Valve Index
Valve has the best hardware, but Steam is holding it back.
Valve has played a huge and important part in pushing virtual reality forwards over the years with its tracking system and SteamVR platform. But it didn’t launch its own VR headset until 2019, the Valve Index.
Even today, nearly two years after it launched, the Valve Index is one of the best virtual reality headsets money can buy. It has an ultra-crisp display that runs fairly well even with older GPUs, a wide field of view, a high refresh rate and Valve’s ‘knuckle’ controllers, which can track the movement of each and everyone one of your fingers.
It’s easy to write off the Valve Index as another nondescript VR headset in the same vein as any Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset – but the devil’s all in the detail here.
On the front, there’s a glossy plastic faceplate above two front-facing cameras that can be used for passthrough video and, potentially, AR applications. Go to put the headset on and you’ll feel the stone gray pads that line the inside; it’s a similar Halo design to what Oculus is doing on the Rift S, and it feels both comfortable and snug.
To keep it that way, there are two dials you’ll need to use – one on the left side that changes the physical distance from the lens to your eyes, and the one on that back that makes the headband tighter or looser. While the second is definitely important, it’s something we’ve seen before. It’s the first dial that’s actually groundbreaking, as that’s what allows the Index to achieve its industry-leading field of view spec.
Amazingly, while all the Index’s features would seem to require extra horsepower under the hood of your PC, they actually worked fine with our much older Nvidia GTX 980 GPU. That’s a boon for folks who don’t have the money to upgrade their GPU after buying a $3,000 VR headset, and it could allow for more people to get into VR.
That last bit is important, because as more people adopt VR, more developers will see a business case for making VR games – right now, Steam’s VR selection is a bit bare compared to the ever-expanding main store, and even the top titles selected by Valve to show off the new hardware are really just a lot of old titles that play better with the Knuckle controllers (see: Space Pirate Trainer, Fruit Ninja, Beat Saber
and Arizona Sunshine).
That said, when we played some newer titles, like Valve’s Moondust
demo, we couldn’t help but smile. Not only do the games look great on the high-resolution screen, and play without any hitches even on our less-than-ideal hardware, but they feel more interactive with the Index Controller.