Pimax 5K+ spotted after a 16 month hiberation.... First impressions

[anton_Chez]

Well, it's here. The Pimax 5K+ headset I backed on Kickstarter in October 2017 has finally made it from the depths of hell and everywhere else in between to my house in Australia. What a ride it's been.

To start, the box is fairly nice, nothing too fancy but definitely of Rift quality, nothing flimsy or cheap. The smell is actually like a brand new paid of shoes! I'd say that's the padding. Anyway who cares about the box, hey?

Upon fitting the strap, I was horrified at the comfort. Only after I messed around with it a little bit did I feel I could actually make it work. It's not as intuitive as the Rift but it's workable for me at least. One thing that's immediately struck me is I've nearly got my nose poking through the lenses from the inside out. My face is literally ON the lenses. We are going to have to order custom cushions. It's insane that they've left this unaddressed. I think additional face cushions are a stretch goal reward but I've not see them being any different to the standard one. We need thicker pads, Pimax. I have a small face and a not so overly large nose and I'm struggling. If it turns out my IPD is able to have the lenses moved to the outside of the headset I might just get away with it.

The strap does tighten on your face pretty well. I did not expect that based on other feedback. It's not ski mask type like the Rift but it does have the ability to stick to my face and feel pressure so there's some modular possibilities there especially for larger faces that won't need to tighten the straps as much. Between the side and top strap you should be able to get the HMD sitting nice and flat on your face without any tilting at least while sitting down.

I've yet to power it on so I'll go and do that now. One thing you'll notice is you need an additional power point for this. It comes with an external power source that plugs into the PC side of the cable. It isn't recognised by the PC unless you power it on.

 

[Tim Palmgren]

Sounds like the bug has been patched out so I am tapping my feet waiting for work to end so that I can get onto that sweet Reiza pack as well . I am generally running the Pimax at 90HZ Med FOV and 1.0 in Pitool and between 60-80% in SteamVR depending on Car / Track combo which is working for me. I have never felt that the smoothing was better than just running at 90hz and as long as fps stays over 70ish it still feels reasonably smooth.

 

[anton_Chez]

Your thoughts echo my own almost exactly Tim. Looking forward to testing out the patch later on.

 

[RobertR1]

New software update. Game profiles finally.

Side note: ran 170% SS with pitools at 1.0 and normal fov. AC. Image quality was great. Very clean. Could feel the lack of fov. Seeing the black edges of the screen in my peripherals. Still prefer the larger fov but less clean image.

 

[anton_Chez]

Just for comparison's sake Rob, how many pixels was that setup? SteamVR doesn't do a great job of giving comparable settings as each component can affect the %. Although with the same headset, the only thing that should change is the recommended value depending on video card. PiTool 1.0 should give the same custom resolution based on the slider for multiple users.

I do it the Steve D way 1.75 PiTool, 100% custom res in Steam VR and then slide the per app sliders for each game down to around 24%. I know it sounds like witchcraft, but the image is not any worse and people have said (placebo probably) that PiTool being set high gives a slightly crisper image with the same amount of pixels rendered.

To be honest I think as long as the res is the same, the image is the same. But who knows.

 

[rikirk]

Yesterday I messed around with ACC for a while and I was able to get a 55-60 FPS with Pitool at 1.0 and using 76% with fpsVR on a full AI grid at SPA...

 

[anton_Chez]

Ill paste a post I made in Discord here so that non SFX-100 users can try what I've found out:

So, further to my post over in the ACC channel, I've got some things to share with fellow VR users wanting to get the most out of their limited ACC VR experience. I'll list a few things and we can discuss later on:

1) Post processing (as it is in AC regular) is a KILLER of fps. At least 10 frames lost going from low to medium setting. Equally, this gives the most notable difference in image, anything above medium is trivial at best and with a minor increase in GPU usage to match. I now run LOW post processing, and I've been able to counter the loss of image quality (this is debatable, as it does come down to personal preference) with the contrast and exposure settings in the lower part of the graphics menu.

2) A lot of the settings see a major drop in frames going from low to medium, and then very minimal drops from medium to high and then high to epic. Point being is that if you're running anything on medium settings,. you're almost better off just maxing out to Epic since you're already paying the price by not being on low.

3) The SteamVR SS settings for this game are weird. I can go as low as 3M pixels per eye, allowing me to reach 90hz (!) on my Pimax with the Small FOV, while maintaining a pretty good overall image. The numbers in the dash seem to get slightly blurry at this level of pixels, but out on track things still look very good to me. You can go sharper and indeed the image scales pretty well with pixels vs sharpness, but we cannot afford that with this title and thus it's a great thing that we don't end up with non super sampled Rift levels of image quality at the 3M pixels per eye level.

4) Motion smoothing in this title works probably the best I've seen out of all the other titles. Which is great if you wanted to run that higher SS level and still have a smooth image. 45hz recommended as a minimum, as I always have said the 72hz and 64hz smoothed options on Pimax are too low to make smoothing effective. You get eye strain and can tell that there just isn't enough real frames being generated to be comfortable. For sim racing, anyway.

Now all of this was testing with a solo car, on cloudy settings on a dry track. My theory is if I can hit 90hz like this with an acceptable image, I have enough leeway with hz options and MAYBE using smoothing if I wanted a better image via increased SS value, for when there are other cars on track and weather conditions. I can afford for those things to cost me 30% of the frames and still come away with an unsmoothed 64hz refresh. However, through my experience Saturday night, I noticed not much different in the way of cars on track in terms of performance. It seems that ACC is just a dog of a title to run period, while adding weather and cars doesn't seem to hit performance too much than it already is just by actually running, I might be wrong and further experiences might change my mind, but this is what I have observed through my time with it.

 

[rikirk]

Yes, in fact I am running LOW post processing and shadow (cars are floating like on Mario kart), but I am able to keep an average of 59 FPS on Normal view and 72Hz. This is at SPA with 20 visible cars proving that i4790 is enough and all the weight is on the GPU. Mirrors at Low, 20m

I tried VSync at 64Hz, but does not make any difference. Crossing fingers they give us a patch before they take their summer vacation... With the new release of rF2 I have a solid full 70 FPS