I did say āat least a weekā. Certainly, a month (or two) makes some sense. It depends on how desperate you are for a particular fix or feature.
Iām really getting tired of having to reinstall PiTool 272, to fix the SteamVR āheadset not foundā issue, so Iāll be installing the next version sooner than I normally would.
Just 4 feedback regarding my 5k+
Had the Pitool 271 and I think FW270 before. That version gave me an āalready up to dateā feedback for both Pitool and FW when checking for updates.
The manual install of Pitool 271 downloaded from website went flawlessly, it immediately upgraded the new FW273 on the headset. It looks all ok atm.
Tried to create a separate Topic for this, but the forum software would absolutely not allow me to do so, so here it is:
Some observations of problems with Motion Smoothing, which have become much more pronounced with the addition of the 1/3 refresh-rate mode:
PiTool seems to be, in general, far too aggressive about when to turn on supplemental frames. For example, if tune a title to get a minimum of 60 fps with motion smoothing off, and then exit and go into PiTool and turn motion smoothing on while setting the refresh rate to 90 (to maintain 45 fps @ 90hz with supplemental frames) for that title, it will VERY frequently switch to 30fps with 2 supplemental frames instead, even if Iām looking at a scene that I absolutely KNOW will render at 60fps with smoothing off. I should have plenty of overhead to stay at 45fps, but itās switching all the way down to 30fps.
PiTool will switch to 1/2 or even 1/3 refresh mode for momentary blips for texture loading: Itās being FAR to aggressive again and kicking in during what would otherwise be a micro-stutter. Instead of a tiny little blip I end up with a couple seconds of awful, low fps gaming before PiTool realizes it can ramp back up.
The ideal solution, I think, would be to give us control over 3 aspects of motion smoothing:
A) Disable the 1/3 framerate option. I will never tune a game to require this as I find it absolutely unusable. Other people may like it though, so Iām not suggesting you remove it, but I very much hope you give us the ability to disable PiTool ever entering 1/3 mode. Itās bad enough going from 90fps to 45fps for a couple seconds when a few big textures load, but going from 90fps to 30fps is infuriating.
B) Tune the āheadroomā point at which PiTool will kick into 1/2 mode (or 1/3). This would allow us to eliminate the issue where PiTool is choosing 1/3 mode when 1/2 mode would do, or even entering either of these modes before itās absolutely necessary.
C) Tune the amount of time the HMD will render a frame rate below the refresh-rate. If I could tell PiTool to āAllow Frame Rate below Refresh Rate for āXā Seconds Before Enabling Motion Smoothingā I could completely eliminate the ālow fps due to texture loadingā issue. For example, in Skyrim VR I might set āXā to a quarter second or half second. That way textures could load without the fps suffering for no reason.
Finally, later versions of PiTool Motion Smoothing definitely have a LOT more distortion and warping and weird flickering issues than earlier versions had. Maybe it feels a bit āsmootherā than earlier versions, but man, itās got a lot of issues. I very strongly suggest you look at the way vorpX provides motion-smoothing and at least give us the option of choosing a method more like that. (For those who donāt know; vorpX motion-smoothing never produces ANY in-image distortions whatsoever, but it does cause a bit of full-screen ghosting sometimes, especially on fast rotation with the stick rather rotation via. head movement. Overall there is no doubt that PiToolās smoothing feel a little smoother, but the partial-image warping it causes is enough in some titles to prevent me from using it; even causing a little bit of nausea. vorpX motion smoothing, while not quite as good at the āsmoothingā aspect, causes zero of these other issues. I would very much prefer having the option for similar smoothing through PiTool.)
My New PC (Avenger) is Stable, W10 clean Install, utilization mostly 0%, Improved latency, Vr games Installed, Base stations mounted on the towers, Index controllers charged, Pimax Vision 8K X in the box :-))))
Literally thrown from the situation because I have found (read) Pitool 270/firmware 298 were stable and easy to install but i donāt know if are good for me because i have a 3080 Ti
In any case @neal_white_iii you could try thisā¦ (instead of reinstalling everything;) perhaps works
Open SteamVR ā Settings ā choose MANAGE ADD-ONS ā
ā Put on Pimax and GamePad Support ā
ā Restart Steam VR
If the setting do not save then
ā save again ā Restart Pc ā Start Steam VR
@PimaxQuorra please ask to the pitool team about the availability of a new firmware for PITOOL 272 (?) correctly auto-installing without going in dfu mode
He can actually just press restart service and it runs again.
Hi Folks
Thanks to @mr_spongeworthy , I definitely agree with all words in this post. An option to Disable the 1/3 refresh rate will be very appreciated because smart smoothing became unusable (problem appears with pitool271) .
Before the implementation of new dedicated option(s) in future pitool software, is there any any possibilities to modify any config file to force the 1/3 off? I remember that is was possible to add a specific line in the āprofile.jsonā ( ādbg_force_framerate_halfā : 1) to force half of the refresh rates in pitool 270. It will be great if a pimax dev could give some input regarding this problem.
Thanks!
Yep, itās really made smart-smoothing completely unusable. Iām having to re-tune ALL my games so I can run them with smart-smoothing totally off. Just tried TWD Saints and Sinners and briefly wandered a scene where I fluctuated between about 85 and 90 fps with Smart Smoothing OFF. Turning Smart Smoothing ON and in that same scene it was frequently dropping all the way to 30!!! Itās just become utterly broken. I did try rolling back to 270 and that seems to work with my HMD. Only problem is that the PiTool UI seems to think there is something wrong with my Index controllers and base-stations; they blink on and off all the time under PiTool 270. But they work just fine in-game so Iāll ignore that rather than having to remove them and set them up again.
So Pimax, 1/3 framerate, either give us a way to turn it off or just remove it. Itās useless and it broke things very badly. See my longer post above for suggested solutions to Smart Smoothing issues in general.
EDIT: Just decided to rollback to either version 270 or 271 again, permanently until this issue is fixed, but this time when doing neither version of PiTool will see my HMD. So unless Iām willing to go to considerable lengths to troubleshoot it looks like Iām stuck on v272 and zero motion smoothing for the time being.
If anyone can point me to a concise guide as to all the folders and files I need to manually delete to remove v272 I would like to do so and then perform a complete clean-install of v270 or v271. Iāve been unable to find a guide detailing all the bits that will need deleted to make sure all vestiges of 272 are removed however.
I wish I could point you to a guide. You should be able to search your C: drive. Open Windows Explorer at the root and search for files (and directories) containing the word Pimax. Let the search run to completion and empty each file area that was found.
Regarding a clean uninstall, you could refer to this post:
you will find .bat script to clean all the folders.
(sorry forum do not allow me to put more than one link in the post)
There might be nothing wrong with your pitool installation. Im on firmware 273 now my 5kxr is also not recognized anymore by older pitools. When i want to use older pitools I first need to downgrade firmware:
-with pitool 272 installed(so headset will be recognized) first downgrade to older firmware using the dfu.exe. then what I did is immediatly stop pimax services or turn headset off to prevent the auto-upgrade.
-I have not tried this but without pitool 272 installed: search the forum for dfuupgrade.zip with dfusecommand.exe.
Excellent! Thank you for the tips for uninstalling completely; I was worried the usual uninstall would miss something, as is too often the case. I do seem to now have my HMD working with v270. Iāll be trying it soon.
Noooooooo! It worked absolutely perfectly for about 30 minutes, then lost connection with the HMD and now it wonāt detect again in PiTool v270. Restarted, unplugged, plugged it in. You name it.
I canāt downgrade the firmware because I have the only version of the firmware already installed that makes 90hz work properly for me.
I have this issue (sporadically). The solution I use is to reinstall PiTool 272. It will fix the occurrence, until the next time it happens. No need to uninstall or reboot PC. Remember to reset the ādisabled deviceā in SteamVR.
Yep, that basically seems to work, thank you for the tip! I did notice however that if I install 272 to get the HMD recognize again, and then 270 to make it stop doing 1/3 framerate, it will actually still do 1/3 framerate unless I restart. So basically, if the HMD is not recognized my solution for now is to reinstall 272, make sure the HMD is recognize in PiTool. Then reinstall 270 and restart. Thatās been working fairly well.
Iām glad you found the tip useful. I was even more glad when I was able to reduce the steps to fix the problem. Initially, I was uninstalling PiTool and rebooting my PC, which turned out to be an unnecessary waste of time.
I was right!!! :-)))))))))))))
Not to off-topic this, but that new 12K beast looks juicy! Sure hope it ships (close to) on time!
I see it has itās own processor in it. Letās hope that this means the Parallel Projections function can be handed off to the 12K HMD itself, rather than having to be done by the computerās GPU. That would make ALL the difference. And while itās going to be effectively impossible to play most games at the full resolution, the higher-density display will make upscaled images look better.
Anyway, back to PiTool and motion smoothing:
Rolling back to 270, as difficult as it can be, has made a huge difference. I can now run games that usually run at 90fps (TWD Saints and Sinners at 140% Pixel Density) but occasionally dip into the 80s and supplemental frames work just like the should, dropping me momentarily to 45fps and then right back when it should, rather than dropping me all the way to 30 for no reason whatsoever.
It would still be nice to be able to control overhead, time-delay, etc. But at this point I very much hope that Pimax either remove the 1/3 option or push a PiTool update that allows it to be turned off as soon as possible. Itās a nightmare.
I would strongly recommend staying away from PiTool 272 if you ever use motion smoothing.
@PimaxQuorra Can we get a fix for this please?
Edit: thanks for the update, looking forward to it!!
Hello,
Our Pitool team is actually working on the Pitool and FW version.
They are now running inspections to find out the bugs and the add-on features.
Fantastic! Thank you!! 