Official Pimax 5K/8K Recommendations

[Ralf]

vorpX now officially supports Pimax 5K/8K headsets (vorpX 19.1.1 and above). For the best experience please check these recommendations.

Brainwarp Settings

• Compatible with parallel projections: has to be ON.
• Compatible With Vive Only Game: has to be OFF.
• Turn on smart smoothing: should be OFF to avoid judder
• Refresh Rate: 72Hz: not necessary, but reduces CPU/GPU usage.
• Field of View: Small: better performance, still provides very decent ~130° horizontal FOV, also helps with games that have a hardcoded FOV limit

Render Quality Settings

• PiTool: Rendering Quality: 1.0 (default)
• SteamVR: Video: Manual Override: 50%

These settings produce a large enough headset render target to play games at common vorpX resolutions.

The above was tested with a 5K+, for Pimax 8K SteamVR quality at 50% might already be overkill. Try 30-40% instead.

Game Resolutions

In contrast to other headsets 4:3 resolutions usually aren’t best for Pimax 5K/8K. Unless 4:3 is required for a game to work correctly (mostly Half-Life2, Portal 2 and other Source engine games), 16:10 seems to be a perfect fit for the FOV setting recommended above.

Try 1680×1050, 1920×1200 or 2304×1440. Depending on the game and your GPU these should usually provide a decent quality/performance ratio. You can also use similar 16:9 resolutions.

Conclusion

With these settings older games can be run on your Pimax even on a midrange GPU like a GTX 1070/2060 in Geometry 3D at 1200p resolutions. For more demanding games and/or higher game resolutions a faster GPU is highly recommended.

Potential performance issues like judder can be addressed by reducing a game’s resolution and/or graphics details or by switching to Z3D in vorpX, which is a lot faster than G3D.

[dellrifter22]

Nice! Glad to see you’ve got a Pimax running. My 8k finally arrived this weekend so I’ve got a lot of vorpX games testing in the days ahead. Thanks for the tips.

First impression is still not quite the resolution bump I was hoping for (perhaps a slight downgrade coming from a P4k), but the FOV is definitely larger. Yet to see how well first person games will be able to handle this increase, but early tests with Assassins Creed Odyssey (which has virtually limitless fov via ini tweak) has shown me that it can work pretty well.

A few quick observations:
– immersive screen could use increased zoom in
– edge peek could use increased zoom out
– crystal image off vs on might look better
– fluid sync seems to halve the framerate to 20 (from 40 which seems is already halved from 80 by Pitool?)
– getting severe drops from 40 down to 12 for about 20 seconds then it recovers. Happens randomly every 10 mins or so. Pitool running diagnostics? or gfx card dump?

For playing Odyssey, I really like the adjustable cinema screen which allows me to wrap the image around almost the entire fov of the Pimax. I might even prefer the way it looks compared to fullVR. The only problem being no edgepeek feature for dialogue scenes. I think it would be neat if either edgepeek could be added to cinema mode, or immersive screen mode given the increased zoom and curvature controls to match.

In general, vorpX seems to be working fine. No problems with hooking so far, and performance seems to be on par. Glad to see the Pimax may be getting some official support.

Time to test more games :)

[Ralf]

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll see what makes sense.

BTW: Check the added ‘vorpX Display Settings’ paragraph above. Judging from the handful of games I tried that way disabling async render seems to work better with Pimax (but not with other headsets!). Rock solid even at 36fps (with 72Hz PiTool refresh rate).

[tonka]

I agree about immersive, the screen is too small and you can see all the edges at least on Small, Normal is much better it seems.

[tonka]

Actually Normal is a bit better. Nicest would be to not see the edges at all.

[tonka]

Actually forget Normal, it seems to give weird problems with audio and suddenly the screen is tilted a bit and I can only move at one speed in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

[tonka]

I set Pitool back to Small and restarted SteamVR but Vorpx stayed on the Normal setting and I had to do a factory reset of the profile to correct it.

[Ralf]

Setting the FOV in PiTool does not affect vorpX profile settings. If you made changes to any vorpX profile settings, you have to change them back with vorpX.

If you are unsure what PiTool settings to choose, use the ones recommended in the original post above. They work well and ensure that everything behaves as expected.

[mr_spongeworthy]

Great to hear that Pimax support is being added. I’ve been waiting for a wide-fov HMD to become available at a reasonable price and it looks like the Pimax 5K is exactly what I’ve been sitting on my hands for.

[guillerodriguezv]

Great news that VORPX finally supports Pimax 8K (in may case). I just want to point out some configs if Ralph is willing to check it out:
– Fixed Foveated Rendering(FFR); support it please, for better performance, Smart Smoothing works perfect with VORPX.
– Immersive mode; needs more zoom in, right now it looks like cinema mode.
– Cinema mode needs vertical axis control.
For those who does not know:
– For better resolutions; config in game (menu settings), leave alone steam VR config.
– For better FOV; the same, config (ini files if necessary) games settings. Depending of your Pimax view mode (small 130, medium 150 or large 170).

I had done those setting in AC Odyssey, Bioshock 1 & 2, Farcry Primal and it looks fantastic.

Thanks Ralph.

[beatet]

Will the next version work without Parallel Projections?

[Ralf]

Probably not, but with vorpX that doesn’t matter too much since in contrast to native VR games the performance impact of parallel projection is more or less negligible. It only affects the second render pass that sends the final image to the headset (and renders the environment in cinema mode). Far more time is spent rendering the actual game, which takes just as long with parallel projection as without.

[kazansky22]

I’m getting horrible double vision in my pimax 5k+ I see this listed in the trouble shooting guide
“Game Resolutions

In contrast to other headsets 4:3 resolutions usually aren’t best for Pimax 5K/8K. Unless 4:3 is required for a game to work correctly (mostly Half-Life2, Portal 2 and other Source engine games), 16:10 seems to be a perfect fit for the FOV setting recommended above.

Try 1680×1050, 1920×1200 or 2304×1440. Depending on the game and your GPU these should usually provide a decent quality/performance ratio. You can also use similar 16:9 resolutions.”

How do I make these aspect ratios and resolutions? I don’t see anything on the in game vorpx menu to do that? Forgive my vorpx noobishness.

[Ralf]

Please enable “Parallel Projections” in PiTool, that will get rid of your double vision issues. Also set everything else up as suggested by the guide above.

How to add custom resolutions to your PC is described here.

[moarveer]

So I don’t know if it’s the latest Vorpx version or the new stable Pitool version I’ve just installed ( https://forum.pimaxvr.com/t/pitool-1-0-1-132-stable-released/20176 ) , but I’m getting much better performance with Vorpx now on the Pimax 8k.

Previously these games worked fine but had some performance issues:

Portal
Stanley Parable
Bulletstorm
Singularity

They have improved a lot, Bulletstorm looks amazing at a ridiculously high res, Stanley Parable worked surprinsingly bad even with it’s basic graphics, now it works really well but I’m capped by limited 4:3 resolutions and higher internal Vorpx resolutions say they don’t work in my computer, also I had a ton of issues with Portal, and now it’s not buttery smooth yet but works a lot better and I consider it playable.

I’m downloading Bioshock Infinite now which had several issues before, can’t wait to see if it has improved now.

Also Return to Castle Wolfenstein had some weird geometry showing at the sides of the screen before mostly close to walls, it works a lot better now with the new Vorpx version and it shows very slightly if you force it and get too close to the walls, but 99% of the time it works fine now.

Ralf, I suggest you add the link to the latest stable version on the first post, or simply mention to download the latest pitool version available at https://pimaxvr.com/pages/pitool

[Author]

Posts