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SvennoJ on 15 October 2016
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Lrdfancypants said:

My biggest holdup on it (besides I'd like more games) is the display.

Does it look good or not when playing a game? I've seen exact opposite reactions on the internet which confuses the situation. Even in this thread we have opinions from it being 480pish looking to better than rift or vive.

I wish someone I know had bought this because for me it's a try before buy. It's not as though $500 is a lot of money but I see no reason to buy it if I get home and it looks like I'm playing the wii or something because I'll just toss it in a closet next to a very expensive racing wheel I bought once because I got excited (I don't even play racing games, go figure).

Some stuff looks amazing, some other stuff not so good. Best looking are bright colorful games, Wayward sky, Battlezone, Allumette. Amazing sense of scale with very solid graphics. This is a screenshot from Wayward sky on the social screen

In the headset you see everything in solid 3D (really not comparable to regular passive stereographic, active headtracking 3D has perfect presence) plus you see more aroud the edges and just as in real life, being able to look around makes it feel like it's a real place. Screendoor effect is hard to notice and the low res isn't distracting at all. Contrast is also much better in the headset with great black level, screenshots look washed out in comparison.

Realistic looking games can look good too, Rush of blood looks great, Kitchen very decent with a bit of noticeable pixelation, Where they lie however really needs better textures. The thing with these generally darker games is that the screendoor effect becomes more noticeable.

Driveclub is a mixed bag, not made from VR from the start is its downside. The insides of the cars are amazing, it's unbelievable when you have it positioned right and you lean back on your couch to see the seat of the car line up perfectly with it. Dashboard is blurry though, you have to lean in to get a proper look and textures are not perfect. You can read the airbag label, but not the smaller print no matter how close you look. Anyway It feels great actually sitting in the cars.
The outside is where it is let down, massive downgrades in detail and the scale seems off. The tracks all appear smaller or shortened. What looks like long corners and sweeping hills on the original version all looks a lot more steep and compact. Standing outside the car also makes the cars seem too small. Dunno why it looks like that, other games have much better sense of scale.
Despite all that and being quite blurry in the distance, it's still a lot of fun to play. Driving feels very natural.

The worst are the surround videos. Video VR has horribly pixelated text in the UI and the videos all appear very low res with bad 3D effect if they have any. Which is odd as HD Netflix on the virtual screen looks pretty good as well as playing any standard ps4 games. It looks better than the Wii with it's big square pixels on HDTV, but it's indeed a step down to ps3 level image quality.

If you're already used to 4K gaming, this will look horrible at first. The sense of presence is worth it though. Being able to lean in and take in your surroundings is worth the sacrifice in resolution. I played for over 5 hours yesterday, craving to get back to it :)