Thank you Helio for your work, however I still don’t understand how Konger said Pimax already updated their current plan of shipping 8KX in February 2020 on the forum when I can’t find any post that says so.
Am I blind, or are Pimax messing with our minds in new ways?
The last Update for the 8kX is To Be Determined. Prior was estimated March/April. But due to recent testing maybe sooner. Hopefully a new progress report will release soon.
They did mention they are testing Fiber.
This is how it should be done. But I (working at bigger companies) have seen a lot happening, sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. In this case though I suppose Pimax had reason to believe Valve would be true to their word because they would benefit from others using SteamVR and Lighthouse tracking, and had announced that this would be available for licensees. Until they seemed to hold back on it all of a sudden, which coincidentally happened when they decided to push for an own headset after all. Ugly surprise. They didn’t completely close the door for competitirs but delayed the availability of the base stations fro anybody other than HTC until their Index was released. And apparently crancked up the price back to the LH1.0 base station pricing after all.
I will give it to Pimax that this was a pretty unexpected development.
As to ordering a new headset from Pimax - as I said in other posts I would indeed wait for reviews & hands-ons from users here before I would dish out that kind of money. I do not regret my pledge, certainly not as the 8KX now seems to be much more expensive than what I paid for it in 2017, but at the same time I would be careful because there doesn’t seem to be much advantage at ordering now as compared to ordering when the first batches have been delivered. So why take the risk ?
Thank you for the update. Certainly, receiving my Pimax 8kX sooner rather than later would be useful.
RE: Available 8K-X Cable Technology in 2020.
As 8K-X prototype currently manages 4K/75 Hz per eye with a single DP 1.4, could this mean with HDMI 2.1 (Max of 10K/120 Hz with DSC 1.2) a higher Hz could be achieved once more powerful GPU’s emerge in 2020?
I would imagine Pimax are desperate to acheive at least a stable 90 Hz for 8K-X to fend off future competition.
If so, it might be wise for Pimax to drop DP 1.4 for 8K-X and swap to HDMI 2.1 or even have dual HDMI 2.1 upgrade for the future e.g. have a secondary unused port on the side of the headset.
I honestly think to sell 8K-X in huge numbers, customers will want a degree of future proofing and not feel that within a year, their ‘slow’ 75Hz headset will be trounced by a competitor who buy an 8K-X themselves, upgrade the electronics, bolt on an HDMI 2.1 port and sell it as a superior headset taking valuable sales away from Pimax.
Pimax 8kX is way more than future proof enough already.
Truly, I could not care less about the ‘75Hz’ framerate.
Before raising any render framerates above 36Hz, resolution must be pushed to that of human vision, which is about 2x super resolution on the Pimax 8kX.
Before raising physical refresh above 72Hz, Smart Smoothing, with its half refresh rate, artifacts, and remaining choppiness, needs to go away, at 72Hz.
GPU power may take seven years or more to increase sufficiently. Software improvements will likely be needed as well, due to current problems with some apps as well the compositor running pixels through the CPU, where single-threading performance not improving significantly.
By that time, it will be past time to start looking at the next most serious problem for VR after resolution - weight.
After establishing adequate performance, physiological ability to tolerate wearing a VR headset (ie. comfort), will becoming the limiting factor for further market acceptance.
In the meantime, let’s just have the Pimax 8kX. As is. High-resolution, high optical clarity. Now.
Higher resolution is not everything. Wireless is also important for immersion and many other factors. Higher refresh rate reduces motion blur, and the less motion blur, the higher the perceived resolution:
“Display refresh rate and display illumination time (“persistence”). Some of the benefits of higher refresh rate are well understood in the Desktop PC space. But in VR, where the display is attached to your head, frequent update and lower persistence are both key to reducing motion blur. Similar to increasing resolution, reducing motion blur helps to improve the perceived sharpness of the system. But it also provides a couple of things that increasing pixels per degrees alone cannot: it improves the sense of physical permanence of virtual objects and at the same time improves the overall stability of the virtual environment. Due to the physiology of human vision, these qualities increase in importance as FOV increases.”
I agreed w the upgrade to 2.1 hdmi. GTX 3080 will be released soon next year and it will have SLI architecture within a single GPU making it much more powerful. Pimax need to think ahead.
I have yet to hear of a substantial use case for which high-resolution and fast-motion at the same time are critical. Whereas, reading instruments, HUD symbology, etc, tends to benefit from reading at high-resolution without any fast-motion involved.
Only the other day I was swearing over how I have only enough processing oomph to have either high supersampling, which really “solidifies”, and “anchors” the virtual world, and makes it possible to resolve more detail, or high frame rate, which really “solidifies”, and “anchors” the world, and makes it possible to resolve more detail.
This was at that particular moment with Elite: Dangerous, which has little fast motion most of the time, and a decent bit of HUD to make out, and to my senses, compromising on spatial resolution, and compromising on temporal resolution, is equally unpalatable.
What about fast paced first person shooters like Pavlov?
I’m gonna be PISSED if people get their 8KX Headsets before backers in Feb.
There aren’t really that many backers that backed the 8kx during kickstarter. Pretty sure those who backed it will get it first.
Exactly what I am thinking of.
In both Pavlov and Onward, I have seen little if any benefit from increased resolution while moving quickly. Not really like I am looking for anything close to being smaller than a single pixel. Even at long range, not moving, I still need a telescope in exactly the same situations at exactly the same distances for exactly the same reason of being able to see around cover. Biggest difference for Pavlov/Onward from Oculus/Vive to Pimax 5k+ was some loss of haze, mostly due to improved optics, and only with Pavlov.
By contrast, every little bit of resolution I can get for reading instruments, HUDs, and similar displays, dramatically improves how often text characters are outright smeared into a single completely unreadable blob.
I won’t know until I actually have the Pimax 8kX for long enough to do some serious testing, but it is a good bet I will not be using it for anything like Pavlov/Onward at all. Keeping the optics in top shape (ie. away from sweat) for flight sim use is probably much more important.
EDIT: @Toba Would you rather we all get our headsets in June? Personally, on a budget, I have preordered quite a lot of stuff from Pimax, with none of the upgrade discounts, and I would be willing to add even more cash to have my headset sooner…
i hear you are jockeying for a job with them is this true?
they were even late on making their scheduled pimax day. twice! Why are we surprised?
yes this is made even sketchier on Valves part in hindsight, considering they knew they were going to become Pimax’s (and all of their potential other partners) competion with their Index without telling them.
Withholding pimax from selling basestations before they launched their index (Again pimax would not have even known the index was a thing yet) and jacking the price and not allowing them to manufacture their own was a BS move.
Still, Pimax is not innocent in this. And I questioned the wisdom of basing your entire companies limited budget on another companies prototype controllers.
But with this artisan release I question if the decisions made at pimax are based on logic anyway.
Well as of right now they have invited me to CES to help them in their booth and as I have said in other posts, I would very much like to work for Pimax with the hope that I could be someone who can help them turn the tide on some of the problems they are having currently, especially in regards to their communication or lack there of within the community. I have not hidden the fact that I would very much like to be someone who helps to make that happen!
Something to keep in mind though in some games higher res will not make a difference if the game had low res textures.
The Article From blog “Infinity to beyond(?)” Talked about this.
Perhaps but they were overzealous with our suggestions as well. With a simple mod accessory Touch controllers even become index like with a simple strap mod.