So we have a few ways to spit games to our HMDs (SteamVR, vorpX), and they are pretty demanding. But there is a third way that can be less demanding, but is tricky to setup; using SuperDepth3D/SuperDepthVR to add depth-buffer stereoscopic rendering to non-VR games.
In thinking about ReShade and VR (not yet compatible), I thought; “What if Pimax came with a tool that allowed us to play older games on our HMDs as VR titles?” That might be a heck of a selling-point. You wouldn’t need to support motion-controllers, just head-tracking, since none of those older games had motion-controller support; with the basic concept being an injector (either part of PiTool, or a separate tool) that you could use to launch legacy games, at which point they would hook ReShade & SuperDepth3D/SuperDepthVR directly and send that all to the Pimax HMD, completely bypassing SteamVR. It’s not a perfect solution as SuperDepth3D is z-buffer, not geometry, so you get some artifacts, but it’s really good overall about this. On the plus side, SuperDepth3D/VR has incredibly low overhead. We are talking only a tiny performance hit (like 2 or 3 fps), so performance would be excellent.
I used to play SuperDepth3D/VR with my Pimax 4K and Google cardboard; the performance, clarity and high resolutions were really good, but with P8K I did not know how to configure the FOV, because it is a mess (in my case). Pimax should support Reshade for a lot of special effects that it has to apply (including SuperDepth), but is seems like only few people used it for VR …
I think a more general need to have direct multi-layer/transparency access to Pimax headset framebuffers and position data is emerging. So we can just bypass SteamVR/Oculus/etc, and just send our own overlays directly to the headset.
This would be really amazing, to suddenly get support to hundreds of legacy games in 3D/pseudo-3D would add a ton of extra usability to Pimax, and give Pimax something that no other VR manufacturer provides without 3rd party apps like VORPX or HelixVision.
When I can find a good, comprehensive, concise guide to getting that working I might give it a try.
To be clear my request is different than just somehow arranging for ReShade support (as that would still be going through SteamVR at some point). My suggestion is for Pimax to enable spitting right-and-left images to Pimax HMDs directly, without going through SteamVR and vorpX, and to work-with the creators of ReShade and SuperDepth3D/VR to use those to create the stereoscopic effect. Current methods all have a LOT of overhead - even using something like VirtualDesktop in VR in Full-Screen mode and then using Reshade and SuperDepth on top of that has tremendous overhead (although, in theory, a bit less). My suggestion would essentially enable performance very nearly equal to what you would get with no stereoscopic rendering whatsoever. You would still need enough hardware to run at high resolutions if you want a good sharp picture, but that’s a LOT easier to do when you don’t have a ton of overhead. (As a rule-of-thumb, injectors like TriDef and vorpX still drop your FPS to around 50% even when using their “fast” z-buffer modes. Reshade and SuperDepth, on the other hand, have almost zero performance impact while doing essentially the exact same thing.)
There has been a lot of informations in nvidia 3dvision forums, but nvidia mess it up with their stupid new forum tool. Now remains only the information in the github wiki.
The power of 3dmigoto is you can modify the way the game display things. That’s not only changing images or pixel, you can modify everything, as for example the position of object or their texture. I made 3d zoom and convergence changes by working on vertex coordinates. I added kneepad feature in il2 Bos,…and with really few impact as you do not have to manipulate pixels.
What are you asking but Pimax dropped it off is “Video Mode”, we used it and was avaible it with Pimax 4K. I remember at some kickstater point with the 8K testing by Sweviver, I asked him about how “video mode” works with the 8K ?? and he was stranged by that question… So, we need “Video Mode” back to our 8K. “Video Mode” is our HMD as monitors.
OK, so unknown to me, because I’ve been busy working and spending the rest of my time trying to conquer native VR titles and vorpX, BlueSkyDefender, who has made z-buffer a stereoscopic 3D reshade shader called SuperDepth has released a free (please donate to this man if you can, his works has been excellent) tool called Companion.app that simply spits your display to your HMD. Thanks to grzvs in another thread who mentioned his shader and prompted me to check up on the progress. This is exactly what I’ve wanted. This is very exciting as it is designed to be combined with his 3D shaders and allow us to play many titles in stereoscopic mode (it is NOT full VR, your HMD is just your display). I can’t wait to give it a shot in FO4, which performs terribly in vorpX, even in z-buffer “lounge” mode. PS. Reshade turns the depth-buffer detection OFF when it detects network activity, so if you want to use this with any kind of online game, or even a game which hits the network during play for any reason, you’ll have to join those of us trying to talk crossire into allowing the depth buffer to work online.