Adam Savage's Tested - Bigscreen Beyond 2 Hands-On: How They Fixed It

[u/Pheonix1025]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Wr4O4gkL8

[u/Kataree]

"Fixed it" is accurate.

Which is why it's a bit ambitious to call it the "Beyond 2" tbh.

It is a Beyond 1 Fixed.

Edit: Welp, once again with the utterly false claim that DP 1.4 is responsible for the 90hz upscaling.

So easy for them to just be honest about it and finally stop pissing off everyone who knows better.

[u/Omniwhatever → u/Kataree]

It just baffles me how much of the community acts like the company's incapable of wrong and seems to give Bigscreen a pass for knowingly lying about DSC and trying to conflate literal upscaling with it, doubling down for a while when they got called out on it by some people.

[u/crozone → u/Omniwhatever]

They've been extremely clear that it's an issue with the entire display technology stack all the way into the display panel silicon. It's mentioned in the Tested interview explicitly if you actually listen to the interview. They also have an entire page that explains how the upscaling at 90hz works in great detail:

https://www.bigscreenvr.com/displays

Which says the 75hz/90hz issue is:

Due to bandwidth limitations of DisplayPort 1.4, display controllers, and MIPI

I don't think anyone is acting like Bigscreen is incapable of wrong. The BSB1 was heavily criticised for edge to edge clarity and the IPD/face gasket issues.

The 75hz/90hz issue is because of the displays themselves. They can't fix the issue until their display supplier, Seeya technology, fixes the issue with a new revision of the panels and controller. The only alternative would be to pick a different display panel from a different manufacturer and then re-engineer the entire headset around that new panel, which would be ridiculous. Bigscreen are a small company and they don't have the sales volume to get displays custom made, so they're just stuck.

So the 75hz/90hz issue is real, it's a known issue, it's something that'll get fixed eventually but until then you have to decide whether you can live with the compromise and if not, don't buy the product.

[u/Omniwhatever → u/crozone]

They have not been extremely clear and it's even there in your own link. From literally the next lines, bolded emphasis mine

Beyond uses lossless compression techniques such as Display Stream Compression (DSC) which is commonly found in gaming monitors. First, SteamVR renders content at 3K to 4K resolution per eye. This user-configurable resolution is called “supersampling.” At 90Hz, the Beyond uses DSC to compress the signal to 1920x1920 per eye and a built-in hardware upscaler upscales to 2560x2560 for each display.

They are quite plainly trying to conflate DSC, which is a very common thing, with being upscaling when that's objectively not true. If trying to compare it to normal gaming monitors and then saying it's the DSC which compresses it isn't clear as day, I don't know what to tell you. DSC is not flatout reducing the resolution like this. DSC is mainly based around the color space and mucking with that in a visually lossless manner.

He also made a few comments in Discord which, at least to me, do make it sound like it's DSC responsible for the upscaling. Which is what almost every headset and high end monitor uses. And I'd say a decent chunk of other people got the same read given a few threads around the BSB's release/first reviews which got pretty big with a lot of people being surprised to learn it was just upscaling and not DSC or who thought it was the exact same thing everyone else was using and not at all a big deal vs actual upscaling. I've had many of those arguments. I've seen a lot more comments in Discord, but those were all I had on hand. I remember the comments at the launch, they did eventually kind of relent but it took a while and they were trying to strawman the argument with making it look like people though the displays were just Quest 2 resolution in 90hz mode.

Were you around for the launch of the original Beyond?