I know there has been mention of some games that do not support 8K wide FOV but while trying to think about how that works, well in this case doesn’t work, will it be an easy patch for the app developers to support the Pimax 8K?
Or, is this something that needs to be done at the Pimax end with their transform warp process, maybe the 170 FOV switch is not just to reduce demand of power but it works for this reason too?
Also, can I have an example of a game that does not support the 8K wide FOV? And, is this an issue with games only?
Something I wondered about too. I used Project Cars in VR with my Pimax 4K and noticed that in the outer edges the sides of the roads didn’t get rendered. Maybe just 1 degree where you can spot the trees and object disappearing, where the software thinks it’s outside of the screen real estate. I figured that was because it was designed for Rifts and Vives. But when we put on a ~200 fov headset these types of incompatibilities might be more prevalent.
Ahh thats an interesting aspect. In 3D Rendering we often restrict geometry scattering (trees, grass, rocks etc) to the camera frustum (with some overlap) so compute power is not wasted on things you can not see. It can cause issues with reflection in some cases as there is nothing behind you to reflect on the things in front of you.
However this is locked to the camera fov, it is possible that some games do not use that method like you mention or they need to have a little more overlap.
This isn’t just an issue with VR. I’ve seen this in Elite Dangerous on a 3D monitor, not VR. In particular, the monoliths at the Guardian alien ruins sites sometimes disappear, when they are near the edges of the screen.
Hmm. Its an interesting point about comparability and culling. I know some people may freak out at Tue mention of added features. But it raises a question of the idea of an absolute compatibility mode that locks to 110 fov in the same way 170 mode works but for different reasons. Just so we don’t get locked out of playing particular games.
No. This is an issue with games (and other apps), not the headset. To increase rendering speed, objects that you cannot see are not drawn. Sometimes, due to various shortcuts in a game, visible objects are mistakenly marked as not-visible and not drawn (“culled” or “clipped”). This leads to objects in the periphery popping in and out of existence.
The concern is that the 8K’s wider FOV may trigger issues, due to invalid assumptions as to what should be visible.
I can imagine games being optimised by locking fov. If those setting can be arbitrarily altered by a user the game might drop in fps so much that people complain and give it bad ratings due to not understanding what it is they’re doing perhaps.
I raised this issue before. I wanted a software fov slider setting so we could adjust our headsets manually when a game we want to play isn’t suited for bigger than standard fov such as 110 degrees.
What I heard is that SteamVR has this feature build in. It gives that value to the game engine. If it’s hardcoded in the game instead of taken from SteamVR it can lead to problems like that. But I am not a pro and I only did some experiments in Unity…
Well, SweVR (I’m joining the new naming here :P) said that he’s tested like what 300-400 games (and other software) or some such with the 8k. He’ll know, and have reported, about any issues.
But yeah of course, if a game is limited to let’s say 100° FOV… Then we’ll either see half our 8K FOV as black on the sides, or there will be extreme distortion (should the 100° FOV be stretches across the whole 200°, of even 170° FOV of the 8K.
Now, a lot of games do have an FOV slider or at least you can go mess around with an .ini file if need be. That’s not ideal, sure, but it’s probably what we’ll have to do for some games.
