Hi, long time user of the original HTC Vive looking to upgrade, need help deciding what's best to pick in my specific case.
I've been debating to upgrade to a new VR headset for some time, my current Vive is very old, I constantly feel very sluggish and tired after using it for longer than 2 hours, the visuals are very outdated due to the aged lenses and screens. As such, I've decided that I would only go for the currently available small factor high-end'ish VR headsets to upgrade my experience.
Most of my VR use cases are simulators, especially DCS being my daily driver currently. It's no secret that these are a demanding category of games, so I'm trying to min-max my headset choice accordingly. I've mostly stopped playing other VR games since staying with the headset would always tire me out relatively fast, and the sitting experiences haven't really interested be that much due to the poor visuals. I currently have an RTX 3090 paired with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 32GB RAM. The specs aren't the worst, but I understand it's not a 5090 neither, so I should cautiously not over-reach. As such, a headset with eye-tracking for DFR is a must, but I would still like to hit a sweet spot for the best optics and screen combination and am currently hoping that DFR will take me the rest of the way there.
My current consideration is the Bigscreen Beyond 2e. I already have the 1.0 tracking stations from the Vive, along with the controllers (although not really needed for my use cases), I would go with the halo mount to get the universal face cushion. The BSB2e would currently set me back 1600€, which seems an okay price for what I'm expecting from a new headset. The problem is that I keep reading the negatives about it - bad performance/overheating when on high brightness, glare, the screen resolution being sub-par. The opinion I form from reading some of the comments on Reddit is that for the price that it asks, it's not the best choice of a headset.
My other consideration is the Pimax Dream Air. I now see that they're slowly starting to get delivered, so there's some hope that I would be able to receive it relatively shortly after ordering it. A lot of the things advertised on the headset specification list are better - better resolution, better lenses, better eye-tracking tech, etc. Understandably, the headset is pricier - 2150€ is an amount I would only be willing to spend if the headset is really worth the 500€ extra to future-proof myself and worth stepping over the 2k mark. I also most-certainly have high doubts about being able to run the headset at the native resolution with my current rig, as well as doubts about Pimax as a company itself with their supposedly shaky QC and support. There's also the SE version, which seems to be more inline with what the BSB2e delivers at a much cheaper cost (around 1000€), although I would be even more uncertain of when I would be receiving the headset, as it doesn't seem to be even close to ready for shipment, and I'm not sure if that's worth waiting indefinitely for.
I suppose I'm looking for advice whether these two (or three if you count the SE) are my best options and whether the BSB2e, which personally seems to best fit my use case, is really the right choice. Perhaps there's a better alternative that I'm missing that some of you use? Or maybe I should just go ahead with the BSB2e since it's more on-par with what my rig can push. Any advice or your experiences on picking the best headset would be greatly appreciated, thanks for reading and helping!