Late last week, HTC made a major tease of a forthcoming new Vive headset with improved resolution. Apparently leaked information ahead of any official announcements suggests we’ll see a ‘Vive Pro’ announced by HTC at CES this week with an enhanced 2,880 × 1,600 resolution and the addition of an optional Vive Wireless Adapter.

Update (1/9/18): Catch our in-depth hands-on with the new HTC Vive Pro here.

Update (1/8/18): The leak turned out to be right on the money. HTC officially announced the Vive Pro today at CES 2018. See our first look at the Vive Pro here.

Information reported, and subsequently pulled down, earlier today by VR publication VRNerds suggests that HTC is set to debut a ‘Vive Pro’, a refresh of their VR headset featuring an improved resolution of 2,880 × 1,600 (compared to the 2,180 × 1,200 of the original). That’s 76% more pixels. As we suspected, this is likely the same OLED display being used in the Samsung Odyssey headset.

VRNerds further reported that the Vive Pro would include on-board speakers, though it isn’t clear from the leaked information if that would mean on-ear headphones, like with the Vive Deluxe Audio Strap, or hidden projection speakers similar to those on the Vive Focus headset. The latter would potentially eliminate the need for the Deluxe Audio Strap in some cases, making the headset lighter without sacrificing on-board audio.

The report suggests that the original Vive headset will continue to be offered alongside the Vive Pro. Pricing and availability for the Pro aren’t mentioned.

The VRNerds report also talks of a “Vive Wireless Adapter,” which is described as an official Vive accessory based on Intel’s WiGig connection. That wouldn’t come until Q3, 2018, the report suggests.

There’s no confirmation at this time that the leak is genuine, but the information appears perfectly plausible, and follows logically from prior announcements and teases, like HTC’s collaboration with Intel for a WiGig wireless adapter.

HTC’s CES tease late last week listed a date of January 8th (today), so we expect to see official announcements at some point which will verify the authenticity (or lack thereof) of the leak. Stay tuned!

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • PRGuy69

    Someone is getting fired. The fact that they pulled it just makes it more believable.

    • Downvote King

      I mean… surely they would also pull it if it was false information?

      • Brian Brown

        If this wasn’t genuine, HTC would go on record to dispel these ‘rumors’. Seems real to me.

        • Downvote King

          Why would they go on record about a product they haven’t unveiled yet? The whole point is to leave people guessing til the last second, there’s no reason to come out saying “hey guys, wait – it’s definitely not this, this, or that”. Either way, they’d just wait until the scheduled moment their marketing department decided on to confirm any features.

          For the record, I tend to agree, I just like finding flaws in logical arguments. In this case, the action of pulling this information could equally indicate the parallel possibilities of it being either false or true. Some extra line of reasoning would be required for me to find either one a more sound argument.

          • Gary Warke

            Any possibility of upgrading my existing vive or will I have to try selling on ebay?

          • Downvote King

            Ummmmm… reply fail?

            If not, and you actually picked me to answer this seemingly out-of-context question for you:

            I highly doubt you’d be able to either purchase any of the (still rumored) components from Vive 1.5 piecemeal/a la carte, or actually cram them into the existing hardware successfully, so… try selling on eBay? Or maybe offer it to a local school :-)

          • Brian Brown

            Wrong on all counts.

          • Downvote King

            Which counts?

            1. It wasn’t a reply fail?

            2. I doubted parts from 1.5 would be modularly swappable with 1.0?

            Or

            3. In this case if he wanted to upgrade he would need to purchase the new one?

            ?

            Specificity is the soul of narrative Brian Brown, and thus far you have but pooped 5 words and a full-stop onto the Internet.

          • Brian Brown

            Why list the inaccurate points, when everything you said was wrong. A reply fail (which was not a point), notwithstanding. Sorry if I ruffled your feathers, you just seem to be so negative about this new product.

            I’m buying one the day it’s available, and have been waiting for a Steam VR HMD with a resolution bump. Maybe you use PSVR or Oculus and for some reason come off as a stick in the mud regarding positive Steam VR news. I don’t know.

            You can reply with some snide remark obviously, but I’m done with this.

          • Downvote King

            Brian, I think we should both take a step back. I certainly didn’t mean to offend you – I felt that your terse response was a little rude, and that I responded in a playful, diffusing manner. My intention clearly failed, but I’m sincerely interested in where you’re coming from.

            I don’t have any dog in the VR race as of yet – I’m just waiting for now until the prices come down and the hardware is revised generally in the direction of being at least 4K, with hand and eye-tracking, if not 4K per eye with full body, face and eye tracking. I feel this is a critical tipping point in VR, and am willing to wait until it is at least a few measures closer before purchasing myself. I have no doubt that Steam, Oculus, Sony, Microsoft, and many other vendors will get there, and each to my knowledge produces fine products in the current gen.

            My response to what I genuinely believe was a reply fail included information which to the best of my knowledge is correct. I don’t think that any internal components of the Vive Pro are modular or swappable with the original Vive. Whether or not this is correct, which I hope you do address, I don’t see how relaying that to someone who specifically asked me is either negative or being a “stick in the mud”. As far as I can tell, he would need to upgrade to the Vive Pro hardware in order to enjoy the new features it offers. I’m sure that will also be true of any upcoming revisions from the Vive’s competitors, outside of perhaps OSVR – who thus far have been a bit of an outlier.

          • Brian Brown

            My apologies. I own more than one VR system, and have a good idea what is good and what needs work. For me, Steam VR is the most viable option because it’s open source and is a stable ecosystem where (if it’s Steam VR) LG, Samsung, etc…. can release hardware, and it will be ‘interchangeable’ with existing Steam VR components.

            What I mean by interchangeable is not by putting the Vive Pro screens into the standard Vive. It means that if I want to upgrade to a newer higher resolution HMD, it natively works with what I already have, without purchasing the base stations, Vive wands or any other part of my system twice.

            Example: with Steam VR, in the future I can buy an LG controller and it will work with my HTC Vive. I can buy any component that is part of Steam VR from anyone who sells it, and it will be integrated automatically.

            Again, my apologies.

          • Downvote King

            Cheers – I’m glad you’re passionate about it, this type of enthusiasm is what’s needed for VR to succeed; I guess it’s also a double-edged sword ;-)

            I’m not sure what Mr. Warke meant by his question precisely; given our two different takes it seems likely we may need some clarification from him. When he asked if there was “any possibility of upgrading my existing Vive”, I took that to mean the headset. In any case it does appear we agree.

    • lavizh

      OR this was just a planned “leak” to draw some more fuzz about the announcement and nobody is getting fired becouse of it :)

    • dk

      wasn’t it supposed to be announced already…..I guess a few more hours ….damn it

      • daveinpublic

        Ya, it’s 2pm Central time where I’m at, and thought I’d be reading the official story about this by now.. Well, hopefully it’s around the corner.

  • Rigelleo

    With this resolution the aliasing will be 25% smaller (if the FOV is the same). If the angular dimension of the pixel of Vive is 1 the angular dimension of the pixel of Vive Pro will be 0.75. A good improvement.

  • mellott124

    Makes sense that its the Samsung Odyssey panels. Hopefully the wireless doesn’t require constant reboots like the TPCast.

    • John Carletto

      You should upgrade to OpenTPCast. I did it day 3 and never looked back. The connection is rock solid now.

      • mellott124

        Thanks. I’ll try it. It’s really annoying given the cost to have to constantly reboot.

  • Kev

    Seems really underwhelming. If it’s the “pro” version that means they will continue to sell the existing one. Therefore they could have easily pushed the envelope with the pro but instead they will reportedly use the same panel that’s in the Odyssey. We need considerably larger jumps to mark genuine improvement.

    • kontis

      > Therefore they could have easily pushed the envelope

      How? They can only buy what Samsung sells.

      • Kev

        Over a year ago Samsung itself showed OLED displays specifically designed for VR that would become available late last year. You can google it if you like. This is lower resolution than those that were shown are. I think they opted for a more off the shelf solution from Samsung rather than pushing the envelope.

  • Manuel Riger

    lol this jump is a joke for 2018……

    • mellott124

      It’s not 4k like maybe people hoped but it’s not a joke either. Improvement in image quality is immediately noticeable. I have the Odyssey and the HTC Vive. Vive and Oculus look blurry after using the Odyssey.

      We’ll see a 4k HMD from Samsung before anyone else gets them since they make the panels. The area is too hot for Samsung to give that to anyone else. They were testing the market with Oculus. They know now they can do it themselves.

      • care package

        I would agree. Love my Rift but I would take those new specs any day.

    • kontis

      It’s tad disappointing, but it’s not like HTC can do anything about it, except for switching to LCD.

      Find me a higher PPI AMOLED available on the market anywhere in the world.

  • lloyd

    Would 76% more pixels require 76% more graphics processing to achieve the same fps?

    • kontis

      To some extent this is correct (76% higher fill rate required), but there are some other aspects that don’t scale with render resolution and when the CPU is the bottleneck (happens quite often in VRChat) then the FPS will be unchanged.

  • Sam

    Lets be honest, we wont see flagship 4k hmd’s until 2019 or later because single card systems can’t push 4k@90fps. I would expect the next big HMD update soon after Volta or Ampere drop.

    • kontis

      Contrary to popular belief, HMD’s resolution has no relation to GPU power. These headsets generally have the highest res screens available. It’s the state of the screen manufacturing tech. The only relevant GPU thing is the output resolution support (HDMI, DP).

      Oculus GO will actually have 20% more subpixels than Vive Pro despite the 10x-20x slower GPU than in high-end PC

      • care package

        resolutions have no relation to GPU power? Hell I’m convinced….

        • Matt Clark

          For instance, I am using 1.5x supersampling for a couple games on the Rift. This means that my graphics card is already rendering 2016 x 4032 = 9,676,800 pixels. This is more than standard 4k. This means there is still a lot of catching up for HMD resolution to do before it can natively run the resolution that my graphics card is capable of.

          I think this is what Kontis is referring to.

          Of course, I will always welcome better gpu’s so that I can run some of the more taxing games that I play which can only reach 1.2 ss or so before reprojection. I’m hoping that in 5 years we can push 10,000,000 native pixels + SS and full-vision FOV. With a very smart implementation of eye tracking and foveated rendering, we might be able to push it much farther than even that.

      • Jerald Doerr

        HMD resolution has no relation to GPU power? Ahhh your kidding right? And how in the hell did you get 5 upvotes? Please tell me your mexing up a stand alone unit with a unit that’s hooked up to a PC.. The vive pro is just like the old vive but higher-resolution screen higher quality audio and what looks like stereo front facing cameras

      • victor

        you are not very technical are you?

      • brandon9271

        I great deal of VR content isn’t all that complicated graphically. Even ones that are like Robo Recall I can run with supersampling on my GTX 1070. For every ‘Robo Recall’ type game you have about a 1000 ‘Climby’ style games that would probably run on a toaster. Also, if i had an 8k HMD now i could always run at lower resolution until i get a better GPU. Personally, I’d like to invest in a more future proof HMD and not something that cost a premium but is obsolete in six months.

    • Kev

      That assertion is total baloney. There are 1000 ways to perform that task without some mythical future video card. By your thinking VR on a PS4 would be impossible as would VR on cell phones that have 1% the processing power and are pushing higher resolution than the Vive. The argument is ridiculous.

      • Muzufuzo

        Galaxy S8 is about 500 gigaflops and that’s 1/18 of the GTX 1080 so no, not 1%

        • Kev

          Even if you use your number (which isn’t correct) you completely prove my point. The S8 drives Daydream VR at 2960×1440 with 5.5% of the capability – and it’s a battery operated device…

          • Muzufuzo

            so what is the correct number?

          • Kev

            The premise of the original comment was it requires a hypothetical CPU/GPU to drive next gen VR. I suggested that is total baloney. So the Adreno 540’s FireStrike at just 1080P is 453 vs. a 1080TI at 28,500. To find a PC video card with a firestrike of less than 500 you need to go back almost 10 years. So an S8 has a CPU that is ~20% a PC (when in full power mode which you rarely use), and a GPU that is ~1.5%. (also when in full power mode also rare as your battery life would be 20 minutes). So the typical usage scenario on battery is less than 1%.

            Therefore a Galaxy S8 is pushing 2960×1440 GearVR with a tiny fraction of a PC’s capability.

            This idea that you MUST run any game at the absolute maximum settings for it to be “usable” is complete non-sense. So the assertion you must have VOLTA for high res VR is just silly.

          • Jerald Doerr

            Ok your forgetting so much.. I have a gear vr with my S8 and I have a Vive with 2 x evga 1080. I dont even have the time to list everything your forgetting so I’ll keep it simple..

            S8 has no video mem compared to my 8/16 gigs of video mem on my 1080’s
            What’s that mean? Games suck on my s8 because there’s not a lot of room for polygons or a lot of objects or vfx on screen.. It’s like playing Doom 1 vs Doom 3 ..

            So lets get in to resalotion.. The Gear VR looks far better way more crisp than my Vive why? Becouse of resalotion (mostly) but! The Gear VR has way less FOV so????

            For you to say that resolution meens nothing Ied love to see the look on Sony or Microsofts CEO’s facies as you try to sell your new idea. Geeez why even make a PlayStation 2, 3, or 4 buy your standards??? Why do we even have 4k tv’s there’s no need.. Lets just go back to 640 * 480 cuz that’s good enuff.
            Correct me if I’m wrong???

          • Kev

            Wow the entire point of my post blew right over your head it seems. In fact you are greatly reinforcing my point. The OP assertion you MUST have a top of the line year 2020 video card to push a nextgen vr hmd is completely disproven by mobile VR, PSVR and more. The absolutely highest shadow, antialiasing, texture sizes, supersampling etc.. is largely what causes these requirements to seem so high.

            I never said resolution means nothing at any time in fact I think it is extremely important. Merely that since it is possible for a phone with a tiny capability to push a high resolution at a static 96 degrees fov shows us what is possible with current hardware (which is 40+ times as fast).

            I too want great new video card capability and was not arguing against that – merely that existing tech can and should drive nextgen VR. This stuff that nextgen VR should not exist until some hypothetical graphics tech is released is just silly.

          • Jerald Doerr

            I might have missed your point a little bit but you also missed mine.. VR on my S8 has nothing… Apsalotly nothing BUT a sharper looking screen compared to my Vive.. The problem with the vive is the vive screen and optics.. Not the video cards.

          • Kev

            You are still totally missing it and arguing for my point.

          • Jerald Doerr

            Ok cool.. Sorry, I’m not understanding what you’re trying to say but if I’m arguing for your point than cool.

      • care package

        That’s because GPUs have their work cut out for them. It isn’t just about pixel pushing. If you compromise in one area, you gain in another. PSVR is barely strong enough to run the same games we see on PC, just with lots of compromises. Cell phone VR for the most part has it’s own non-taxing software. I don’t even call cell phone VR actual VR. More like a taste of VR.

  • superdonkey

    wheres the rift pro

    • Mei Ling

      You got the rift go bro.

  • oompah

    hope its affordable

  • Nika

    i’d say include the adapter with the next vive