hey welcome PC world I'm Hayden Dingman and I am here today with the vive pro
it's not really a 52.0 but that's kind of what I've been thinking of it as at
home it's the first upgrade or the first headset upgrade we've had in two years
since the original vive and rift came out in 2016 so yeah first thing as you
can see it's now blue I can't really say I'm a big fan I think I like to be dark
a black or a sleek black a look of the original I don't know this kind of it's
not as bad in person as it is in their renders but it's still very blue but
anyways aside from that you can see a lot of the the improvements to this have
actually been folded in from last year's deluxe audio strap which we also put a
review of up on the site last year that was the first time that we had this
rigid plastic headband and also the built-in headphones so a lot of those
improvements carry over into the vive pro from the start you can just snap
these headphones down on your ears and now adjustment instead of being like a
crazy three strap system as the bicycle wheel system which is used on hololens
also so you just turn this knob in the back
very easy slip the thing on and off in about 10 seconds now which is definitely
not the case with the old model the big difference from last year's deluxe audio
strap is there's also now much more of a counterweight here on the back you can
see it's pretty sizable piece of plastic good and bad things here first of all
the headset feels a lot lighter so before if you had the original vibe or
the rift even from that headset would kind of pull down on your face a lot
there wasn't really anything to offset that and that was especially bad on the
vibe because they only had elastic straps it really would just hang heavy
and if you look down you would always get this thing where the headset pulled
down towards the ground this now solves both those problems the rigid plastic
keeps it up against your face and also the counterweight offsets some of the
weight in the back so I think this is actually technically heavier overall
than the five but it feels lighter but the one
thing I have noticed and this is sort of an itch problem because I have a very
tall gamer chair with a headrest that comes up above my head but because of
that seated VR with the vive pro is actually much more annoying this little
piece of plastic as small as it looks actually pushes my head forward from my
chair yeah I think that if you have a tall chair this new vive pro model is
gonna be a little bit awkward it's clear htc you really just wants to focus on
the the room scale environment which is what distinguishes the vibe still from
everybody else they still have the best tracking in my opinion but for those of
you who are using to see the VR still a bit of an issue the vibe control box is
also I think worth talking about under the vive pro control box they did
redesign this so the old model had on the back USB DisplayPort power and an
HDMI that HDMI port has been taken off now so you can see it's only gonna be
main display port on the back which is fine most graphics cards have more
DisplayPort capabilities and they do HDMI anyway on the front they've also
redesigned the cable they have a custom port now it's very I don't know large
but that replaces both the original ribbon cable which most people probably
got rid of I think they stopped sending vibes out with the original ribbon cable
like two months in but if you have that this is a much sleeker cable it also
replaces the three-in-one cable which is the solution they had before that one of
course was I think HDMI power and USB on the front also this one is just the
single port plug it in it's a little bit finicky but it goes straight in and then
you also have a power button on the front which you're gonna press to turn
it on and you'll have a little green light illuminate there I don't know many
people are shutting the vibe off in between sessions but I guess if that's
something that concerns you you can do it for me it's been only a thing that I
use when I need to reset the hardware but yeah otherwise a much sleeker box
than before I think but biggest improvement by far is actually
the resolution which is the thing that we can't really demonstrate to you here
but the original vibe had a resolution of 2160 by 1200 the vive Pro jumps that
up to 2880 by 1600 which if I remember from the HTC marketing materials I think
is a 73 percent increase in pixel density it's still not quite enough to
get rid of the the screen door effect but it gets a lot closer I've been using
it at home for a variety of demos including just the Steam home
environment and the thing that I've noticed the most difference in is text
which should not come as a surprise anyway let's use the original 5 the 2160
by 1200 seemed like a great resolution at the time or at least was much better
than what we had had with the dk2 and those earlier rift prototypes but text 1
was always still pretty blurry unless you did like size 72 point font nowadays
with the 5 Pro I've noticed I can read all of those steamed home menus which
are especially small a lot of that text is at probably 12-point font what you
used to look very blurry and you had to squint to read it all that looks crystal
clear now and games I don't notice it as much games already looked pretty good on
the vibe this does get some of the lines look a little crisper some of the
backgrounds look a little less blurry but overall you can still tell oh I can
see the pixels a little I think that we'll still need at least one more jump
before we fully get rid of the screen door effect but at that point we're
talking about 4k at 90 frames per second which is probably a few years down the
line unless Foveon rendering becomes more of a solution than it is right now
but yeah it's a pretty nice headset the main problem is the price $800 for just
the headset that doesn't include you know the base stations or the
controllers I'm gonna guess it's gonna be $1,000 for the whole package the $800
deal seems to be aimed at people who already have a vibe and to be honest I
think that's who the vive pro is primarily aimed at to begin with it's
the enthusiast it's the person that has really wonder
where we're gonna get our next our upgrade from that's me I remember you
know back in the dk1 days it felt like a year later we had the dk2 and then a
year after that we were seeing the vive and it felt like these upgrades were
coming so fast at the time and then it's been two years since we got the consumer
versions there hasn't really been a lot going on for the people that have been
wondering like hey when are we gonna see a higher res hmd this is that but it
doesn't really feel like a vibe - I think they're smart to not really call
this a second-generation piece of hardware it's more of like a 51.55 Pro
is a pretty apt name I guess but it's expensive and so it's also gonna be a
pretty niche item I think most people are gonna wanna stick with the original
vibe which is the $500 bucks and that comes with the base stations and the
controllers 800 for just the headset or a thousand so twice as much for a little
full kit that seems a bit outrageous but we will keep you updated obviously
there's a lot more stuff to come this year in VR oculus the Santa Cruz
prototype we saw at oculus connect last year that's expected to come maybe later
this year or early next year so there's more stuff coming but for now this is it
vive pro 800 dollars and it's blue