Here are some initial impressions with the 3 games I’ve tried so far. I’ll compare to the Rift since I used that primarily prior to this. Note: I have a 1080ti and i7 4790K:
To start, I only tried the 8K for a few minutes and it looked very similar to the 5K+, just a bit worse aliasing and a different pattern to the SDE. It didn’t give any benefits that I could see so the rest of my impressions are of the 5K+:
Robo Recall: The wide FOV, reduced SDE and increased resolution were quite noticeable, especially on distant objects. I had to turn off supersampling to get it to run smoothly, but still didn’t notice any jaggies.
Batman Arkham VR: I turned on the Nvidia Multi Res with a 30% res for outer and left the inner at 130% supersampling. Still wasn’t quite as buttery smooth as the Rift was but it was certainly playable and looked very good with the increase in res, increased FOV, and decreased SDE.
Arktika.1: This is the game I was most worried about since there are some very dark scenes and the Pimax is LCD. It wasn’t as bad as I feared though. The completely dark areas did have a white haze to it, which decreased immersion, but once any light source was on, it was back to looking better than Rift. I did have to turn to medium settings instead of extreme though to get things smooth.
I’ll update more as I try more out, and tweak the settings, I haven’t played around at all with the various resolution settings in the pitool and steamvr yet. I also have a Samsung Odyssey + on the way so I’ll compare to that once I get it as well.
Edit: Just tried Lone Echo on the Pimax then the Oculus right after… wow, the FOV difference is huge when you look at it back to back like that. The oculus looks like you’re looking through binoculars whereas the Pimax seemed almost natural.
Edit 2: I just got a chance to try out Elite Dangerous, switching between the Oculus and Pimax. Once again, the FOV was the biggest thing I noticed when going from Pimax back to Oculus. When you first put on the Oculus, it’s pretty jarring how small the FOV is, and the binocular overlap looks strange because there’s portions on either side of the FOV that can be seen by only one eye in an unnatural position. The pimax feels so much more natural in that regard. I loaded up the first tutorial and looking through the Oculus, can only see the three middle HUD elements without moving my head, while with the Pimax I can see all 5 at once (the text blocks and sys, eng, and wep bars). The text is also much clearer, on the Oculus there is fringing on the edges that isn’t there on the Pimax, and it is easier to read small text without leaning toward it. I don’t notice the worse colors and black levels as much as a game like Arktika.1, at least on what I saw, since there was always some light source and it wasn’t totally dark.
