Seen quite a few posts lately from people who are looking to get a new HMD specifically for Elite so i figured it would be good to have a consolidated thread where we can put forward our experiences with the wide variety of headsets now available to help people make an informed choice.
I currently own a Rift, a Vive Pro and a 5k+ so will detail the relevant info here. Would be good to get input from people who own the WMR sets and also other Vive Pro/Pimax users.
Rift
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Positive
OG Vive Pro (Fresnels)
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Positive
Modded Vive Pro (GearVR aspherics)
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Positive
Pimax 5k+
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Positive
Like i said it would be good to get more data from the WMR guys and consensus from other Vive Pro/Pimax users. This is after all subjective in a lot of assessments so the more signal we get the better.
I currently own a Rift, a Vive Pro and a 5k+ so will detail the relevant info here. Would be good to get input from people who own the WMR sets and also other Vive Pro/Pimax users.
Rift
===
Positive
- Affordable complete out of the box VR solution
- Lightweight, pretty comfy
- Performance, enables even potato spec rigs to hit 90fps and Async Spacewarp is best in class.
- God rays - plenty of light beams flying around although can be tuned out.
- Color/contrast/brightness/saturation are not impressive. Showing her age.
OG Vive Pro (Fresnels)
==================
Positive
- Complete out of the box VR solution
- Excellent ergonomics, very comfy.
- HUD text is very legible.
- Excellent color/saturation/brightness/contrast.
- OLED so zero backlight bleed. Black is black.
- Performance is demanding. Need a 2080Ti to achieve a solid 90fps at 100% SteamVR Application resolution.
- Expensive, i paid 1300 quid in the UK.
- Very small sweet spot, off axis definition is heavily blurred.
- God Rays. Insane, makes Elite hard to enjoy they are so obnoxious.
- Occasionally visible mura correction pattern (grey haze).
- Medium impact screen door effect.
Modded Vive Pro (GearVR aspherics)
==============================
Positive
- God rays - Zero, they are gone, completely.
- Transparency - crystal clear optics because there is zero stray light.
- Image is beautifully sharp from edge to edge. Sweet spot is the entire FOV.
- Field of view is reduced to 100 degrees.
- Distortion profile might need to be adjusted from the factory firmware profile. Scale can appear off.
- Open heart surgery is required to replace lenses. Its actually quite trivial but prising out the fresnels with a knife is a bit daunting at first.
Pimax 5k+
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Positive
- HUD text is perfectly legible.
- Field of View - Its huge, like natural field of vision huge. Takes a while to sink in.
- God Rays - big improvement on the OG Vive Pro/Rift/Vive. There is stray light on axis though with high contrast scenery.
- Color/saturation/brightness/contrast are good.
- LCD so no mura correction pattern visible.
- Low impact screen door effect.
- PiTools has a lot of panel/viewplane options including 64/72/90hz refresh rates, Small/Normal/Large FOV, Brainwarp/FFR, Low/Normal/High brightness.
- Performance is terrible because you need to have parallel projection compatibility enabled in PiTool. This means a colossal render target. 2080Ti struggles even in Small FOV.
- Not an out of the box VR solution, needs Vive lighthouses.
- Needs a Vive DAS/3D printed adapters/new face gasket to get it positioned properly (and comfortably) so the distortion profile works. Out of the box it sucks.
- LCD so you get a lot of backlight bleed. Black is not black.
- Brainwarp is not as good as Async Spacewarp, not even close.
- Defective units appear to be common and users have reported pretty poor after sales support.
Like i said it would be good to get more data from the WMR guys and consensus from other Vive Pro/Pimax users. This is after all subjective in a lot of assessments so the more signal we get the better.
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