How Much Should You Spend to play Half Life Alyx?

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 [Music] 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.

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,386,622

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Id: UTwgInKmEHI

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020