It’s in the title really. I was expecting support for Direct Mode as a given, is this something we need to worry about?
Of course it will support steamVR direct mode. What makes you think it wouldn’t ?
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The fact that I saw a couple of Direct Mode related support queries re the Pimax 4K when scouring the forum as well as a user asking on KS and in this forum, if he should worry about the horizontal res max limit of his GPU, as he is already running 2x 1440p monitors. Pimax reply was that they honestly don’t know if this would be causing issues; my understanding is that Direct Mode completely detaches the HMD from any monitor based arrangements, so if Direct Mode is supported then Pimax should be confident that there aren’t any GPU based max horizontal res limitations.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. But you might have read something about the ‘Driver direct’ mode. There’s great confusion among those 2, since they’re both called ‘direct mode’, which is some very unlucky naming …
- There’s “display direct mode”, this is what the average user talks about when he’s talking about ‘direct mode’. This is a mode where the HMD is not presenting itself as a 2nd monitor but has direct access to SteamVr.
- There’s also a “direct mode” in the driver model, this is something completely different than the “display direct mode”, it’s totally unrelated. This is when a driver does not use SteamVR for rendering but does its own rendering. Pimax is using this ‘direct mode’ as of v1.2 in their piplay sofware. Valve is calling this: “IVRDriverDirectModeComponent”
Since there were tons of problems when Pimax changed their renderer from SteamVR to their own implementation, there’s quite a bit of talk on this ‘direct mode’ here on the forum too. You might have read that, I’m not sure …
Anyway, dont worry here, it will surely support the direct mode you’re interested in (it will also support the other, but that’s a different story)
Btw, about the difference of those 2, you can read more about it here:
Cannot enable "Direct Mode" with IVRDriverDirectModeComponent implemented · Issue #431 · ValveSoftware/openvr · GitHub (see the 5th post there)
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The Fruit Ninja and BigScreen demos on the Pimax 8k in San Francisco earlier this month at least were running in direct mode unless they somehow hid the “running in extended mode” prompt.
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Cheers for the reply, appreciate it!
Yes, I was referring to the Direct Mode I am accustomed to from my Rift and Vive, so that’d be option 1)
As my understanding of the workings of that mode matches your description, it should be completely irrelevant at what res monitors attached to the PC at the same time as the HMD are running, right? The HMD is not being treated as another monitor after all…
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That’s indeed exactly how it works.
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Wicked!
So I guess it’d be nice if someone alleviated the OP’s question pertinent to exactly this topic in the follwing thread:
http://community.openmr.ai/t/2-1440p-desktop-with-8k-headset-simultaneously/3646/4
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I replied, I’m not sure what I think of his post, he’ll need to give some more info to find out what he’s actually asking.
Well I hope pimax does allow for Direct “driver “ mode , yesterday I thought I’d give project cars a run just for fun ,I guess there was a major update on steam or maybe the the game itself I don’t know but now I’m running everything in ultra settings Anti-aliasing @9x and super sampling 4.0 and it runs fine ! That is all on a 980ti by the way incredible ,
steam VR just keeps improving it’s amazing ! Forgive my enthusiasm I own a vive I couldn’t even run that game on medium settings without problems two months ago .
I do not want to steal this topic, but is it possible to use the Pimax as a primary monitor, without my “normal monitor” connected? If so, that would be great (i think).
You can but far from ideal