 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 they're fantastic pressure sensitive hand presence controllers But that's not what we're gonna be doing today is it oh boy. Thank you Instead we're gonna 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 gonna cost you about $500 and we're gonna 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 ModMix lineup includes three options the ModMic USB Which is USB attachable the ModMic Uni which uses a three and a half millimeter jack and the ModMic wireless Which is of course wireless you can check out their lineup at the link in the video description 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 the gamers There is really not much benefit to upgrading your SSD once you have at least an SSD loading times for games This case is a little bit tricky graphics card goes in from the front We chose the GeForce GTX 1060 for a couple of reasons number one is that valve system requirements for the game specifically call for? 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's 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 boom. Oh ah 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 anchor USB a to type C this sin loon right angle adapter and This mono price active USB extension cable It's a bit of a kludgy 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 alright 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 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 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 Valves 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 gonna work on third-party ones like these Performance hey there we go Medium fidelity these are set automatically modifying these may impact frame rate alright alright 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 just connected that's very disorienting I'm gonna 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 valves 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 gonna 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 as 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 8 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 cans 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 regular stutter Really subtle touch feedback when you reach out and touch a wall 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 stutter there That's pretty nice now though 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 on low 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 gonna 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 dollars less on the used market one reason to go 2000 series though is if you're a game streamer because you're gonna be able to take advantage of the new Turing And bank encoder alright, 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 and bank encoder this one might end up being better alright, so there's low and there's high Does that look materially different to you guys Not really If the shadows look crisper, okay, here's a soft shadow alright Hi fidelity What am I looking for here, here's a texture here's the floor alright we all looking at this performance If we spent all this time just to find out that it really makes just no darn lick of 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 alright Cool. Yeah, alright fine, and like that concrete looks pretty natural. We're gonna go all the way down to low 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 One thousand 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 a hundred and forty four 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 on to 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 gonna 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 dry 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 gonna have a problem Definitely seeing some spikes above our threshold here, so I'm gonna 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 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 overcasty 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 it's 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 overclock on it. I don't expect that to be your bottleneck Okay, your performance settings are now at a recommended level performance. Hi Put me at high nah dog. 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 five point five 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 back to high So it would be really hard for me to recommend Spending $1,100 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 would say something like a riff-desk 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 main gears vector gaming laptop is available at 25 micro center locations as well as on Amazon It features a core i7 9750 h processor Nvidia g-force 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 special 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 gonna 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