Only, that they aren’t. They claim they do, that much is true. But a headset with that resolution with minimum reocmmended GPU spec being a 970 (!) is not exactly pushing the boundaries, is it ? I really had my money on the table waiting for somebody with their hands-on reviews to give me a reason to push it to Valve. Sadly, I have to report that I read them and it left me wondering where exactly I would witness an upgrade over my current experience if I bought one.
The Index HMD seems to be a step into the right direction but slightly underwhelming as it doesn’t seem to make a leap, rather babysteps.
The Index controllers are of course superior to the Vive wands, but will they be better than the Touch ? They have more functionality, sure; but so far the reports on the last Knuckles prototypes (v3) seem to be rather mixed and I don’t expect any significant improvements in the release version.
And LH 2.0 ? For 99% of the consumers it doesn’t provide any substantial improvement over LH 1.0.
So is this a high end gaming market device ? To me it’s rather a half-baked compromise, tailored to work for a greater audience with no high-end PC, but having been priced out of range of anybody who will not then also have a high-end PC anyhow.
If once they are shipping people start to report that it is a compelling package and worthy of replacing the Pimax & co., I can still jump ship later on. But so far I am not convinced.
Don’t forget about the barrel distortion calculations, ideally you will always want to render a greater resolution that the physical one before applying the distortion calculations. So the render target will grow and remain larger than the physical resolution irrespective (until we get bent displays & rendering algorithms taking that into account right-away so we don’t require any distortions to be calculated)
Yeah. Pretty much every game I try doesn’t work until i’ve spent a few hours messing around with it. Reading forum posts. Editing config files. Trying different versions of this or that. Even buying different versions of the actual game. I have quite a high tolerance for tinkering, and it exhausts even me. What will other people think?
They have a good core product that can be sensational (when it can be made to work), but everything else is a shambles. And everything else really really matters. There is a lot of thought in marketing and design circles that the other stuff is even more important than the power/capabilities of the core product. That thinking is for good reason. Look at Apple. Personally I don’t buy/like Apple products because I believe there are more important things and I do like a good core product! But that is part of why they are successful. And even if Pimax is an enthusiast/earlier adopter grade product, and i’m the target market, they’ve got miles to go on customer experience/support/ease of use/comfort.
There is a lot of “details” which are difficult to quantify from the marketing presentation. I agree that the panel res and the FOV seem to be so yesterday, but there are still few perks I am really curious about.
For example 120Hz and potentially 144Hz mode. The ultra low persistence LCD (only 0,3 ms of the active time!), the new lenses (and their distortion), canted panels. While GTX 970 sounds more like mid-range today, I bet that trying to run Elite at 90 Hz (or even 120 Hz) on Index would bring even the high-end PC to the limit.
So in a way they are addressing the high-end PCs, with an option to have also a low end experience, they are just not pushing the FOV as much as Pimax does and I expect that other aspects like PPD, SDE or colors will be similar or better on Index (not to speak about the headset calibration and overall quality).
The last point is the whole ecosystem. I expect Index to be plug and play. If someone asks me today for an advice whether to buy Pimax or Index, I would recommend Index, but even better would be to wait how Pimax evolves (if they bring some new version) and how Index turns out when the delivery starts and the first independent reviews show up.
This unfortunately is an issue. I love my 8K for Skyrim, PJC2 and Elite, but for most of the other games I tend to use my old Rift again, especially those where I just want to spend say 15-30 minutes of casual playtime, or switch between them a couple of times. Of course it’s a downgrade visually, but i noticed that with my 8K only approach I simply couldn’t be motivated to go through the configuration efforts for any other games than those 3 mentioned upfront, where I knew I’ll easily spend 2+ hours in them once I get started. After a while I felt it was a pity I wasn’t playing around with all the other great software anymore, and re-connected my Rift to my PC…
That would be one real upside of the Index if it was visually on par with my 8K - although I would still have the downside to have to go through Revive for the Oculus games, which hurts too.