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The Pimax 8K MEGA Thread - First Reviews Now live

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
I've been on the fence about this and have some reservations about build quality and performance under heavy load, but for me the positives outweigh the negatives and I guess many others feel the same way. Now I never backed the Rift during its Kickstarter campaign (unfortunately) but I assume the feeling is similar where you're helping to forge the future of VR in some way, or at least like to think so. I consider myself an enthusiast and not the majority, therefore what's another £600 to experience the latest  in VR. Sadly, having Samsung not release the Odyssey here in the UK left me with an itchy wallet finger, a void that needed filling and with GO not releasing until next year either I thought the Pimax 8K will scratch the itch and might just prove to be pretty good too. I'm excited for it.

There is always going to be skepticism and no doubt a number of people will suggest I am backing a paperweight but, that's ok it's fully understandable to have those feelings and that prediction is always a possibility. But... if someone doesn't take the risk and we all play it safe, how can VR move forwards - I guess we've already taken risks with past VR investments in some way or another including with the Rift. I've never claimed any loyalty to anyone having owned The Gear VR (still have that knocking around somewhere) DK2, Vive, Rift, PSVR and come next year Pimax will be added to the list. However, I am interested like many of you agreed in the poll we did here a while back that certain things were important to improve on what we have now and it seems the Pimax 8K is offering some of those things on paper. 

I think once you can look past the silly marketing name (8K) and the hammerhead shark design and focus on what's inside, this HMD offers something many claimed they would like in the past but are not prepared to trust Pimax to deliver. I think a number of people would rather wait for a more established company (like Oculus) to offer a similar experience further down the line. All very understandable. But I am impatient, and whilst I use my Rift quite often I want more of what VR can offer sooner rather than later. 

So, (and the main reason for this post) is come Feb 2018 some point in 2018 I will gladly post impressions and comparisons without hyperbole and answer questions any of you might have. That said, I expect many others at the time will post their impressions also so there should be plenty of opinions going around from various sources.


System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.
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bigmike20vt
Visionary

Iriodus said:


Ultimately, I'd be more excited for a headset that has better FOV and resolution, but to the extent that the increased resolution, FOV, etc., is offset by any High Tech Sorcery (hardware or software) that has been done to improve performance (Foveated Rendering). The ideal upgrade for the Rift, for me, would be said High Tech Sorcery offsetting the improved specifications to the point where you can use the same specifications as the current Rift (More or less). I think that this is a better target to shoot for than making an enthusiast headset that only a Niche Of People³ would buy.



Personally I think you are looking too short term..... the Rift CV2 wont be out for another 12 months..... by this time what is now high end level of performance WILL be cheaper...... whilst i do not expect min cpu to change much i do not think it is reasonable to expect CV2 to aim for a GTX970 level of hmd.  (possibly GTX1070 though?)

2ndly CV2 is going to be out for at least 2 years, maybe 3 before being replaced... again, even if it is  considered high end at launch, over the life of the CV2 it will fall into the main stream.

finally....... even if the resolution of the panel is higher, i am not expecting people to be forced to output to the native res. IF you have a CV2 but your PC is a little weak, then i would imagine you will be able to output to your HMD at CV1 resolution.

The thought of foveated rendering is nice, don’t get me wrong but at this early stage I do not want oculus to hold back too much just to allow people with a (relative) potato be able to game on it.... oculus are servicing that market with go, and Santa Cruz. There is a happy medium of course, i dont expect oculus to demand we all buy the newest titan.
Fiat Coupe, gone. 350Z gone. Dirty nappies, no sleep & practical transport incoming. Thank goodness for VR 🙂

Anonymous
Not applicable



Iriodus said:


Ultimately, I'd be more excited for a headset that has better FOV and resolution, but to the extent that the increased resolution, FOV, etc., is offset by any High Tech Sorcery (hardware or software) that has been done to improve performance (Foveated Rendering). The ideal upgrade for the Rift, for me, would be said High Tech Sorcery offsetting the improved specifications to the point where you can use the same specifications as the current Rift (More or less). I think that this is a better target to shoot for than making an enthusiast headset that only a Niche Of People³ would buy.



Personally I think you are looking too short term..... the Rift CV2 wont be out for another 12 months..... by this time what is now high end level of performance WILL be cheaper...... whilst i do not expect min cpu to change much i do not think it is reasonable to expect CV2 to aim for a GTX970 level of hmd.  (possibly GTX1070 though?)

2ndly CV2 is going to be out for at least 2 years, maybe 3 before being replaced... again, even if it is  considered high end at launch, over the life of the CV2 it will fall into the main stream.

finally....... even if the resolution of the panel is higher, i am not expecting people to be forced to output to the native res. IF you have a CV2 but your PC is a little weak, then i would imagine you will be able to output to your HMD at CV1 resolution.

The thought of foveated rendering is nice, don’t get me wrong but at this early stage I do not want oculus to hold back too much just to allow people with a (relative) potato be able to game on it.... oculus are servicing that market with go, and Santa Cruz. There is a happy medium of course, i dont expect oculus to demand we all buy the newest titan.



If Oculus manage to get foveated rendering sorted out the current Recommended Spec VR Ready PC should be enough to run the CV2 as the new Minimum Spec VR Ready PC I reckon.

kojack
MVP
MVP

pyroth309 said:

My concern with the Pimax, and maybe someone here who is more familiar on the Dev side knows, is how many games really allow a FoV past 110? Most games cap between 90-110 and don't allow wider for competitive reasons. Seems to me like stretching a 110 fov to 180+ would look bad. Is there a solution for that? 


Yep, this can be a concern.
First, stretching is REALLY bad. If you stretch 110 to 180 then nothing is where it should be. Something that is 55 degrees off from the centre in front of you would look like it's really beside you.

Now for games... there's a standard way that 3d engines and gpus render. Probably 99% of all games these days are doing this. With this method, the wider the fov, the lower the image quality on the sides. 180 degrees is impossible. Larger than 180 will render everything wrong. Usually 150 degrees is around the max you can get away with, but even that is really pushing it (the centre loses detail and the sides are stretched)
There's two ways to fight this:
- split the fov into multiple cameras
- use a different rendering technique that doesn't use rectangular projection, like ray tracing.
Ray tracing would be amazing, but it's way slower than normal rendering. It would be the best solution for VR in general though, since you can get it to render based on the true geometry of the lenses and pixel distribution over them.

So the only real solution is multiple cameras. This is what StarVR do with their 200 degree headset. They split each eye into two cameras. That means they need to render the scene 4 times, which is a pretty big hit.

On the Pimax, each eye covers around 140 degrees or something (can't remember). So it's pretty close to the point where the sides look garbage due to stretching. Now that sounds fine, but it's both sides of each eye. The peripheral vision is bad, but the area of stereo overlap in the centre of your vision is the overlap of the sides of each eye too! To keep the quality up, developers should split the 140 (or whatever it is) into maybe two 70 degree fovs per eye, or 90/50, etc. This is something that has to be done explicitly by the developer, there'[s no way for steamvr to do that transparently.

Here's a good comparison of typical rectangular projection and non typical (software fisheye in this case) at high fovs:
http://strlen.com/gfxengine/fisheyequake/compare.html

StarVR have been public about the issues, I haven't seen Pimax mention it yet.


Long story short, if a vr api like openvr tells a game to use a high fov, it will probably work, but the result won't be as high quality as if the game itself was designed for high fov.

Author: Oculus Monitor,  Auto Oculus Touch,  Forum Dark Mode, Phantom Touch Remover,  X-Plane Fixer
Hardware: Threadripper 1950x, MSI Gaming Trio 2080TI, Asrock X399 Taich
Headsets: Wrap 1200VR, DK1, DK2, CV1, Rift-S, GearVR, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Reverb G2

Iriodus
Explorer
@bigmike20vt - Well, I don't believe we'll see the Rift for about that long as well, and I'm ok with the recommended specs going higher, I care more for overall accessibility or adoption rates for people considering PCVR, and that's why I answered as such. I'm perfectly alright with, let's say, a GTX 1070/Vega 56 becoming the recommended GPU, and maybe the current recommended specification would become the minimum specification?

I don't believe that foveated rendering will be the magic bullet that people on the forums seem to thing it will be, I do think that Oculus and Valve will come up with additional methods to reduce VR overhead, as well Microsoft, Khronos Group, etc, so I mean more of an overall improvement in hardware/software will allow for this. Granted, I'd want the Rift 2.0 to be 2k and 150 FOV, as I think that's a nice compromise regardless of the above.

Anonymous
Not applicable
I think 150° is too much of a leap to hope for imo, 120-130° is more likely I think.

Iriodus
Explorer
@snowdog
Well, I think 150° is much more realistic than, let's say, anything over the 2k VR equivalent for the CV2, but if memory serves increased FOV (in general) has much less of a performance hit than a resolution increase. If you just mean that the actual lenses themselves likely won't go over 130° for the horizontal FOV then I agree.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Iriodus said:

@snowdog
Well, I think 150° is much more realistic than, let's say, anything over the 2k VR equivalent for the CV2, but if memory serves increased FOV (in general) has much less of a performance hit than a resolution increase. If you just mean that the actual lenses themselves likely won't go over 130° for the horizontal FOV then I agree.


Increase FOV has double effects. One, it requires that heavy object environment has to draw more objects and to keep them there instead of culling the ones that are not important to the main focus. This means more work for the GPU over all and this can lead to the programmer/designer not to draw as detail of an environment over all to keep performance down (up?).

Two it puts more work on the CPU by forcing more animations onto the screen resulting in more work that the CPU has to do because not as many objects again are not being cull in the process.

In this case, then resolution has less effect than a increase in resolution would have. Drawing pixels is always cheaper than drawing objects and or animations. Example: a 2D game can easily run at 4k at 60Hz while a 3D game might only get 30 FPS. Obs. the 3D game has more going on than a 2D game - but both are the same resolution. That is my point - the work has more of an impact than drawing pixels alone does and by increasing the FOV you are increasing the amount of work needing to be done as well.

Pimax will have problems not because of the resolution that everyone keeps pointing at - but because of the amount of work that is going on in the headset that the GPU has to now keep up with now. 210 FOV is just silly not because no one else is doing it, but because it's a increase of GPU resources that isn't needed yet. A Modest increase in FOV goes a long way in both directions (good and bad) that they could have thrown the extra pixels to just making the resolution that much better instead.

bigmike20vt
Visionary
I agree..... dont get me wrong, CV2 needs to increase the FOV, indeed the FOV has steadily declined from DK1 - DK2 - CV1....  but 200 degrees imo is just too much, it means the HMD needs to be massive, and the resolution needs to be increased otherwise the "perceived" resolution decreases, and you need a monster PC to run properly (even reports from those who are impressed with the 8k note performance issues, and this is on pokier machines than their min spec)... and this is why i think some are commentating that the visual quality in the "8k" is not quite as good as they expected for thinks like virtual desktop.

The vive already has the edge on the rift in terms of FOV, but it would have been nice to have seen a minor bump for the vive pro.. but i guess that would have meant more retooling needed than HTC were prepared to do for what is in effect a mid cycle refresh.

for the CV2, i think there is definitely room for a happy medium compared to the 8k.  Sure, you can bet your left nut some people will look at the (hypothetical) specs and say   "only" 140 FOV and "only" 4k spread across both eyes... but then these would be the same people who when they buy a new camera only look at the megapixel number or buy a TV and only look at the resolution to decide if it is any good or not.

I hope the pimax 8k is good I really do, however looking at it, and the tiny number of sensors on it compared to the vive, and the reports i have read from some on the tracking, not to mention the fact that unless it undergoes a major facelift for the consumer version it looks more like a dev kit than even the vive (fair enough it IS a dev kit for now)................

Lets just say i have my concerns for the pimax**** and have more faith in oculus (and htc it would appear) to bring a more rounded headset out.

**** I was shot down in a number of places when i said there was no chance pimax were launching their HMD when they said they would at KSer. I wanted to be wrong, but i wasnt... just like i want to be wrong about the 8k when it does eventually come out....  I think the 8k will be ok, but i do not think it will be the market leader that some are convinced it will be.
Fiat Coupe, gone. 350Z gone. Dirty nappies, no sleep & practical transport incoming. Thank goodness for VR 🙂

kevinw729
Honored Visionary


.....
**** I was shot down in a number of places when i said there was no chance pimax were launching their HMD when they said they would at KSer. I wanted to be wrong, but i wasnt... just like i want to be wrong about the 8k when it does eventually come out....  I think the 8k will be ok, but i do not think it will be the market leader that some are convinced it will be.




I understand your scepticism - I was very wary of the system and developers when first investigating - having seen their original Pimax VR platform. I have to say I am heartened by what I have seen lately - they are committed, and moving forward. I still think they could be swallowed up down the road if their momentum continues to grow.


We are very interested in the lesser known Pimax 8K X system that is aimed squarely at commercial interests, and offers a great system. Seen the latest DK2's of this and they have come a long way. It is little known that the first systems off the production line are aimed at being deployed in Out-of-Home entertainment projects, and will act as a great promotional tool for what the platform can achieve regarding level of immersion.

https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

nosys70
Expert Protege
Pimax could as well implement its own foveated display, under the form of a 140deg FOV window sliding on the 200deg space in sync with your eyes direction (eye tracking was part of KS)
This would be darn easy, ensure game compatibility , allow higher refresh rate and emulate the microsoft device with LED with even very basic eye tracking.