Met quite a few nice backers there, some drove two to four hours! Others came from Las Vegas and Phoenix!
I wanted to make sure those individuals had first chance to try it because obviously they made a huge time investment. I showed up around 9:30 and Jeff (from Long Beach) was there already, Pimax showed up (two guys, one girl) with all their equipment around 10 or 10:30 and had things setup by 11, many took photos or video so I’m sure that will be coming out soon.
They had three headsets there, the 8K, 5K+ and ‘5Ks’? The 5Ks was a product which we were told was lower end but had OLED panels and their hand tracking module.
The tracking of the hands were great from what I heard and could witness but I didn’t try it because I was told by all who did that the displays/quality was not very good.
At first they had the lab on the 5K+ running with traditional vive controllers and an xbox controller with the 8K on elite dangerous.
I tried the 8K first but spoke with many other backers there that had tried both at that point.
My first impression of the 8K was the resolution/clarity wasn’t a huge leap over the vive. SDE was clearly better but still noticeable.
FOV was fantastic but felt I took it for granted after the first few seconds and really was only concerned with the clarity which didn’t blow me away compared to my vive.
So then we had them put on a static scene (home screen I guess of the app bigscreen beta) at pitool 0.75 (didn’t get to see steam vr SS setting) and although I didn’t see the pitool version (all in chinese on the rigs they brought), we had them change the pitool to 1.25 then but I saw him lower the steamvr SS slider but couldn’t see to what specifically.
1.25 made quite a bit of difference compared to 0.75 BUT clarity of text and vertical and horizontal lines still left MUCH to be desired.
Then I go to try the 5K+ on the same bigscreen beta environment at pitool 1 and the clarity of everything was noticeably better on the 5K+, especially text–confirming what we already know.
The only thing that MAY have been slightly better on the 8K was things far off in the distance had less jaggies but that may have been due to 1.25 pitool on the 8k (second time I tried it and was actually looking in the distance) vs 1 on the 5K+.
I was disappointed by the brightness/contrast/muted colors of both headsets…I wouldn’t give the edge to either from what I saw…they were both obviously inferior to my original Vive but that is to be expected when compared to oled screens.
They had the headsets at 150 FOV from what I can recall and any periphery distortion is very minimal and has to be looked for.
SDE appeared the same to me on bigscreen beta but the 5K+ really pulled ahead with text and overall clarity especially when it came to any vertical and horizontal lines (most likely due to the pixel/panel arrangement). I’m sure others will chime in on this thread that attended and add their experience soon since I didn’t get to try to the lab but instead wanted to try the apples to apples same environment
I can say that for me the colors/contrast were disappointing but usable on both headsets and there was no winner for me there only losers, but I would definitely choose the 5K+ now that I have looked through both headsets based on all the sharpness/clarity advantages it had.
The other thing that is clear is that the velcro straps (on any VR headset) need to go, I am going to attach my vive DAS to my pimax as soon as I get it and scrap the velcro straps it comes with almost immediately.
The headsets were very light in your hands though and with a good head mounting system like the vive DAS I’m sure they would feel very comfortable/light on your head as well and have a simple but nice design/appearance to them.
Overall I could have just listened to the online/youtube channel reviews and gone with the 5K+ without attending the backer meetup as it’s clearly the better headset and saw no disadvantages with it versus the 8K from my limited time with it.
I spoke to one of the pimax guys there and expressed how we would like the wireless module to be a priority accessory and other backers had expressed that we wish Pimax would just natively work with Steam VR with no pitool in the middle as it creates confusion/complication and one more overhead/thing to go wrong plus you can’t leverage some of the work steam vr has already done to implement things like motion smoothing etc but understand that the perhaps the distortion and fov algorithms are done by pitool.
@aesopfabled If you read what I wrote, I said the FOV is great, it’s lighter weight which is often overlooked as a benefit, SDE is much improved but 8K wasn’t vastly better than my vive in terms of fidelity, 5K+ was but mention that both headsets lack in the vivid color/contrast department. So it is a positive review mostly…for the 5K+ at least.
@Douglaster I talked to two other backers who tried elite dangerous on the 8K same time as me (didn’t get to try it on the 5k+), and we all agreed it didn’t blow us away in terms of fidelity (almost like the pixel pattern/layout detracted from it looking as natural) and much preferred their experience in the lab on the 5k+ but admitted that the lab has always been a very sharp/clear experience so it wasn’t an apples to apples comparison perhaps.
If you did not have a vive and had to decide to get the Pimax 5k+ full package or the Vive Pro full package (lets say at the same price) what would you buy?
Thanks for your honest first impressions. I’m yet to see one reviewer matching Swevivers enthusiasm. It’s all pros and cons. Nice to read some real impressions instead of all the hype surrounding this thing
I didn’t try it because they all said the displays seemed low quality but the hand tracking was great at least. I think about a dozen showed up in total before I left around 12:30. Sorry about the wall of text, I was at work and just wanted to knock out the thread.
If you didn’t care about vivid colors and brightness/contrast overall, I would say the 5k+ hands down for the FOV and SDE improvements and lighter weight over the vive alone. Obviously the holy grail is 8K native res oled panel with full RGB vertical stripe panel.
Many of us backers at the event talked about how all these performance concerns could be eliminated if developers simply made use of all the tech available but then less incentive would exist to buy new expensive graphics cards if things like vulcan, dx12, dlss, smp, fixed foveated rendering, space/timewarp could breath an extra year or two life into your existing cards plus the developer SDK licensing costs. Hopefully these things come down the pipe sooner rather than later as I see a huge boost in VR with SMP simply checked on in iracing.
I think if the newly announced Samsung headset due next year actually had a FOV like the pimax, it would be the best headset to go with but alas they chose to go with traditional 110 it seems.
As for kellerbach’s question, I have the regular vive and while both Pimax headsets are better in terms of weight, FOV, and SDE, in terms of overall fidelity/clarity I wasn’t wowed and neither were many other backers who tried elite dangerous on the 8K who were all rift and regular vive owners and were familiar with the game, the one that did in terms of a clear increase in clarity was the 5K+ however but we didn’t get to try elite dangerous in that one, only the lab on the 5k+ and bigscreen beta so we don’t have a perfect comparison here either.
It does seem as if the 8K is not the ideal choice as an allround headset, at least with the current firmware (and betting on an update to resolve the issues is a pure gamble). 5K+ seems to have the edge.
But was the clarity in Elite on say the text below the three energy pip columns (Weapons, Engines, Systems) not substantially better readable even with the 8K?
On which GPU was it running ? Was it fed by a laptop or desktop PC ?
I am curious. you are backer # 82 according to the spreadsheet, yet you have not yet made a decision on which headset to get, nor have you stated the day you received the survey email. I am wondering if you have chosen to receive everything at the same time. You seem to want it badly as evidenced by your many posts in here. Of course it is all your business and none of mine It just seems inconsistent to me.
The only laptop they had there was purely running the new 5ks oled model with hand tracking. The 8K and 5K+ used desktops with either a 2080 or 1080 if memory serves. I can’t say how much clearer the 8K was than the vive in terms of the items in elite dangerous you asked about as we didn’t have those for side by side comparison but I can imagine the 8K would be clearer in those items than the vive, but I still think the 5k+ is even clearer if we had tried elite dangerous on it today. Having said that, none of those familiar with 1st gen headsets and that game were blown away by the clarity…we expected more or at least equality especially considering the 5K+ present that day was more impressive.