Bought a 8k+ for the index controllers mainly. I thought if the 8k+ is a improvement over the 5k+ then I would keep that instead of the 5k+.
After extensive testing I’ll give you the run down with a summary after the list
CPU 8700k 1080ti
Tested with Fruit Ninja, Beat saber and various steamvr homes
Comfort ----- 8k+ due to the new comfort kit
Contrast ----- 8k+ I could make out items in the dark on the 8k+ but not on the 5k+
Color ------- 5k+ This would be at least a 25% drop in color. Surprised me the most
Ghosting ----- 5k+ This also surprised me. I could see ghosting on the 8k+ with head movement. Sort of like black smear, just instead it was with everything.
SDE ------ 8k+ I couldn’t see any SDE on the 8k+. Very impressive
Performance ------ 5k+ This puzzles me. Both at 90hz running beat saber I could push the 5k+ to 55* x **** resolution before losing frames. 8k+ to get same result I could only go up to 45** x ***. About 10ms difference
So with all I know now I will be selling the 8k+. Performance being the biggest hurdle for me and colors second. The ghosting was also very noticeable when two strong colours where side by side. The steamvr home for testing FOV has a beach ball on the floor which looked horribly in the 8k+ when you moved your head. I had the same antialiasing, the same readability. So I see absolutely no reason to “upgrade” to the 8k+. In fact I see no reason to even have a product line for the 8k+. If you want no SDE and slightly better contrast then go for it.
Edit - Ok as I mentioned in my review I thought the performance drop was strange. And it seems you need to restart PC every time you change HMD’s. So that was my mistake. But I stand by everything else. The more I test/use the hmd the more I notice the smear. I think the lcd’s must not have a low enough persistence
Does increasing/decreasing the brightness improve the colors? I heard +2 contrast and -2 brightness or vice versa helps.
As for performance, what are your PC specs? The 8K+ requires more supersampling whereas the 8K-X should have better performance since it runs in native resolution with less super sampling.
What has the 8k-x got to do with my review? I compared two models with supersampling settings and the 8k+ could not perform nowhere near the 5k+ even with both receiving the same image size.
Your questions and lack of observation leads me to believe you only flicked over my review.
He mentions he has a 1080ti. That part matches my setup. The og 8k and 5k+ perform about the similar to near same on my systems. Both even perform similarly on the old r9 390.
Now the og 8k has 10hz less running at 80hz vs 90hz. So maybe the approx 10% decrease in refresh might be helping these results on my system vs an 8k+. Though the other elements like ghosting is new as haven’t noticed it on the og 8k.
He only mentioned the 8kX due to the advertising bling that it is supposed to be less demanding than the 8k+ and thus should also be less demanding than the 5k+.
I would want to see something like that personally. However it has closer to 15 to 20% reduction in refresh.
But I hear you as the 8k+ should perform similar to the 5k+ with maybe a 5% to maybe 10% decrease in performance. Though ghosting and color drop is odd as this should have had improvement vs og 8k and 5k+.
I’m not sure if the color is more accurate in the 8k+. That sort of thing is harder to tell.
The ghosting reminds me of when I owned a Oydessy+. On the steamvr menu you could notice it easy when something had a light line box around it. Move you head and you could see the ghosting of the line box.
Performance is the biggest killer on the 8k+. It’s just not worth it. I was really disappointed as I was excited to test it. I’ve even got that feeling now like it should be better, but I know it isn’t
Are you currently planning on getting an 8KX at some point in the future? Your measurements on the 5K+ were superb and incredibly informative. Many recipients of the 8K+ are reporting concerns in regards to the colors and contrast of this unit, which seems strange given the claims of improvements in those two areas over the 5K+ model. If you were able to perform similar tests upon an 8KX that you had done on the 5K+, I think that could be an invaluable resource.
I went from a 5k+ to an 8k+ and there is no difference in performance for me, its processing the same input resolution. Its likely something has changed in your setup between the two that is causing this.
Unfortunately I don’t plan buying a 8KX. I’m very sensitive to black level so I will only replace my current 5K+ when there will be a HMD with similar resolution but black level / contrast / colors on par with 1st gen oled HMDs (not happening soon I guess ).
This is my dream and I often wonder if I would have preferred the 5KXR over the 5K+ despite the lower resolution, because deep blacks have a huge impact on my immersion in VR. I still have an OG vive (2nd hand bought to have base stations and controllers until receiving pimax ones) and recently used it to pair the index controllers, I was amazed how more immersive it was just being in the black field with a floor grid in steamVR. Gray blacks just kill that immersion for me.
So no chance I do 8KX color measurements unless Pimax want to loan me one for a review, but I doubt they are interested in that kind of review for which the audience may not be very large. Also the probe test is unforgiving and more difficult to contradict. If there are bad characteristics, the probe will show it.
I guess all VR manufacturers have those datas for the displays they use in their HMDs, and in the end they never make them public. It is certainly better for sales to have traditional reviews with feedbacks like “colors are good for me” or “I don’t have any problem with the blacks”, rather than measurements showing high black level and “not very good” colors deltaE. On top of that they may fear customers could misinterpret the probe results, concluding from the numbers the image quality should be terrible while in fact they could “like it” if they just tried the HMD (which I don’t doubt can often prove to be true).
Now with all the 8KX sold there is some chance someone will own a probe to test it. The problem is accurate results require to remove one lens to place the probe directly on the screen (well, on the middle glass at least, for the pimax), so it may be hard to find a 8KX owner who accepts to take that risk on such an expensive HMD (especially after waiting so long for it^^).
Ok You are correct. I should have restarted the PC. Do you notice smear. I notice it massively when I play Skyrim and you get the little logo at the start. The extra contrast is good, but it seems it comes at a cost
No, we have not. Smear and color quality are better on the 8kX than any other Pimax headset I have tried.
What I can say with some certainty is the 8kX people will be getting their hands on should be state of the art, beyond what any 5k+ achieves. Also, most 8k+ units should achieve better text readability, with slightly lower GPU requirements, than the 5k+, despite theoretical considerations of overlapping pixels.
I fiddled around with my 8k+ and I got it to smear In SteamVR, on the left the logo for hosting a room (three heads) is a good candidate to test.
I started to take away settings again and after some SteamVR start/stop is disappeared. I am not sure what setting causes that as i did not do a restart of the HMD and Steam by every setting.
I did not notice it before, either do to the settings I had or its a combination of a Settings and Version of Steam and/or PiTool.
More important, it seems you can get rid of it.
^^Interesting! Could it be that there is a bug that sometimes uses the wrong overdrive settings for the 8k+? Or sometimes black frame insertion, sometimes not?
Or perhaps the gamma value somehow changed, so it wasn’t the same color transition anymore? (But that should be visible, right?)
Edit: @PimaxQuorra@SweViver - Could you please (notify a dev to) try to reproduce this? If it is a bug (that potentially affects both the 8k+ and the 8kX then?) this might be worth investigating. Good news, that it’s apparently not hardware related then at least!
Mainly I noticed it on white letters on dark background. Almost prominently. Could be that something goes bad just as you mentioned in the panel, firmware, or pitool that causes that bug.
I’ll do some testing on this. It’s not so noticeable in games. As you mentioned it is most noticeable with white on black. You can also see it heavily in the steamvr home that allowas you to test the fov. Look at the beach ball. The blue and red look terrible.
Only in the special case where it goes wrong. I did a lot of testing in the Real o Virtual Room an never noticed it. It was only the last days that it seemed to pop up. Only real thing I know is that I haven’t played in 110hz before, did not have 260 Pitool and at least 2 Steam updates. ALSO I just very shortly did the contrast +, brightness - thing. So it has to be one of those in combination.
What I do notice is with all Pimax HMD, and I can’t remember if that’s the same on the others I had, if I move an object with text in front of me or if I turn the head and hold the text still makes a large difference in readability even though in both cases the text moves in front of my eyes.
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