Starlight, are describing the Pimax setup or Vive setup in your Glorious buggy mess description? This is kinda what is putting me off ordering the Pimax now, having been using the rift for 2 years now, i have done away with all that messing around, which for me was a complete nightmare in the start up, Now a days, I just start VA, Rift and ED and i am in game in VR.
PiMAX 8K VR
- Thread starter VR Mr Teatime
- Start date
Starlight, are describing the Pimax setup or Vive setup in your Glorious buggy mess description? This is kinda what is putting me off ordering the Pimax now, having been using the rift for 2 years now, i have done away with all that messing around, which for me was a complete nightmare in the start up, Now a days, I just start VA, Rift and ED and i am in game in VR.
Still sounds better than the first six months of using the vive.
Which would almost on a three hour basis completely bork its calibration.
Bluetooth never worked.
Base stations auto shutoff\turn on NEVER worked, particularily the turning on part, and enabling it doubled the amount of aforementioned problems.
I simply put the lighthouses on RF controlled cutoffs.
Still I would mostly get an hour or less of actual VR time before calibration had a stroke and I was stuck in the floor.
And it was back to running the whole recalibration rigamarole.
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Actually both. Pimax (while it has some serious advantages over Vive) is still like Vive was in it's infancy. The tracking on boot up is often iffy, you restart the hmd, sometimes two-three times, and it then works till the headset is turned off. The other minute you pick it up and it works flawlessly "out of the box". Some titles (Elite and DCS included) require you to enable the so-called compatibility mode called "compatible with parallel projections" which impacts the performance. But you get much larger sweetspot and fov which is incomparable with Vive or Rift (as in, way better). While it SOUNDS complicated, it really isn't. It's just... annoying, beta tech. And Rift has it's own share of issues from what I read but I don't have one so I cannot pinpoint the specifics.
Let me put it this way. If you have money and you want fov and better sweetspot, the pimax 5k+ is a nice headset. It requires beefy pc though or you will face reprojection. It has some algorithms to deal with that but no support for SteamVR motion smoothing yet (Valve's ASW/ATW/whatchamacallit). There is almost no SDE in my opinion, things are crisp in much larger radius. I would need to compare to vive pro however to have a full picture of things. After pimax, wearing a vive (or a rift for that matter) feels like looking through toiler paper roll. Seriously, I am not kidding. The fov is SO SMALL. But the feeling subsides in a moment, and unless you're playing Onward competitively I myself don't see the point in such fov (especially that it is computationally expensive). You can always wait for a better product, it's not like Pimax will ship preorders any time soon, but they are ramping the production. One thing to say though is that colours on 5k+ do look washed out especially when compared with Vive/Oculus during A-B testing (both sport OLED panels while Pimax has LCD). It's gen1.5 in my opinion. Better, but not "killer". And I myself am holding with preorder because "Valve hmd" leak. Gaben save us from HTC and their Vive Pro Eye super "bullpoo professional" overpriced edition.
Yeah that's why there was a third party dashboard added (openvr advanced settings) which allowed you to do "Floor fix". But TBH I cannot remember when was the last time I used it. I think it was fixed long ago. But to be fair, currently with vive there are no problems with bluetooth driver (unless I start installing some rift software, some pimax software etc), tracking is stable 99% of the time (there are some drifts on controllers if one of lighthouses is obscured by you), room setup didn't bork even with pimax (and even if it did, I have profiles saved in OpenVR advanced settings I can apply).
So, yeah. OG Vive seems pretty stable now. Some minor annoyances but it keeps getting better and better (or I am getting more and more accustomed to this "beta stuff", hard to tell tbh).
Wonderful news everyone with pimax headsets!
"Moving world" issue during gameplay and finnicky tracking at startup all working great now!
The problem was the tracking firmware in the headset. Pitool cannot update that specifically and only way if you have these issues is thru pimax supprt. Which I might add was the best support I ever had in my life. It was 1am in China and thay still helped me. They had to connect to my PC remotely and did the tracking firmware uodate like that.
I undertsand now why some people don't see the issue and others do / It depends if the the headset has the fixed firmware or not.
So if anybody has these tracking issues they told me to just contact support and they will arrange to connect to your headset remotely and do the update.
Super impressed now with my pimax5k+ headset and pimax support.
By the way they also told me it is better to leave the single basestation to B and not A.
Ok now back to exploring in ED!
"Moving world" issue during gameplay and finnicky tracking at startup all working great now!
The problem was the tracking firmware in the headset. Pitool cannot update that specifically and only way if you have these issues is thru pimax supprt. Which I might add was the best support I ever had in my life. It was 1am in China and thay still helped me. They had to connect to my PC remotely and did the tracking firmware uodate like that.
I undertsand now why some people don't see the issue and others do / It depends if the the headset has the fixed firmware or not.
So if anybody has these tracking issues they told me to just contact support and they will arrange to connect to your headset remotely and do the update.
Super impressed now with my pimax5k+ headset and pimax support.
By the way they also told me it is better to leave the single basestation to B and not A.
Ok now back to exploring in ED!
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![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
its easy to forget but my 1st few months of rift and more accurately oculus touch ownership was also full of issues. (actually my rift without touch WAS pretty much flawless but i suppose those issues were ironed out during my rift DK2 ownership years)
its all great now though!. A few early issues with the headset is nothing to worry too much about imo. I do have my reservations about some parts of the pimax hmds but i would have been stunned if it didnt have some teething issues esp with software
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I had much less issues with getting the rift working than those first few months of the vive.
But steamVR seemed a lot more polished last time I gave it a go, and that was almost a year or so ago.
But the rift and the Camera's is always a chore, and I installed the inateck card before I even booted this computer.
But just changing something on USB's could trigger another bout of one of the cameras introducing tracking wobble or dropping out entirely.
Just last week I upgraded my microphone, and naturally even though that was put on a completely seperate USB 2 port I got tracking warnings on one of the camera's.
Anyhoo, I'm suspsecting the 5k+ to be on it's way.
When I was looking at buying VR I ran into something similar... I tried the Samsung Odyssey and the Rift and eventually went with the Rift as WMR was too new. I felt the Odyssey was better overall but just couldn't pull the trigger and the Rift was on sale making it way cheaper so I went with the proven tech.
But, before I pulled the trigger I decided to try the Lenovo... The sweet spot was awful, the blacks not as deep... But then I played a couple of short games and all that faded away. You just didn't notice while playing the game. Yes, I see the edges on the Rift, like wearing a scuba mask, but for the most part you don't concentrate.
Don't get me wrong, I would love a wider field of view, higher resolution, ect… But I enjoy the game much more because of the VR and I'll take that for now.
The blacks are not so black unfortunatley. This is only noticeable in dark games like elite. Colors are fine. To help with the blacks set the brightness option in Pitool to "low" and in-game elite set the gamma to full. This improves things quite a bit although still not like the blacks you get with oled screens. But good enough for rocknroll!
Having said that I wish we had some contrast adjustment in ED or in Pimax Pitool
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Finally got my 5K+!!! Launching Elite now, let the tinkering begin!!
UPDATE: Setup was a breeze, got everything working in less than 10 minutes. I've read of people having to manually delete a bunch of files and restart their PC multiple times, guess I'm lucky..?
You really MUST take a look at the SS settings inside Steam VR - I had it set up at 132%, which equates to about 174% of Pimax's resolution - way more than my 1080ti can handle. If something looks screwy, closing the game/app/Steam VR and power-cycling the headset also helps.
UPDATE: Setup was a breeze, got everything working in less than 10 minutes. I've read of people having to manually delete a bunch of files and restart their PC multiple times, guess I'm lucky..?
You really MUST take a look at the SS settings inside Steam VR - I had it set up at 132%, which equates to about 174% of Pimax's resolution - way more than my 1080ti can handle. If something looks screwy, closing the game/app/Steam VR and power-cycling the headset also helps.
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Well, let us know how you think it compares to the Vive then...
Is there anyone in London with a Pimax who is willing to let me come over and have a look ?.
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<HDRNode_Reference>
<PrototypeLightingBalancesEnabled>1</PrototypeLightingBalancesEnabled>
<UseCompute>1</UseCompute>
<ToneMapType>0</ToneMapType>
<DisplayLumScale>164.000000</DisplayLumScale>
<HistogramSampleWidth>60.500000</HistogramSampleWidth>
<ExposureThreshold>1.000000</ExposureThreshold>
<Percentiles>0.6,0.540000,0.9000</Percentiles>
<ExposureType>0</ExposureType>
<HistogramMode>2</HistogramMode>
<ManualExposure>-0.500000</ManualExposure>
<GlareCompensation>1.3333</GlareCompensation>
<ShoulderStrength>0.1575</ShoulderStrength>
<LinearStrength>0.5080</LinearStrength>
<LinearAngle>0.1040</LinearAngle>
<ToeStrength>0.2300</ToeStrength>
<ToeNumerator>0.0200</ToeNumerator>
<ToeDenominator>0.2050</ToeDenominator>
<LinearWhite>11.2000</LinearWhite>
<ACES_A>2.51</ACES_A>
<ACES_B>0.03</ACES_B>
<ACES_C>2.43</ACES_C>
<ACES_D>0.59</ACES_D>
<ACES_E>0.14</ACES_E>
</HDRNode_Reference>
(IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are going to fiddle around with the graphics settings use a custom Graphics Configuration Override XML file
Tested and it helps a lot , black is almost perfect now after appying this to your graphic config file !
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My experience was a bit different. I unplugged my Vive, plugged in the Pimax, installed the software and started playing. Sometimes between games I restart SteamVR, but I do that anyway in VR games to clean out memory leaks and the like.But yeah, Pimax was always marketed as an "Enthusiast" HMD... So, I suppose how hiccups are dealt with is subjective. I remember when I first got into VR with Vive/Rift there was a bit of testing settings to get things right
I know it's bordering on itvoodoo and I barely believe I am writting this but I suppose pimax is better prepared for "first setup" than subsequential setups. My friends who is the 5k owner set it up without a problem, I had to pair controllers everytime I switched headset and almost everytime had tracking issues on boot up. While my friend has never had to pair vive controllers again for example.
As for "cleaning memory" I am used to restart my system anyway. W10, boots up in 13s, no hassle whatsoever. And helps keeping the system resource-hog free, because even a firefox running in the background can gobble mem and resources on my old system.
All right! After fiddling with the thing for a couple of days, my first-hand impressions are as follows:
PROs:
-Resolution: oh my, everything is so much sharper! Which should not surprise me as much, given that the 5K+ has about 3 times the pixels of the Vive - even with a double-the-size FoV, the area with the most detail is always in the center and it shows. I never tried the Vive Pro, but I've read it's comparable;
-FoV: need I say more? This is the "main course" - I can easily keep track of my surroundings with the corner of the eye, and even read text without directly looking at it;
-Lenses quality: No more God rays and much less chromatic aberration when not looking at the center of the lenses;
-Significantly lighter: it's more comfortable in general, except for the lack of the DAS (that can however be easily adapted, I already ordered the 3D-printed pieces to do so).
Cons:
-the colors suck. Anyone that played on a WMR will relate, especially when looking at stars in space the contrast - or lack thereof - is striking. You don't notice much in any other circumstances though, but it will be there at every witchspace jump;
-the black levels are not too bad honestly, and I tried with both low/med/high luminosity in the new PiTool version. Your mileage may vary, but I was expecting something much much worse - still not as good as Vive of course;
-edge distortion is always present for me, at least until I will be able to increase the distance between my head and the mask. This does not bother me too much, but it does break immersion every single time I rotate my head in the cockpit. Immersion itself is no longer a deal breaker for me, but it may be for the average consumer that expects a seamless, fully belieavable virtual reality.
All in all, the pros significantly outweigh the cons anyway: the Pimax 5K+ is a massive upgrade over the Vive and Vive Pro, especially for games where colors / black level don't matter as much as in ED. It is, however, not yet mature for mass adoption, as the average user is probably not willing to go through all the fiddling we enthusiasts do in order to get the optimal experience.
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Additonally, I will be running detailed benchmarks this weekend.
I have a 6700K @4.5Ghz, 16 GB of RAM and a 1080ti (not OC for the purpose of benchmarking); I plan on testing different combinations of detail level, headset FoV and supersampling/downsampling and report on the performance.
I will run a ~1 minute test in each of the following environments:
I have a 6700K @4.5Ghz, 16 GB of RAM and a 1080ti (not OC for the purpose of benchmarking); I plan on testing different combinations of detail level, headset FoV and supersampling/downsampling and report on the performance.
I will run a ~1 minute test in each of the following environments:
- space station;
- supercruise;
- nav beacon in normal space;
- planetside.
Thanks for that!
So it sounds like it a nice step forwards for the tech then at least in a number of important areas. It will be interesting to see what Oculus for example come back with then to compete...
It is indeed. And Oculus won't do anything as an answer to the Pimax - Facebook doesn't care about enthusiast-level hardware and it only aims at mobile social VR for its endgame.