evertec

In my opinion, no it's not overall the better headset, especially if your use case is primarily gaming. The only pro I would agree with the previous responses is the fact that you don't need a facebook account. Other than that: The comfort was much worse than I expected given the better balance. I have a DAS with battery on my Quest 2 and the comfort is actually very similar and the face cushion fits better in fact. Exchangeable battery is a plus in certain situations but for my use, the Quest 2 lasts for 6 hours with my battery on the strap so it's a non issue to charge whenever I'm not using it. The better lenses on the Quest is not a minor issue: it's a much larger sweet spot and much fewer reflections and God rays so the overall image, despite being slightly better looking in the center on the Focus 3, is actually better on the Quest 2 for me. The software is much more refined on the Quest 2 - HTC just has started to come out with features that bring the image quality for PCVR up to par but even now it can be buggy to get steamvr started and the wireless experience is not up to par with the smooth glitch free performance of Airlink. The focus 3 has wifi 6e but the only practical benefit that gives is running multiple headsets on the same network at once. It doesn't give any higher bitrate in streaming. The fact that all Oculus software and steamvr software can be run without issues and for new games as well is huge. With the focus you have to mess with revive, steamvr bindings and sometimes the controllers just don't even work (like in Boneworks). The Quest 2 is the most popular VR headset out so new games and mods always work first on it, and are maybe later patched for the Focus 3.

In my opinion, no it's not overall the better headset, especially if your use case is primarily gaming. The only pro I would agree with the previous responses is the fact that you don't need a facebook account. Other than that: The comfort was much worse than I expected given the better balance. I have a DAS with battery on my Quest 2 and the comfort is actually very similar and the face cushion fits better in fact. Exchangeable battery is a plus in certain situations but for my use, the Quest 2 lasts for 6 hours with my battery on the strap so it's a non issue to charge whenever I'm not using it. The better lenses on the Quest is not a minor issue: it's a much larger sweet spot and much fewer reflections and God rays so the overall image, despite being slightly better looking in the center on the Focus 3, is actually better on the Quest 2 for me. The software is much more refined on the Quest 2 - HTC just has started to come out with features that bring the image quality for PCVR up to par but even now it can be buggy to get steamvr started and the wireless experience is not up to par with the smooth glitch free performance of Airlink. The focus 3 has wifi 6e but the only practical benefit that gives is running multiple headsets on the same network at once. It doesn't give any higher bitrate in streaming. The fact that all Oculus software and steamvr software can be run without issues and for new games as well is huge. With the focus you have to mess with revive, steamvr bindings and sometimes the controllers just don't even work (like in Boneworks). The Quest 2 is the most popular VR headset out so new games and mods always work first on it, and are maybe later patched for the Focus 3.

I tried taking off the facial interface and putting just a cushion on to bring the lenses closer to my eyes. Helped a little, and made the fov a bit bigger, but the lenses are still just crap imo, super blurry and so many god rays.

So I took some screenshots, and now I'm thinking the clarity difference may be due to the lenses after all. It's hard to get exactly the same distance and angle, but the screenshots look really good on the focus 3. So maybe I just have an eye relief that's not optimal for this. Or maybe the Oculus screenshot tool compresses more, I'm not sure, because after trying both again it really does look like the focus 3 has more aliasing in the background objects, not just a blurring of the lenses.

Yes, I do have that set. It doesn't seem to do any different than setting the steamvr res higher though. It still looks like it's being downscaled at some point through the process instead of running at native res.

Hmm, yes, the lens sweet spot could be affected by eye relief, but that's a separate issue to what I'm talking about right now. I'm starting to wonder if there's just something HTC is doing with downscaling on both the Vive pro 2 and the Focus 3 that's hindering its ability to fully utilize its high resolution displays. I've never tried the Pro 2, but for you to say you weren't blown away by the difference between it and the Index makes me wonder since the HP Reverb G2 really did/does blow me away with the difference between the Index. And that's even using a 2080ti (though I have a 3090 now). My biggest gripe is that even with the improvements in the newest beta, it still looks far worse than the Quest 2 (not even counting the small sweet spot, I'm just talking about clarity). That just shouldn't happen, since the Focus 3 has a 70% higher resolution. Even if you factor the bigger FOV that's still plenty higher of a pixel density. So I just don't understand how it could look so much blurrier, even in the center where I'm getting good focus on the lenses.

When you say basically a wired Vive Pro 2 is it actually close, like better than Valve Index, Quest 2 sharpness? It's still nowhere near the Reverb G2 sharpness for me, and not even the Quest 2 sharpness. Not sure if I did something wrong or if people are just giving it a benefit of doubt given how bad it was before.

So you have a Quest 2 also? Do you think it looks better with the new software and RS at 1.4? The Quest 2 still looks a lot sharper to me, when I have it at 5408x2736. Setting the Focus 3 to 1.4 RS seems to just change the default SteamVR resolution, but it still seems like somewhere in the pipeline, it's downsampling to a non-native resolution.

Honestly I would tell you to just return it and get a Quest 2 if you want a wireless headset. Even after hacking the config files to increase resolution and bitrate it still looks far worse than the Quest 2 running wirelessly.

Yeah I just returned mine, I even tried updating the config files to force a higher bitrate and resolution but even with that the max you can set is 2448x2448, which still results in a much blurrier image than even the Quest 2. Not acceptable for a $1300 headset.

I've been playing around with the resolutions and if I set to a high res like 3456x3456 it gets clear, similar to the quest 2....BUT, it's formatted all wrong so I can only see part of the screen. Please, HTC, fix this and enable the option for high res streaming!

I'm coming from a Quest 2, which frankly, looks pretty amazing with Airlink cranked up to the max resolution. I was expecting even better with the Focus 3 given it's nearly 70% higher resolution but unfortunately it looks far worse, even with the resolution upped to 2448x2448 in the settings files, and bitrate to 150Mbps. Does anyone in here have both headsets and have compared? If there's a setting I've missed I'd greatly appreciate being pointed in the right direction. Thanks!

Did you ever get the higher bitrates and resolution to work by editing the settings file? I saw you were discussing with someone on reddit about that

I know he's said that, but he's unfortunately very wrong on that. I've talked to him directly about this in the past to correct this misunderstanding... while it's true for some titles and scenes, others that have a lot of vegetation or dark areas, for example, the Forest and Horizon Zero Dawn, look much, much better at 200Mbps vs 100 on Virtual Desktop or Airlink. Even 200Mbps isn't enough for the Forest, although it's not terrible.

Have you actually compared it to Quest 2 recently though? Quest 2 is looking really good these days with airlink as they've improved the resolution and sharpening for it. I'm just not sure if it would actually be an improvement if the focus is using half the bitrate to transmit a potentially not even higher resolution image.

I actually was about to buy a focus 3 until I found out about this ridiculous limitation. 100Mbps? My Quest 2 runs great at 200Mbps on Wifi 6, and 500Mbps on USB.