Chicago Backer Meetup Impressions videos! [unofficial]

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Hey Guys, I am uploading some interview videos I took from the Chicago Pimax Backer Meetup. We had a very good turnout. Will upload pictures soon!

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Sorry for the Piano on the last videos lol. Is that the theme song from the movie BIG?

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Thanks! was nice to have the same questions asked over and over. This give more coherence to the users comments.

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Here are some photos of the event Chicago Pimax Backer Meetup 12-15-18 - Album on Imgur

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More clips, sorry was recorded vertically.

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So 5k+ seems to win the hearts & minds of this crowd even amongst elite dangerous players. Seem to be hearing/reading more and more commenting that the large fov is acceptable where as sweviver and mrtv urged us to stick with medium fov. Could it be that recent improvements to pi tool is correcting the distortion?

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@G-Maniac yes a problem we discovered was if you had pitool set “normal FOV” as the default and then tried to increase it large field of view while in-game, it created a sort of unacceptable distorted rendering effect at the edges (that looked exactly like very excessive lens distortion at the edges! but really wasn’t)

But if you start pitool in large field of view first. Reboot pitool then start the game that rendering bug is gone in large fov. You can also change from large, normal, and small fov this way without rebooting when starting in large fov.

When we did it this way most people weren’t bothered by large FOV anymore. It still has a little of the “coke bottle effect” my fiancee calls it, but at least it’s not the weird bright and unacceptable edge distortion (that I’m guessing sweviver and MRTV see, not sure if they reboot pitool when they set it large fov)

It’s something you can unsee after getting used to quickly in the large fov.

Edit: It sort of makes sense that they added “requires reboot” under fov settings now but everyone just ignores the message. Really is best to just reboot pitool after fov change if you can.

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So basically the 5k stomps the 8k.

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Hope, my 8K will be shipped a bit faster :slight_smile:

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Interesting videos!

Yes that has always been the case. A SteamVR reboot is needed after changing FOV or pitool render value. Otherwise it may look really strange if FOV is set to large without restarting.

Why I mostly recommend Normal FOV over Large is because of a significant performance difference. And the visual fov difference between normal and large is most of the time not worth the fps difference

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Thanks again to @karrtoon for hosting the Chicago meetup.

I VR almost exclusively for ED and I was very keen cementing my decision in that context. So much so, that I brought my rig (9900K & 2080Ti) to the meetup for an ED ‘stress test’.

First impression is that it required a significant amount of tweaking to get each app fully optimized. I strongly encourage Pimax to add functionality for saving individual game/app profiles. As other backers have commented upon receiving their HMDs, this is absolutely a must.

Regarding ED, the decider for me was the text. While I started out as an 8K backer and confirmed in the survey, I will be requesting a change to 5K+ with Pimax Support.

Contrary to what would be taken for conventional wisdom, the aliasing in text was most noticeable on the 8K. I honestly didn’t see a significant difference to colors or SDE. The blacks were better on the 8K, but not significantly so. Again,the text was the deal breaker. The aliasing was just too immersion breaking for me.

The consensus from other attendees was that the text was noticeably worse on the 8K in ED, but given individual sensitivities, YMMV.

All that said, once you get the Pimax settings optimized, ED is absolutely gorgeous. Can’t wait now to get my Pimax!

EDIT: While the text aliasing issue was mildly present in other apps, it was most noticeable in ED. I’m chalking that up to ED’s proprietary rendering engine being the likely culprit.

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Offtopic joke:
I have just checked the pictures of the first 12 backer videos.
Some of the guys are showing with their hands: Mine is that long.
And the last woman, then shows the truth. :smile:

Now I’m gonna watch the videos. Thanks for uploading.

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More comments


In bringing my rig to the meetup, I was able to get some ‘pre-training’ for installing PiTool and setting up the HMD.

Having an Oculus, I had no idea what to expect and was pleased with the process. Software installation (.91) was a breeze, zero issues. Kudos to Pimax for improving that process.

Operation with (already installed) Steam VR was a bit less intuitive, but ultimately seamless. As @karrtoon mentioned, I recommend booting the HMD into Large FOV and adjusting from there.

Computer/software recognized the HMD immediately. Sync-ing the LH and controllers was also less intuitive, but again, I’m an Oculus owner and YMMV.

The Steam VR real-time display of ‘frame timing’ is incredibly useful in finding the limits of your GPU, while maxing the display quality.

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Backer number 2 is talking about distortion:
What order for less distortion ? Have not read about that before.ï»ż
I restart SteamVR after changing the FOV mode.

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@DocsOutatimeTV Edit: SteamVR reboot is sufficient afterall. No need to restart pitool for fov change.

If you want to adjust in realtime though without reboots start on Large Fov (reboot pitool after) then you can go to all of them in realtime. Still safest bet to avoid excessive distortions is to just reboot pitool/steamvr/game everytime you adjust fov it seems.

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Thanks.
But you don’t need to reboot PiTool after each change of FOV !
Just restart Steam VR. That’s what Sweviver showed from the beginning.

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@DocsOutatimeTV Thanks, yes just verified just SteamVR reboot is sufficient. My fault, I just assumed it because pitool says (“Need restart VR application” underneath) but looks like it’s indeedonly necessary to reboot Steamvr.

(Just noticed the part sweviver said about SteamVR whoops!)

Feedback for Pimax: Pitool should really say “steamvr restart required, and VR application restart” instead of “need restart VR application” in broken english because it’s confusing. I would have assumed VR application they are talking about either their own pitool or just the app, not SteamVR.

Edit: As in nobody at the meetup listened to the note about VR application restart and when they did they didn’t reboot SteamVR. A few complained about distortion when going from normal to large, when it was just the rendering bug and we found this out!

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Could you share the ED settings that worked for you? I have a similar pc and the default settings resulted in 60fps around a station and I need that to be around 90. Thanks!

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