Is VR dead?

[Deleted member 197115]

30 minutes to take it out of the box? Talk about milking the time.

Now let us watch you walk over to your computer in slow motion to plug it in.

Unboxing videos is what gets most hits on Youtube. Don't ask why.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I guess I need to make a 4 hour video showing me painting a surface for about 1-2 minutes and then 3hrs and 58 minutes of watching the paint drying...

 

[gamma123152]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1650104671216836610

So it will probably take while before the Index 2/Deckard or whatever it's called is going to be released...

 

[blekenbleu]

painting a surface for about 1-2 minutes

Capture that part at high frame rate, for replay in slo mo.

 

[RCHeliguy]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1650104671216836610

So it will probably take while before the Index 2/Deckard or whatever it's called is going to be released...

No doubt. It certainly won't be this year. We will be lucky to get anything official saying what is coming.

 

[RCHeliguy]

This is an interesting review in that it's the end of April and this is still a Beta non-production headset. Any guesses on when it will be non-beta and shipping?

He said it was "mostly usable" but drivers needs work and the controller tracking needs work, the audio has no bass to speak of. FOV was meh. He said they working on the audio still.

He did say it was more comfortable than his 8KX and he was glowing about the color and clarity. He also said it was a similar weight to the 8KX. He generally liked local dimming, but said it had blooming and and he wasn't sure everyone would like it, but it did go very black.

So they appear to have the visuals working well, but for some titles the Crystal was still unplayable and he has a 4090.

In titles like Half Life Alyx which is extremely efficient he had to turn off AA to get a good frame rate. With the Aero I have everything in Alyx maxed out including AA with no issues. So it appears the current performance of the Crystal is lagging behind quite a bit. He said Resident Evil was unplayable. Below is with HAM enabled with FFR which he said dropped the vertical resolution to 94 and it helped. His earlier test without FFR and HAM was solid red.

I've not tried Resident Evil with the Aero for comparison, but I found a post on the Varjo forum calling RE 8 "Freaking Amazing". I just asked what kind of frame rates he was getting.

Notice the "other batteries" below the controller batteries.

 

[BrunoBæ]

Taken from the video the clarity and sharpness does look stellar.
BUT I guess this video does not show how it looks through the VR lenses.

 

[gamma123152]

This is an interesting review in that it's the end of April and this is still a Beta non-production headset. Any guesses on when it will be non-beta and shipping?

He said it was "mostly usable" but drivers needs work and the controller tracking needs work, the audio has no bass to speak of. FOV was meh. He said they working on the audio still.

He did say it was more comfortable than his 8KX and he was glowing about the color and clarity. He also said it was a similar weight to the 8KX. He generally liked local dimming, but said it had blooming and and he wasn't sure everyone would like it, but it did go very black.

So they appear to have the visuals working well, but for some titles the Crystal was still unplayable and he has a 4090.

View attachment 658125

In titles like Half Life Alyx which is extremely efficient he had to turn off AA to get a good frame rate. With the Aero I have everything in Alyx maxed out including AA with no issues. So it appears the current performance of the Crystal is lagging behind quite a bit. He said Resident Evil was unplayable. Below is with HAM enabled with FFR which he said dropped the vertical resolution to 94 and it helped. His earlier test without FFR and HAM was solid red.

I've not tried Resident Evil with the Aero for comparison, but I found a post on the Varjo forum calling RE 8 "Freaking Amazing". I just asked what kind of frame rates he was getting.

Notice the "other batteries" below the controller batteries.
View attachment 658139

The performance looks horrible. The image quality is probably amazing at 100% render resolution(except for the "blooming" which could be an issue) but it needs a 5090. The Aero seems to have the advantage when it comes to fps/render resolution balance in terms of performance.

I'm wondering how the Crystal will look and perform at 70-80% render resolution+MSAA in the sim racing titles(AMS2/DR2/ACC/RF2 etc.) with foveated rendering enabled. My Crystal isn't shipped yet so I'm not able to test it anytime soon but when I got it then I will report it here for sure.

 

[RCHeliguy]

More reviews are coming...

"Hey guys, sorry for being so silent. I haven't had any time today unfortunately... I did try and make a video, it worked for like, 30 seconds and just as I was about to load into Microsoft Flight Simulator.. The battery died. Aghhhh lol I have A LOT to say about this headset, so I'll try my best to get my first video out asap. Maybe tomorrow evening if I get chance. Work is pretty crazy this week and unfortunately I'm not a full time YouTuber so this just come first. More soon. Cheers all."

"Build quality nowhere near Aero levels, or even Quest 2 for that matter (in some areas). FOV and image quality, well... Let's just wait for the video"

 

[RCHeliguy]

I did get a reply from the guy hooting about how great RE8 was with the Aero. I guess that highlights a pretty large discrepency.

"I got everything maxed in game. Steam SS 100%. 35ppd. 90fps locked. 4ms frametimes on cpu and 8ms on gpu. Not much headroom, lol. 13900/4090"

Hopefully Pimax will optimize their driver software between now and when they ship the most people.

 

[gamma123152]

I did get a reply from the guy hooting about how great RE8 was with the Aero. I guess that highlights a pretty large discrepency.

"I got everything maxed in game. Steam SS 100%. 35ppd. 90fps locked. 4ms frametimes on cpu and 8ms on gpu. Not much headroom, lol. 13900/4090"

Hopefully Pimax will optimize their driver software between now and when they ship the most people.

Got a other comment of this Omniwhatever guy: "First impressions of 100% to 70% difference were shockingly minor in terms of clarity impact though. But huge performance gain.

HOWEVER, that said, at least from what I briefly tested the Crystal with no AA still had less shimmer to it than my 8KX did with medium to high levels of AA, depending on the game."

We are not sure how 70% of the Crystal looks and performs compared to 100% of the Aero "through the lenses". Maybe the Crystal at 70% render resolution looks equally sharp in terms of PPD as 100% of the Aero. The COO of Pimax told me that it's a bug(the insanely high render resolution of 100%) and that the Crystal has to run lower in terms of render resolution to achieve 35PPD. But he doesn't say at what percentage exactly and he didn't come with any proof about it. So it's completely unclear what the facts are at this moment... but this sounds at least more promising then his first impression.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I assume that performance will improve with time. That seems to be a consistent trend with all hesdsets including historical Pimax headsets.

As always the question will only be how much better will it get and how quickly will it get there?

When I first set up my Aero, I wasn't running everything at 35ppd.

The Aero was released before any GPU could drive it well and the it wasn't until recently that the software caught up.

At least in the case of the Aero having native DFR support is a massive improvement. OpenXR DFR support helps, but not nearly as much. Current estimates are < 10% improvement.

Unfortunately only DCS added native support and that still required an OpenXR hook to use. That also may be a unicorn since Varjo works heavily with military flight simulation.

We still don't have a standard hook for DFR. Hopefully that will change with time.

So how quickly the Pimax performance improves will depend on how well they document their SDK so people can add DFR support to OpenXR. But currently only expect a 10% or less performance jump.

So most of this rests in Pimax's control with their driving software.

 

[blekenbleu]

I assume that performance will improve with time.

Beta users may have software compiled with debug enabled and optimizations off, to help sort reported bugs.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I wonder if Valve will push to add DFR support directly into the OpenXR specification...

I mean once they have it of course....

 

[RCHeliguy]

Hmmm...

"first impressions. <F-bomb>! But there are some serious BUTS... I best get this edited. It's a raw video folks. But it's going out regardless."

I'm guessing that to mean, beautiful visuals but hard to live with. Find out soon. I tend to consider this guy pretty straight about stuff. He is a real simmer and he has spent time to make the G2, 8KX, and Aero work as well as they can.

Edit: video will be up in about 6 hours.
" have A LOT to say about this headset and it's certainly a roller-coaster of emotions (put it that way) ... "

 

[RCHeliguy]

People seeing a trailer for a game thought it looked so realistic that they didn't believe it was rendered and thought it was a camera recording.

With AI now starting to generate video we may have another issue in terms of what we consider acceptable. What if an AI generates a fictitious but realistic snuff film? What if an AI can generate a video of any fetish/kink/perversion? If no one was harmed, how far can this go...

The other part of this video talks about how META buys up top selling VR studios that never produce another title and how that may be hurting VR gaming.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Looks like the Crystal has excellent visuals and the extra vertical FOV is very noticeable even if the horizontal is similar to the Aero. He sounds blown away by the visuals ( color, sharpness, local dimming blacks ) The weight didn't seem to bother him.

He was getting 25fps with the Crystal in MSFS vs 45fps with 2:1 reprojection with the Aero. Turning AA completely off didn't have any impact on the frame rate. That's with a 13900K / 4090.

He did not fly with motion at this point. He left out a lot of the off video futzing and frustration and made a few comments about that. He thought the build quality was not impressive for the cost. He had concerns about the lens motors sounding weak. he said the instrap audio is garbage, but the mic is fantastic however the software was causing lots of crackling. ( drivers? )

Basically it looks like the crystal has some impressive bits in it, but as a complete solution isn't fully cooked. We will continue to wait for an actual production copy with full release software before we will actually know how it will work in the real world.

He does say he will be living with the Crystal for a while, will try to work out what he can and give an impression after logging some hours in it.

.

 

[gamma123152]

Looks like the Crystal has excellent visuals and the extra vertical FOV is very noticeable even if the horizontal is similar to the Aero. He sounds blown away by the visuals ( color, sharpness, local dimming blacks ) The weight didn't seem to bother him.

He was getting 25fps with the Crystal in MSFS vs 45fps with 2:1 reprojection with the Aero. Turning AA completely off didn't have any impact on the frame rate. That's with a 13900K / 4090.

He did not fly with motion at this point. He left out a lot off off video futzing and frustration and made a few comments about that. He thought the build quality was not impressive for the cost. He had concerns about the lens motors sounding weak. he said the instrap audio is garbage, but the mic is fantastic however the software was causing lots of crackling. ( drivers? )

Basically it looks like the crystal has some impressive bits in it, but as a complete solution isn't fully cooked. We will continue to wait for an actual production copy with full release software before we will actually know how it will work in the real world.

He does say he will be living with the Crystal for a while, will try to work out what he can and give an impression after logging some hours in it.

.

Seems, if I understand him correctly, that the resolution looks also much higher in the display than the Aero at 39PPD setting. And that's probably the cause of the much lower framerate, because it simply renders with a lot of supersampling included. Great to hear from him about the lack of distortion, the lack of chromatic aberration, the lack of color shift, the impressive (especially vertical) fov, the impressive blacks, colors and stereo overlap etc.etc. I honestly already expected a quite flimsy build quality so that's not really a surprise... But overal the guy seems to be pretty impressed by it. But on the other side: it doesn't seem te be realistic to run it at full capability in sim racing because it's simply to demanding with the 4090. But if I understood him correctly, also with scaled down resolution it was still sharper then the Aero so it can be used now hopefully with scaled down resolution and in the future with a 4090TI/5090 in its full potential. (I don't expect magic software updates from Pimax, but who knows.. )

 

[RCHeliguy]

I suspect that part of living with it long term will be trying to find the best balance of settings and reducing resolution, may be part of the solution.

Based on his earlier comments, I don't think he was expecting the Crystal to look sharper, but he also lives in MSFS and you can't run in 39fps mode in MSFS, only 35fps. 39fps is reserved for DCS only I'm afraid. I'm not trying to take away in the least from his impressions. From what I've seen from BSB etc.. having additional contrast and richer colors also tends to make everything look sharper. So I suspect some of the improvements he was seeing were because everything in general looked better. ( I actually think that is probably more important )

Fingers crossed that Pimax pulls a rabbit out of a hat before release in terms of performance. The IPD adjustment motors for "most" people will only be setup once, so that may not be a big deal to a large number of people as long as the auto-IPD feature, when that is ready, is disabled after initial setup. Many people were planning to use their own headphones anyway, so the audio solution is a don't care to many.

I'll be curious to see how he manages in terms of getting the right compromises to work with his CPU/GPU. Based on history, he will put in the time to figure out how to make it work as well as he can.

Edit: I really do think this guy will present the first realistic review for simmers. I suspect he will find a way to make it work well enough for MSFS. DCS may be another story. DCS performance with the Aero was basically OK at 28ppd before the big update with native Aero SDK DFR support. Getting better frame rates at 40% higher resolution was all because of that native DFR support and it was a game changer. However DCS was still good enough at 28ppd and if it had more contrast and colors that popped more that would even have looked better.

 

[gamma123152]

I suspect that part of living with it long term will be trying to find the best balance of settings and reducing resolution, may be part of the solution.

Based on his earlier comments, I don't think he was expecting the Crystal to look sharper, but he also lives in MSFS and you can't run in 39fps mode in MSFS, only 35fps. 39fps is reserved for DCS only I'm afraid. I'm not trying to take away in the least from his impressions. From what I've seen from BSB etc.. having additional contrast and richer colors also tends to make everything look sharper. So I suspect some of the improvements he was seeing were because everything in general looked better. ( I actually think that is probably more important )

Fingers crossed that Pimax pulls a rabbit out of a hat before release in terms of performance. The IPD adjustment motors for "most" people will only be setup once, so that may not be a big deal to a large number of people as long as the auto-IPD feature, when that is ready, is disabled after initial setup. Many people were planning to use their own headphones anyway, so the audio solution is a don't care to many.

I'll be curious to see how he manages in terms of getting the right compromises to work with his CPU/GPU. Based on history, he will put in the time to figure out how to make it work as well as he can.

Agree with all of that.

The 3 biggest issues with the Pimax Crystal are: performance, warranty/after sales and software.

The image quality seems to be next level on almost all aspects. Mind blowing/game changer/next generation/insane clarity etc is what I hear from all reviews without exception also compared to the Aero, so it really seems to be the next big thing regarding that. The comfort is okay/even pretty good according to almost all reviews that I've seen now, much better then expected since the weight looked initially quite shocking on paper to most people.

As long as you live in the EU, you get 2 year's warranty by default, still not much but much better than 1. The software will probably improve slightly over time, I expect an WMR/G2 experience with that(had a rough start but is good now in the end).

But i expect that Pimax won't be able to solve the performance issues, and that will lead to a lot of frustration. Because it's sold for its display sharpness/clarity/resolution, which is probably the biggest part of the whole experience, but there is no hardware to generate the FPS due to their terribly demanding barrel distortion profile. The 4090TI is not close yet, so the 5090 is FAR away. So it will take a long while before the biggest issue is solved but there is probably a way to get it OK looking with the 4090, with still much better visuals then my G2, I just hope that it won't be less sharp... We'll see.