first, i only tried beat saber and theBlue for 5min each. I do own both game and tried them on my Vive and Rift on the same day, this is how i compare 8K to them :
+++ FOV is fantastic, hard to go back
++ Lens felt great, lighted pixel text are much easier to read. Artefacts-free and no God ray.
Resolution didn’t really felt improved but since i was not able to see individual colors i guess it does mean the resolution was better somehow.
. SDE felt about the same or slightly better. But just like Rift and Vive it’s here and you notice it well on whitish colors.
You can’t look around by moving your eyes but it’s clearly something which cant be done with angled screen, this might get a bit better with eye tracking in future though.
– If you move your head you can notice the high FOV area have incorrect distortion, however it was not an issue with the lens at all, seems more like a software rendering challenge along with some eyes positioning calibration, IPD is likely not enough, and likely game engine need to be adapted for multiple angled viewpoint rendering to tackle it well.
— The colors are less vivid, the black less deep. This actually is the only real setback compared to old gen.
overall the hardware felt solid to me, the only thing i wish was better were the colors and black levels (looking forward to see if 5k+ is better on this without too much trade-off) but they are not going to change the screen at this stage so i would say green light. I’m happy to see they don’t have old generation issues and whatever issues they have now make sense ( as per they won’t be able to solve it overnight and will need developers support ) so i think Pimax did a good job.
i won’t be able to test the 5K+ as I’m in Tokyo.
The aliasing and color grading on the lines of the text let me felt the text were at least rendered with similar PPI as the Rift/Vive, but the lighting effect of the text however felt significantly less glowing and my guess is this is thanks to the lens.
The reason could be something else but it won’t be with such two short demo that we can truly tell, hoping the M1 tester will give clarity on this on 16th September.
either the game was running undersampled or the resolution bump wasn’t big enough for me to say. i tried the 8k and the Vive with 1h between the two, maybe people who try it within few minutes interval can notice the resolution difference much more.
I would advise to wait on the 16th September to know the real deal , what i layed out, while 100% honest, is just the first time impression and in no way a rigorous comparison.
i was surprised also that so many people said the SDE is better, some people even said is gone.
The screen is less bright, the pattern maybe more pleasant and of course the high FOV aera mostly free of it which help SDE but when i looked at a whitish color in front of me and checked the pixel fill i didn’t felt it was in a different category from old gen.
About sde, may it is about incorrect configuration.
Because some 8k is worse than 5k.
They had 2 8Ks there, and one I tried apparently was not configured correctly, because the image (not the display) actually looked more pixelated to me than the 5K, somehow the antialiasing was turned off too. Some people who tried both 8Ks said the other one looked better. Based on that information I cannot really make a definitive decision whether the 5K or 8K is better, but I would probably pick the 5K, for reasons mentioned in a previous comment.
if you are in Tokyo you could compare to the StarVR wide FOV headset, a SEGA in Shinjuko Kabukicho has 3 Stations with StarVR headsets
1 Chome Kabukichō, Shinjuku-ku, Tōkyō-to 160-0021, Japan
35.695095, 139.701523
if you stand on the enrance to the TOHO cinema its direct to the left
price its still 1200 yen for ~15 minutes
afair they opened the VR area from 3pm to 10pm
there also was another vr arcade a littel bit down the raod to the left (from the sega) they offered a ghost in the shell arise experiance that seemed to be based on an open area and backpack pc’s but they told me its only once a week and i missed that day