New SteamVR FOV Setting Needs a Pimax Driver Update (Per Valve)

Pimax Hardware P2: 8kX
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Worldscale works fine, and 99% makes things better for me in my 8KX (always thought things were too big in my Pimax headset).

Currently, the FOV setting doesn’t work correctly in the new beta, patchnotes found here:

I made a thread in Steam to note it doesn’t work here, where Valve states what I have in the title:

My goal was to have something like 130FOV as I think that’s a good sweet spot between FOV and performance. Hopefully this is fixed eventually.

Going to @ @PimaxUSA to see if this is something being worked on.

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Does this happen only when changing the default values?

Or won’t I be able to use my 8K-x properly anymore as soon as the new version is out of beta and Pimax hasn’t updated the drivers until then…?

Is there any way prevent SteamVR update meanwhile?

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Yes, if you don’t touch anything, you’ll be fine. It’s only in SteamVR beta for now. The driver update is only needed if you wanted to change the FOV to something in-between the standard Potato, Small, Normal, and Large FOVs

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Thanks :slight_smile: (20 Chats)

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What’s the difference between steam FOV and pitool fov?

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If you install Steam beta and don’t change FOV through Steam, does the world scale work just fine?

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Yes, world scale works perfectly and on-the-fly. I found 99% is good, tried comparing to a Quest 2 back and forth.

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The SteamVR FOV lets you change the percentage of FOV from 50-100%. Pitool has those 4 settings and that’s it.

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But the question always is:

How much benefit - in terms of FPS - does it give? Decreasing FOV from Pimax standard 150° “normal” FOV down to ~130°.

I think the whole VR community would have a much larger benefit, if Valve, NVidia and AMD would manage to work on a corporate standard for Fixed Foveated Rendering and the like. This way, you wouldn’t loose the peripheral sight completely by decreasing FOV, it just would get a little more blurry, which isn’t a real issue since no existing headset has a sharp crisp image all over the HMD/FOV. FPS would increase, as well.

But for the moment, I still see and fear, that due to VR still having niche character, every manufacturer is doing its own thing without taking general solutions into account: Pimax has FFR - only partially supported; NVidia introduced VRSS begin of 2020 for 24 titles - never heard of any progress or roll-out to further games there since then; and Valve “plays” around with FOV adjustments - which isn’t properly supported by non-Valve/HTC-headsets, as well. Well - and AMD still has nothing at all :wink:

I think it’s really a pity - because otherwise, VR could be far beyond its current development status and be much more established in mainstream, as well, with benefit for everybody.

Not at least because I see it when playing my different real world cockpit sim’s:
Even 4k textures still are not yet sufficient for VR real world simulation - I estimate 8K texture resolution being close to the absolute minimum. Not talking even about the general, overall headset resolution - the 8K-X is great, superb - for the moment - but still not the end of the line.

Of course, all this needs GPU performance, very much GPU performance.
So from my point of view: Any improvement in terms of FFR/VRSS or eyetracking would provide much larger and better benefits than many other options… just my humble opinion.

Well, but in the end, there certainly always is more than one way to skin a cat … :wink:

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does this mean we dont (or wont in the future) have to restart steamvr to lock in the changes when switching fov in pitool? or is changing in steamvr identical to changing in pitool so we can just do it there without restarting?

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wow it was complicated enough having to do the math to combine steam Render Quality & Pitool Render Quality.

Seems now that the same thing will need to be done with fov.

I wonder if this will allow us to keep pitool FOV on large and only mess with FOV in steam.

Also allowing low level fine tuning of world scale is great and should appease some Pimax users who cant get world scale right…

however clearly it shows that if Valve can do this. Couldn’t they also add an option also force PP off?

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Yup, I support any move to OpenXR. Its the future we all want.

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This would need some testing to see for certain but I would speculate that the FPS improvement would be small or none because for best results you need hardware support.

As for the world scale I would guess it has roughly the same affect as changing the software vertical IPD as that does affect the scale rendering.

We’ll certainly include this in our next Valve meeting and see if there is a potential tangible benefit over existing capabilities.

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You can use 8k textures right now if you’ve got enough Vram.

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I agree with what you’re saying, but you’re all over the place, lol. I’m on a 1080Ti, so I can’t use FFR, so if the new SteamVR FOV feature can help me, I’d like to use it. Maybe Pimax can learn from the feature too, allowing us to change FOV through PiTool on the fly instead of a restart, for instance.

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That’s my hope too. I usually play in Small FOV, but if I can just load up a non-demanding game and throw it into Large, that would be awesome.

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The only test I did was with a Quest 2, in the Phasmophobia lobby, keeping my head still, and I saw a difference in GPU usage (2-3%). Since the Quest 2 FOV is small already, it makes sense that it’s a small difference. I’d guess Pimax headsets would benefit more. I’ll have to test something like DiRT Rally 2.0, with lots of things to render all the time, to see if there’s a big difference, but if I can see the difference with my head still, there should be some benefit.

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Ok so if I’ll lower fov in steam vr while using normal fov in pitool, will I notice that picture is smaller/narrowed?
Or it will only cut invisible part from the sides of hmd?

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Well, if it worked with Pimax headsets, you’d notice the FOV getting smaller. It’s very noticeable with the Quest 2.

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So I’m confused. People here saying that lowering fov on steam will increase performance. That’s exactly what small or potato fov in pitool do. What’s the difference?