It arrived after a week in shipping. Having waited nearly three years, that’s a small thing. I’ll mainly be comparing to the 5K+, which I have upgraded with a Vive audio strap. The pink pieces are 3D printed adaptors.
Installation was quite simple; I plugged it in (including a second USB port, I’m really going to appreciate not needing that separate AC adaptor), and PiTool detected it rather quickly. SteamVR wasn’t so lucky, but it sorted itself out after I’d paired the Vive controllers and rebooted. That reboot revealed another quirk; my BIOS seems to have thought the 8K X was a monitor, because I couldn’t see my boot loader. Swapping DP connectors sorted that out. It was never an issue with the 5K+ simply because I didn’t have it powered on during boot. After the reboot Windows also ignored the keyboard, but replugging that helped. All in all, a typical Windows day.
In other happy news, it appears the Yaw VR Game Engine plugin for Elite Dangerous now works (the beta version of the game engine was just updated, downloaded it from the website).
Back to the 8K X itself. It has a blue rubbery casing, and silvery wedge and buttons. The power button still did nothing in SteamVR; I’d love to rebind it as a system button. Pimax Home and SteamVR both render neatly. I can only resolve the pixels in part of the display (central), but be aware I’m a bit of a resolution geek; I found the iMAX cinema to use silly low resolution, and think my 27" 2560x1440 monitors are just acceptable at arm’s length. “Screen door effect” is not technically eliminated, but in practical terms no longer a factor of concern. I can just tell there is a raster, and it would be surprising otherwise; 2160 is a big number but still not a match for human vision. I could still tell some aliasing based creeping in the periphery in Pimax Home.
The comfort kit with the much larger facial interface, rigid audio strap, and nose gaskets is a huge upgrade. The foam still has the glasses cutouts on my model, but that’s the only remaining point of external light leaks. I noticed some on the right side, but that’s with a bright light in that specific direction. As for the audio - it’s small speakers, they don’t sound terrible for such but I doubt it will work very well with positional audio. Verified the microphone worked with Discord.
I probably won’t read here for a while as I’m now going to try running actual programs.
Quick impressions from Elite. The Yaw VR Game Engine default profile did not play nicely with the set limits; it would basically twitch when I passed over the small range of orientations that were mapped, and what motion there was felt backwards. That has nothing to do with the Pimax, but it’s also a new toy. Bumping up HMD quality factor a few steps in Elite helped quite a lot; text is easier to read than in the 5K+. Blacks look pretty good; it’s obviously backlit, but the lack of competing impressions makes it a background thing, like looking through air. As for the optics, it’s a slightly mixed bag. When looking straight ahead, the distortion profile is excellent. However, when glancing to the side I seem to move my pupil out of the sweet spot, and get edge distortion. Furthermore, it looks like I’m looking past the edge of the lens (!) - there’s a band of clearer display past the milkiness of fresnel ridges. “God ray” effects seem less pronounced, probably largely because there’s not much leakage. Also, the one thing that helps more than having a button to reach Elite’s main menu (“pause”, by default Escape) is knowing where that button is. And my X52 Pro had calibrated center to the wrong position when the Yaw VR was pitched down on boot, quickly resolved by unplugging the HOTAS. I don’t seem consciously disturbed by 75Hz in Elite, but it may well be tiring. And I’m not sure I have quite the right fit with the head strap. Note that some of the distortion effects could well be affected by the use of parallel projections, though I did dare to set it to large field of view.
On the sad side, with Elite’s excellent audio design, it’s immediately obvious that the SMAS audio just isn’t anywhere near good enough. The audio is tinny and easy to pinpoint. It beats not having any earphones, but I am going to upgrade, one way or another.
After receiving my 8kx half an hour ago i want to share my first impressions, too:
Setup was easy and straight forward. Tried first Fallout 4 VR with the 5k+ on a DAS to compare then directly after swapping. Comfort Kit played out nicely. Also my packeage did not contain the thinner face foam, so the lightbleed from the cutouts for the glasses are a bit distracting at first, but thankfully not having a lightsource behind myself was beneficial for my experience.
The audio was barely hearable. Even after cranking up the volume to 100%. I think i need to use a booster or my vive in ears in future.
I swapped the 5k+ with the 8kx and paired the controllers. then i strapped on the 8kx and…well… still saw screendoor in the white pimax logo. and chromatic aberation at its borders, too. Hmm. Then i checked the IPD and suprise, it was set to 69.5 automaticly??? Must be pure luck? Or software adopted my setting of the 5k+, but hardware setting was different, still showing my IPD in the HMD? I don´t know.
Destortions are better than in my 5k+. But it is definately there. Maybe i can improve it with dialing in my IPD better with software, etc. I am waiting for @SweViver s NewPimaxExperience. If i look at a vertical beam structure in FO4VR everything is fine. If i turn my head to the right/left, the more i do, the more that vertical beam bends in the middle outward (barrel distortion) - not a lot, but visible. If i look with one eye/lens centered then the more i go to the middle of the lens, the more it bends inward. So the more you go to the outer edge of the lens it bends outward, the more you go to the inner lens area it bends inward. Again, very likely gone with thinner facepad or more accurately dialed in position/aligment in software.
Chromatic Aberation is also still there. I had the SteamVR-Performance-Window active in my lower viewing area (standard position). And on its borders you can clearly see the blue/yellowish colors at the border of that overlay.
Sweetspot is similar to my 5k+. I think that is the biggest disapointment. Not that its pimax fault. Just that i thought they could improve that with using the sdame lenses - silly me.
Overall despite this all sounds disappointing because i was nitpicking on some known issues, THIS HEADSET IS FREAKING AWSOMELY SHARP and i can´t wait to test it more thourougly with automobilista2 in my sim-rig (a shame i have my d-box system not setup yet)
That reminds me. My left audio jack was unseated, leaving me with only right ear audio. Just had to wiggle it back in. Also, I’ve seen notable CA when the headset isn’t quite in the right position; in fact, I use it to determine where the sweet spot is. The hardware IPD adjustment is a little stiff in the higher range (I have almost 67mm IPD).
Both plugs were properly plugged in. Tried now with AM2. turned the laudness and bass bosst on in the advanced hardware settings of the usb audio and for AM2 it worked well.
ok, the raster is pretty much as expected because how could it not? we’ll need 8k, possibly even 16k per eye before we get real retina panels and since no one but vr needs panels like that we need to get much bigger before someone will develop them not to mention pice them for consumers.
I hope the thinner foam will help with the distortions you see but as long as it’s better than my 8k loaner I’ll be a happy camper. because despite it’s shortcomings it was still an awesome headset.
Tried AM2, HL Alyx and Google Earth. Have to say, Google Earth was most impressive. felt almost (un)real. having my ceiling ventilator on and feeling the breeze from above, i felt a strong presence.
AM2 need PP on, like PC2, so clarity was no the best. Also i did struggle to get constant high frame rates. hmm, i thought i would need less AA with the 8kX, but for some reason i had to decrease the resolution (dialed vertical pixels around 2160) but my GPU (2080ti) was struggeling as hell. Never experienced the same with my 8k/5k+. Maybe i need to reinstall the nvidia drivers/pitools, whatever.
HL Alyx: i tried with the startup-commands from another thread. But that was a slideshow. Checked SteamVR resolution and it was almost 4000pix vertically. Set that back to 2160p and activated Autoresolution of HL Alyx. was much better and fluent. But the distortions distracted me. Glad that i finished it already with my index. Details were better, but i would recommend the index hmd for this game alone.
Now waiting for the eye-tracking to improve performance together with the nvidia 3090 (or 3080ti). Waiting game on again!
As said, i could not make out a difference between colors on the 5k+ and the 8kX. If there is any, then it is not much. also regarding the brightness. Probably dimmer but i only say that because others said that here on the forums . Brightness is a special thing, because the eyes adopt while using it.
So in total i am really please by the look of the panels. SHARPNESS beats almost every probably not so great attribute of this fine piece of engineering…
CA is a fundamental property of multicolour light through single lens optics - more complex optical systems often compensate using more elements. Modern VR headsets compensate by taking it into account in the lens undistortion profiles. In my very limited testing, it’s mostly a sign that your eye isn’t quite in the sweet spot. There are certainly scenes that use colour shifting as an effect too. PiTool’s default logo display is very good at showing CA with its sharp white circle on nearly black background. It would be far less noticable in low contrast scenes.
well, i do adjust the sweetspot in a way where the CR or distortion is same strong if i move the headset in any direction. That is my sweetspot. Unfortunately finding the sweetsport (and there is no CR) does not mean that there is no CR sooner or later if you start to look with your eyes around. And thats a problem and should be avoided by lens distortion profile (for the three colors seperate). I can understand if CR starts where the image becomes blurry anyway because of the lenses. But unfortunately it does start earlier, so that i see CR very prominent in areas which shouldn´t have any.
Are you saying the distortions are more notable in HL:A than other games? In my experience distortions are most notable in games where there’s a straight ‘connection’ over the whole FoV (so no space for example) and straight long lines. But I don’t think there are necessarily more ‘straight long objects’ in HL:A then a random game
Thanks for your review BTW (also thanks to @LoneTech for his)
No. Same in all games i tried. Menu in front of me like in AM2 is distorted, too.
Btw, i found out what was the performance problem with good old fpsvr. It showed a massive GPU problem so i opened EVGA-X and hoho: GPU was running at 430MHz
So i stoped steamvr and loaded the OC profile manually (always worked so far to load it on startup, i don´t know what went wrong this time) and GPU was running again 2k+MHz. AM2 runs so much smoother, so i changed to pitools 1.25 resolution setting. but that was probably too much because i saw some reprojection going on. Have to check best settings over time.
Also want to share that i use small FOV only. That probably changes if i receive the thinner facepad. The distortions are so bad that anything bigger than small is useless rendering because it falls behind the part of the lens that is blurry and distorted anyways
Interesting…if the distortions are better for you than your 5K+ and you are still only able to play in small FOV without them becoming to distracting then it seems like you may be one of the unlucky ones who can’t get the headset positioned in a way to make it better. On normal FOV in my 5k+ I could only notice distortions if I specifically forced my eyes into the far corners of the display to look for it. In the course of normal play it wasn’t noticeable. As long as the 8kx is at least as good as or slightly better than the 5k in distortions then it should be fine for me. Shame that you haven’t been able to get a distortion free image at normal FOV.
