I noticed something strange about distortion

I’ve never noticed any distortion in my 8K, except in Large FOV, until I recently used VorpX to play HalfLife 2. I assume I haven’t got my VorpX settings adjusted correctly and I haven’t bothered trying to fix it yet.

Last night, I played some Quake 2 RTX on my flat screen monitor and I actually noticed distortion when I turned my head left or right. This is just due to turning my head slightly, which changes the angle that the flat screen is positioned in front of my eyes. I’ve played games for decades and never noticed this before. I think it must be that VR has changed my expectations as to how computer graphics are supposed to appear.

I also think it’s a bit strange, since some people have postulated that those of us who don’t see any distortion using their Pimax headsets are somehow less sensitive to distortion. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case, since I do see distortion in other situations. The flat-screen distortion I noticed is fairly subtle, but it was obvious to me, even though it took me a while to figure out what was wrong: It just looked weird and unreal.

9 Likes

WOW… I never thought about testing games in VORPX with the Pimax headsets. As for the distortions, I only seem to see them in my 5K+ when I have the FOV slider set to large and the headset is not fitted right. On normal with the proper adjustments I very rarely if ever seem to see any sort of a warped or distorted image. The biggest factor for me in mitigating it was finding the right eye to lens distance and once I got a thicker VRcover on the headset it made all the difference in the world! I think Pimax has really put in the effort with the new comfort kits and wider top strap to help get the users eyes at the proper distance and level and hopefully this will help many others with this issue going forward. I just got confirmation from my contact today that I should be receiving an 8K+ next month so I am really looking forward to seeing if this is the case when I do my initial reviews! []-)

6 Likes

Change the FoV In any game on your monitor and you have a high chance for distortion!

I have a wide screen and have had such issues a lot with games - even when they have a slider it often gets quite bad if you adjust it. In Many Games its like a magic magnification at the edges distorting the view in those areas ( outsides of the view). And also often games don’t adjust to the wide monitor so the Aspekt ratio is wrong or parts go missing- looks like bad hard coding of those parameters…

4 Likes

I plan on running some vorpX tests on my 5k XR tonight, will let you know if I suffer from an distortions

4 Likes

Please try HalfLife 2. That’s the game that was giving me trouble.

3 Likes

Will get in installed now and test it. Just setting everything up now

4 Likes

Cool… I haven’t used VORPX much since the DK2 days so it might be time to give it another look!

4 Likes

Done a bit of testing, not noticed much issue with distortion with the Pimax, but was really unplayable at first, lots of ghosting and things going on.

These are the settings I changed to get looking right as advised via Ralph.

In PiTool

  • Compatible with parallel projections: has to be ON.
  • Compatible With Vive Only Game: has to be OFF.
  • Turn on smart smoothing: should be ON to avoid judder
  • Refresh Rate: 72Hz: not necessary, but reduces CPU/GPU usage.- I used this
  • Field of View: Small: better performance, still provides very decent ~130° horizontal FOV, also helps with games that have a hardcoded FOV limit

Render Quality Settings

  • PiTool: Rendering Quality: 1.0 (default)
  • SteamVR: Video: Manual Override: 50%

Then in HL2, as this is a Source engine game, a 4:3 is required for a game to work correctly.

Messing with those seemed to solve my issue.

Even with this settings it get some collision clipping if too close the the wall, there you can see the world. But, just avoiding leaning into the walls solves this lol.

After doing this I tried out Borderlands 3 with a G3D profile created by a user, and after messing with the games video settings making a mix, this ran a dream in the Pimax

1 Like

Thanks for the info! Here’s what I had wrong: Smart Smoothing off, refresh rate 80 Hz, Medium FOV, and I was not running 4:3. I’ll try your settings next time.

1 Like

Cool, hope it works for you, I loved playing through the game in VR when I first got vorpx

1 Like