I was a DK2 owner and CV1 preorder customer, and have used both headsets regularly for half a decade.
The only game I play is iRacing, so all I care about is seated VR.
I decided to jump ship after seeing the horrendously underwhelming specs announced for the Rift S, and settled on Pimax after deciding that FOV was the determining factor for me as a sim racer.
My Pimax 5k+ shipped in two days from Amazon Japan, but initially seemed to be dead on arrival. This was pretty par for the course, as my CV1 was also dead on arrival. Unlike the CV1 though, which needed a 3-week turnaround RMA, the 5k+ turned out to be serviceable via Teamviewer, and after buying it on Monday (and being unavailable for two days on business), it was playable by Saturday night.
My initial reaction on opening the moon base was to be dumbstruck - the FOV and clarity was well beyond my expecations. I also seem to have gotten a good unit, with no dead pixels or other issues (touch wood). Setting it up for iRacing required very little tweaking - I basically just disabled SPS (due to being on a 1080), and it was good to go. I did have to uninstall Oculus Home, though, as it kept popping up on its own and crashing iRacing to desktop. Farewell, I guess.
The v1 lighthouse setup was a bit frustrating… I thought I had the “permanent standby” bug and almost opened a ticket, but found that it would actually connect if the distance was far greater than I thought necessary. Whereas my Rift sensor sat on my computer at the end of my rig (about 2m away), I needed to put the Lighthouse on a bookshelf on the far side of my apartment (about 6m away). My partner is under strict orders not to break its line of sight when I’m in an official race!
Comfort on the strap is not ideal, and it feels like it’s always falling down my face. I’ve bought the DAS vive strap and am waiting on the 3d printed adaptor pieces from Thingiverse. Hopefully they should be here in just over a week.
After doing some practice to get used to it, I did a couple of races, and found both a huge competitive advantage (being able to see cars that I’d usually be guessing at the position of), as well as a gut-churning increased sense of speed. From a single monitor, to triples, to the DK2, to the CV1, to the 5k+, this was the very first time I’ve actually felt like I was “going fast” in the sim.
I then started looking around to tweak settings, and found that SteamVR had automatically downrated my resolution to 36%. Overriding that and trying it at 100%, I had the same “wow” reaction all over again. I’d already thought the clarity level to be a game changer, but at 100%, it was almost like racing on a monitor.
Unfortunately, a 60hz monitor. The resultant 2080ti arrives tomorrow.
My racing team largely moved to CV1s due to my evangelism, and I predict they’ll be ditching them for 5k+s in the near future.
