Pimax 8k Updated Impressions & In-Depth Interview

Pimax 8K Series
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Hi there,

Today I was granted an exclusive 1h hands-on with the Pimax 8k in Düsseldorf Germany, in which I had the chance to try out other games than Fruit Ninja. Also, I did an interview with Ru Wang, who is the Sr. Marketing Director of Pimax!

This is my write-up!

I was really happy to be able to try out the device a bit longer this time and in a more relaxed setting than at the exhibition where other people breath down your neck to let them try as well. I tried the following:

Project Cars

YES! As a big racing game fan, this is probably a dream come true. There is no better way to play Project Cars than with the Pimax 8k. The humongous 200° FOV together with the high resolution are just made for racing games. It was tough to get me off this game, and therefore I didn’t have more time to try out a First Person Shooter. But I can only tell you: just for THAT experience, it is worth it to get the Pimax 8k. Racing fans rejoice, this one is gonna blow you away.

Frame rate was acceptable, but not super high. The game was running on an MSI Raider laptop with a GTX 1080. That’s of course a great machine, but it is still a laptop with less than idea thermals. This one screams for a high end gaming machine that can deliver high frame rates!

Big Screen

I needed to check out Big Screen since I believed the higher resolution is gonna make working in VR a bliss. Unfortunately, from this one I walked away a bit disappointed. Of course, we also had the bigger FOV which makes everything look better and makes you feel more immersed. But I was more interested in the Virtual Desktops and they still did not look as great as I had hoped for. There are of course improvements in clarity. Still, I was quite surprised about this one and I think it is good to let the community know about this. However, I must also say that we had not made any optimizations and simply loaded it up and went in.

Watching a movie from within BigScreen was great though and in the movie theater everything looked fantastic. It was also a great test to check out the god rays and they are by far not as pronounced as for example in the Oculus Rift. The lenses are truly fantastic.

The Blu

Great experience to demo the Pimax 8k’s superior resolution and FOV. Loved every moment of it. VR has never been this immersive. Nothing more to say about this one.

Then I interviewed Ms. Ru Wang, the Senior Global Marketing Director of Pimax! Really enjoyed the interview. Ms. Wang addressed the recent refresh rate discussion, we talked about the Kickstarter and their plans to sell the Pimax 8k after the Kickstarter is over, the controllers, and many more topics! If you have like 30 mins and would like to get to know someone from the higher management team of Pimax, check out the whole interview here: Pimax 8k Updated Impressions & In-Depth Interview with Ru Wang (Sr. Marketing Director of Pimax) - YouTube

Hope that was of interest to all of you, bye, Sebastian

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Sounds great, but I’m not surprised about the virtual desktops. It’s a real shame because 4K screens should be blowing everyone away. The problem is that giant FOV is stealing away to much resolution. I really feel this should have been 140 FOV with all the extra resolution that would have given. With the rift, I’m constantly removing the headset and walking away in disgust due to the poor resolution… Some things look Ok on the rift, but too much looks like a pixelated Mario Bros mess!

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Thanks for the review Sebastian

You didn’t mention if you were trying the V2 or V3 prototype?

Good to hear your comments on project cars! Finally somone has tried it!

I think by the time we get the final version and we can tweak the graphics settings in our own time I think this will be the ultimate headset for sim racing

Most people who have tried virtual desktop have said the same thing about clarity but as you say there are plenty of settings that can be changed to improve the quality

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Ok,
Just changed my pledge to an 8k.
If anyone’s interested there’s a 5k early bird available now. Didn’t want to give up my early bird but the 8k is just too much to resist based on the driving sim reviews :smile:

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Swappable lenses witj 150 degree FOV or 120 Degree FOV would make bigscreen better.

The only ways to improve bigscreen without new lenses are different rendering techniques where detail is focused on the center, greater panel utilization, and supersampling.

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Overjoyed about PCars but more disappointed than I expected regards BigScreen and clarity. Can you go into a little more detail on what felt off? Is it simply that the resolution is still too low to satisfy anything other than basic needs?

[Edit] Where are my manners? Thanks for posting :slight_smile:

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That’s a real shame about the resolution with the Bigscreen application. I might end up canceling my pledge just based on this alone since it was honestly my only use case.

How did it look? Was the text just too blurry to read? In retrospect were there any optimizations you could have made that you think would have made it better or is it entirely on Pimax for this one?

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Hey,
If you have an early bird 8k and are going to cancel, let me know so I can grab it thanks.

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Sebastian mentions in the video interview he was using the V2 prototype.

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Wouldn’t that affect the text/big screen report then?
I feel this entire review/post is kinda pointless with not enough facts, instead too much fluff and impressions. @CraggehPi

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It’s possible. IIRC after previous reviewers were similarly negative Pimax confirmed they were hoping to make tweaks to improve the experience in virtual desktop style applications.

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What’s weird about it is nobody seems to go into detail about what’s wrong with bigscreen. From the @mixedrealityTV video he mentions that he came in with high expectations and was disappointed. Wish he went into more detail about how it fell short for him.

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Being that Ru Wang is marketing director and not an engineer, she gave an awesome intervirw.

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Keep in mind with the v2 the ipd is not tweaked. Far away objects can still be clear. But text that is close up can be not as clear as convergence is off.

If someone wants to see potenial clarity if bigscreen with proper ipd should look like. Close 1 eye & see how it looks.

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Thanks Sebastian, glad to see that Project Cars actually performs to a degree which allows us to utilize the 8K !
On Big Screen: doesn‘t it come down simply to the point he mentioned in his review? If you go from 100-110 FOV to 200 FOV, almost half of your resolution is absorbed by that, and you still have not improved the resolution at all on the App like Big Screen.
So how much increase in resolution per inch do we get from a 1440 upscaled picture ? Still a bit over Rift/Vive, but not nearly enough to make a virtual floating screen look anything like that screen on your desktop, which probably has HD resolution only for this screen area.
I am afraid we all were expecting too much here and didn‘t do the simple math.
This could only see major improvement with swappable lenses to allow fir narrower FOV on the Pimax.

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@Axacuatl This is exactly right. The PPD on Pimax 8k is higher than Rift/Vive but only by a few pixels because of that 200 degree FOV. I’ve heard that Pimax at 200 degrees is about as good as a windows MR headset is at its 110 degrees. Still awesome, but tempering expectation is sage advice.

If customers had an option to choose a different distortion profile, with different lenses (like the ones Valve is now offering to partners,) you could potentially have a higher PPD for apps like Bigscreen, (as long as screen percentage stays the same through the optics.)

Higher PPD would also be great for the sim racing community (seeing further down the track.)

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Perhaps these (synthetic!) images I already posted in another thread can help to get a first idea about text readability:

There are some new infos I learned since making this comparison:
a) Pimax seems to use either very high supersampling or additional upscaling or whatever for the 8k by default - still waiting for details, but it will most likely not look like the 1440p example on the left.
b) If some additional shortcuts are involved then the GPU estimation at the bottom might be off. (This was assuming that the GPU really has to render all these pixels @90 Hz). So best take the GPU estimations with a huge grain of salt until we have more infos.

Edit: The purpose was only to get an idea about the capability to resolve details, so stuff like screen door effect etc. are not simulated.

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Thanks for the review! If its good for racing then I hope its good for flightsims…

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Bigscreen basically confirms that 8k is not doing much better than microsoft 1440p headsets or the pimax 5k, I guess you would need a 8kx to see a real difference.

I think Pimax should have stuck to one headset, the 8kx, and give the possibility to people to use upscaling or not depending on their GPU.

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Shoot, does that mean there’s no hope for a gtx 1070 laptop? Any way to set things up, so it can work there?