[Flying] On a Related Note
I have almost all the components for my flight computer. Just waiting on one more case fan (ETA Friday), and an anti-static wrist strap and gloves (got a tracking number but no ETA yet).
This is going to be a very powerful PC--it had to be, because DCS is really demanding on both CPUs and graphics cards. In addition to DCS, I'm looking forward to cranking up the graphics settings in City of Heroes and getting back to 3D modeling in Blender.
Once I have the PC assembled, the only thing left that I need for DCS will be head-tracking. Since TrackIR has become more expensive and VR is dropping in price, I'm hoping I can save up for a VR headset this fall instead of waiting for next spring's tax return like I originally planned. Valve has teamed up with HP to produce a 2nd generation version of HP's Reverb, due to be released this fall, which I hope will mean Valve's Index will drop in price.
The Index is my current pick among available VR headsets. HP's Reverb has higher resolution, but the Index has a wider field of view--more than one Reverb review has compared it to wearing a scuba mask. One Reverb user in DCS pulled a muscle in his neck while checking his six. The Index has enough resolution to read cockpit instruments, at least with my pretty high-end graphics card, and it has a 130º FoV compared to the Reverb's 114º. All reports indicate the forthcoming Reverb G2 will have the same FoV as the current model.
Also on the market is the Pimax 8K, which manages to stretch the same resolution as the Index across a whopping 200º of FoV. But there are inconsistent reports about its manufacturing quality, and anyway it costs $2000, way out of my budget. There's also a question of whether any current graphics card can process that many pixels. It is possible to chain a pair of (identical) graphics cards together and have one card for each eye, and I plan to do that eventually, but even that might not be enough to maintain a decent framerate in DCS with such a wide FoV.
The next generation of VR headsets are waiting for a breakthrough called foveated rendering, which tracks the wearer's eye movement and only renders their area of focus at full resolution while the periphery is left low-res. Which 1) is pretty much how real human vision works and 2) will go a LONG way to reducing the load VR puts on graphics cards. But that's at least a year off. In the meantime, an Index with my GPU--or two of them, by next year--will hopefully be enough to fly in.
This is going to be a very powerful PC--it had to be, because DCS is really demanding on both CPUs and graphics cards. In addition to DCS, I'm looking forward to cranking up the graphics settings in City of Heroes and getting back to 3D modeling in Blender.
Once I have the PC assembled, the only thing left that I need for DCS will be head-tracking. Since TrackIR has become more expensive and VR is dropping in price, I'm hoping I can save up for a VR headset this fall instead of waiting for next spring's tax return like I originally planned. Valve has teamed up with HP to produce a 2nd generation version of HP's Reverb, due to be released this fall, which I hope will mean Valve's Index will drop in price.
The Index is my current pick among available VR headsets. HP's Reverb has higher resolution, but the Index has a wider field of view--more than one Reverb review has compared it to wearing a scuba mask. One Reverb user in DCS pulled a muscle in his neck while checking his six. The Index has enough resolution to read cockpit instruments, at least with my pretty high-end graphics card, and it has a 130º FoV compared to the Reverb's 114º. All reports indicate the forthcoming Reverb G2 will have the same FoV as the current model.
Also on the market is the Pimax 8K, which manages to stretch the same resolution as the Index across a whopping 200º of FoV. But there are inconsistent reports about its manufacturing quality, and anyway it costs $2000, way out of my budget. There's also a question of whether any current graphics card can process that many pixels. It is possible to chain a pair of (identical) graphics cards together and have one card for each eye, and I plan to do that eventually, but even that might not be enough to maintain a decent framerate in DCS with such a wide FoV.
The next generation of VR headsets are waiting for a breakthrough called foveated rendering, which tracks the wearer's eye movement and only renders their area of focus at full resolution while the periphery is left low-res. Which 1) is pretty much how real human vision works and 2) will go a LONG way to reducing the load VR puts on graphics cards. But that's at least a year off. In the meantime, an Index with my GPU--or two of them, by next year--will hopefully be enough to fly in.