. Having a motion rig helps reduce VR sickness. For me my brain gets tricked into thinking it's real, but when certain forces are applied like braking and accelerating, I get a bit dizzy. Motion rigs move with the forces, therefore reducing the VR sickness

The problem resolution and seeing far with sim racing is that the games were not develop to be a VR title from scratch. Other games that are won't suffer as much from this.

An 8K hmd would be a good thing for VR already today. The thing is that even if a hmd boasts a 8K resolution doesn't mean the games has to be rendered in this resolution. You could still run the game at a lower resolution, thus getting better performance, but still get rid of the SDE.

I tried the psVR on pc with assetto corsa (using trinusVR) the screen is lock to 60Hz and yes, 60fps in VR are just not enough I also tried the same game with oculus and vive and it'is amazing (in this case just for few minutes, so I don't know if a long session will cause motion sickness) In Italy the Oculus boundle is 449€, still expensive but hell yeah, i'm already buying it! ;)

Earlier last year? Touch was released at the end of 2016. Was $600, is now $399 = $300 price cut? Wot?

Another point about motion sickness, it's really subjective. I don't get motion sick, but I do get mild headaches after an hour. Some people cannot spend more than 10 mins, some people can play for 2 hours. It's really, really cool tech, but it's not for everyone :) It messes up with your sense of balance, so if you're easily sea sick or car sick, might be a rough ride.

gosh that CXC rig flexing

Can people with glasses adjust the Rift? I have tried DK1, into which I couldn't fit my glasses, not at all.

im gonna wait and see what the lg steamVR has to offer.

When we have wireless 8k perfect tracking and 144 hz it'll be pretty dank

Ordered mine yesterday. Ive tested both and wanted the Vive but i can not pass this offer up. I felt that the Vive was better when i tested it but we shall see soon how i get on with this one

Hi there, what is the karting game you play in this video?

Cost wise... I think getting a good triple monitor setup is way more money. And having a good pc is a must for sim anyways. 399 is an insane value for all you can get with this system. It comes with tons of free vr titles that include some real quality production material. If you are okay with fiddling with computers, go for it.

As many have said, there is no turning back for me from VR. Even more, VR brought me back to sim-racing. I can enjoy like never before. As for motion sickness, everyone react differently, I am lucky to be very moderately afflicted at first. And, most important, you can train for it. Try short session at first. The more you use it, the less you'll feel it. I can use it for 2h+ session without any problem. It's funny to see people buying an Oculus, trying right on a very heavy VR experience, getting sick and re-selling it : there some very good deal to be made from those people.

Good work :)

Nice review, I would prefer a triple screen setup over VR for the better resolution, being able to easily reach the buttons on my wheel, and last but not least, take a sip of water during those long endurance races. What is the name of the motion platform shown in 15:48?

Running with ASW is FAR better than the alternative (dropping frames). ASW-simulated 90fps is much less nausea-inducing than dropped frames, so I can accept the artifacting that comes along with it. Ideally, your graphics will be set to a place where it only rarely has to kick in anyways. Try the Vive with frame drops and you'll appreciate what Oculus is doing with ASW more. The ATW found on the Vive just can't compare, and dropped frames in the Vive end up hurting my eyes and head a lot.

Seeing the screen door effect in your video really made me sad. No idea it was that bad.

I've heard so much about the resolution....... Here's all I can say about that: Put on a helmet, go rent a Kart if you have no other choice, and tell me how much you can actually make out of the "scenery" on any given track you went to. It's in my opinion...... a stupid argument. If immersion is what one is after with SIM racing....... VR is the way to go.

i have the rift with the two sensors but not the xbox controller, cost me £349.99 from argos. For elite dangerous, racing sims it is fantastic. The problem is distance, for elite its not a problem because space is black mostly, in racing sims that is a problem. You can fix this by up super-sampling, and getting rid of some other settings. I find ss improves allot and i can get bye the distance blurriness, close up in a cockpit of a space ship or a racing car is well fantastic, doing corners is fantastic, in Asetto corsa i was in a 1966 Ferrari doing the 1966 track, i was leaning into the bend with the OR on monitor i was not and my racing line was affected, while in vr it improved massively. As for games with movements like skyrim vr, and fallout 4. Uggh i hated it, and got motion sickness, so i stopped playing the games, that said fallout 4 was terrible in its vr support. . It also depends on games and how well the devs support it. If you get a bad port like FO4 your going to get sick. Is it worth it, YES but use with caution, and be sensible. I must state in Asetto corsa the monza track was blurry on monitor at distance, so its vr has its ups and downs. Comfort wise the OP is correct, the foam is not good for long distance sittings. You can get replacements but they are pricey

What karting game did you play in this video?

It loses a whole star at least from me because of how big of a hassle it was to get the fucking thing to work!! Sensors not being read, usb ports not working with it, problems downloading steam vr games, and now I have to get another graphics card even though it said on the box that my gtx 1060 was enough.

Picked one uo at best buy for 399. Works like a charm... Just as good as my $800 vive. Only wish the resolution was double. Also wish you could adjust lens to eye distance like the vive though! Yours came with a xbox one controller? Weird mine didn't. Just headset, touch and two sensors...

Don't get fooled by Primax's stats. 4K and 8K sounds good on paper but the Primax VR glasses have massive input lag and no head tracking so you can't even use them for racing games, they are only decent for watching movies or slow paced video games (adventures/RPGs, visual novels, puzzle games)

Sim Racing Paddock - there is a FREE alternative to VorpX, it's called Depth3D :-) With VorpX & Depth3D you can play older games like GTR2 or RACE 07 / WTCC / RACE INJECTION in VR - and because they are so old you can supersample the sh*t out of them to smooth the visuals and eliminate the screendoor effect.

Wery god Review. You deserve a lot more subs. Best channel atm. I didnt like the rift. I got Heavy motion sickness and sold it. Maybe its a Learning curve to adapt but i was disapointed in the image quality also.

I find that driving a real car is almost as realistic as driving in vr!

Do I even need xbox controller for PC use?

Set playback to 1.5x, you’re welcome

Worcester sharks ?........Pittsburgh penguins much better team , cannot trust a word you say now.

He span a go kart lmao

he wants to just stomp this thing down doesnt he? however............................

If you think you need a powerful PC to run the rift, wait until you need to power an 8k display. A 1080ti will just barely process 4k.

I recently tried VR for sim racing as i really wanted to invest in it to upgrade our set up. So glad i did as it was one of the most overated and worst things i have tried. The so called 'Screen Door Effect' was abismal and almost made it undrivable. Yes you can look around the car and to the corners but whats the point since they are so badly pixelated. I wouldn't swap this for my single screen let alone a triple screen set up. For me its probably 2 generations away from being usable.

*exacerbate