Vive pro 2 You've exceeded the maximum number of monitors and a number of other bugs and issues. Also some impressions.

[Trigen]

Hello

 

While the HMD is growing on me there is a lot of shortcomings and bugs. I am on the Beta version 2.0.17.0. Current release verions is a computer freeze festival and how you can release something with the software in this state is beyond me. 

First off all i use triple screens and i have 3 monitors connected and the VP2  but i still get this message.  You've exceeded the maximum number of monitors. There's a limit to the number of monitors you can connect to your graphics card. Connect at most 3 monitors. This is the only HMD i get this issue with and something i will actually return it for. 

Then there is all the tracking bugs and alignment bugs in various games. Assetto corsa worked the first day but now the device insist on sending space bar. It will reset the VR view and if i press then window key to type something in the search it will insert spaces at random short intervals. It wont however do it when the game is deselected. 

Motion smoothing seems to be fighting with the steamVR one or something else and when its on performance is quite bad and it struggles to keep the fps set to say 45. There's also a ton of artifacts. 

Another is the vertical FOV. While i appreciate the nice wide fov and excellent wide sweetspot anyone that cant keep this HMD so close it hurts they nose will have a bad experience in my opinion. This is much to big of a sacrifice to make and please never make such a narrow vertical fov again. Its something we really really dont want in VR. 

What i really do like is the panels themselves. The colors are great and black levels fantastic for a lcd panel so thanks for that. I will actually be replacing my Pimax 8kX for this one. Or well i will if you sort out the software issues fairly quick. I dont want my computer to freeze for 30 seconds each time i quit steam VR 

[Trigen]

Nvm the AC problem. It was on my end.

[Trigen]

Please sort out the instant tracking loss if you touch one sensor.  Its almost impossible to press the side button or the IPD slider without touching it

Edited June 7, 2021 by Trigen

[C.T.]

If you are running Ultra or Extreme mode, the limitation is 2 monitors + VP2. 

• Ultra/Extreme mode: Connect at most 2 monitors.
• Other modes: Connect at most 3 monitors.

[mgoldb2]

On 6/7/2021 at 11:19 AM, C.T. said:

If you are running Ultra or Extreme mode, the limitation is 2 monitors + VP2. 

• Ultra/Extreme mode: Connect at most 2 monitors.
• Other modes: Connect at most 3 monitors.

It there anyway to change how it does the detection.  It won't work in extreme/ultra mode fair enough.  The problem is disabling 3rd monitor, turning off monitor, unplugging, even removing display port cable on monitor side all don't work.  The only way I got it to work is to remove the cable from the computer it self.  This is extremely inconvenience and it would be way easier if you just let me disable the monitor in windows or even unplugging monitor to use the VR headset in Ultra/Extreme.

 

 

[AwesomeNinja]

An explanation as to why this limitation exists would be nice. Considering I just got my HMD today and I have a 3090 (Best case for this HMD) with 6 ports (3 DP, 3 HDMI) and I can only use 3 of them at one time is pretty stupid.

[mm_993]

Please disable this "feature" or let us choose by ourselves

i used the pro2 since today together with a triple setting for simracing and i have a RTX3080

when i use a simulation it runs only at 1920x1080 in the background, so this is not a problem

but i dont wont always plug out the monitor on the PC, when i start a sim with the VR Headset!

[HackPerception]

We unfortunately have no stake in this behavior - this limitation is put in place by Nvidia and is not something that you can modify beyond the user-settings. The error message your seeing is actually from the Nvidia API - not from a Vive API. NVAPI_MAX_DISPLAY_LIMIT_REACHED 

Simply stated - driving a bunch of external monitors starts bumping up against the limitations of what GPUs and framebuffers can accomplish while also supporting a direct uncompressed stream to an HMD. Multi-monitor setups beyond 3 monitors are not a supported use-case at the GPU level when using this headset due to the bandwidth requirements. Vive is unfortunately unable to alter this behavior on our side.\\

I would not be surprised if you saw the exact same limitation on most other 4K+ headsets over the coming year or two. I'm think the Pimax headsets have had similar constraints since the beginning and think Varjo may have a similar thing.

What sucks is that Displayport often won't let you just turn off the monitor within Windows Settings and you'll may asked to physically disconnect the Displayport cable. That's just a function of how the Displayport standard works.

Adding to the complexity, modern GPUs and headset OEMs are stuck in between a generational divide with Displayport 1.2 vs Displayport 1.4. These type of high resolution headsets ideally would get hooked upto a shiny Displayport 1.4 but realistically you couldn't launch an HMD in the current market without Displayport 1.2 back-compatibly because a huge portion of users only have DP1.2, especially laptop users. Displayport 1.2 legacy/cross-compatibility is going to be an major industry topic for the next year or two. Backwards supporting DP 1.2+ requires a bunch of fancy optimization tricks, namely such as Display Stream Compression to be feasible.

Another thing to keep in mind is that VR-fullscreen/mirroring doesn't work the same as traditional 3D fullscreen in terms of how the draw-calls and framebuffers resource usage plays out. The headset is driven directly off the GPU in a way that doesn't happen with monitors - they're different outputs that need to be rendered in the GPU. You can't recycle from the buffer to drive a full-screen render/mirror on the monitors like you can with standard flatscreen 3D content - it's an additional viewpoint that needs to be rendered in addition to the VR output. It may only hit you a few percent - but if you're maxing our your card, a hit is a hit.

Hope some of this makes sense as to what's happening and to Vive's constraints around this topic.

[mgoldb2]

25 minutes ago, HackPerception said:

What sucks is that Displayport often won't let you just turn off the monitor within Windows Settings and you'll may asked to physically disconnect the Displayport cable. That's just a function of how Displayport works by default. 

Thank you for giving me the clue I needed to allow me to disable one monitor in software.  I switched one of my 3 monitors too a HDMI cable and now when I disable that monitor in windows am able to use the VP 2 in extreme mode. It look like requiring the cable to be physical disconnected from computer is a issue specific to DisplayPort.

 

 

[C.T.]

6 hours ago, AwesomeNinja said:

An explanation as to why this limitation exists would be nice. Considering I just got my HMD today and I have a 3090 (Best case for this HMD) with 6 ports (3 DP, 3 HDMI) and I can only use 3 of them at one time is pretty stupid.

are you using Aorus 3090?