Pimax 5K+ spotted after a 16 month hiberation.... First impressions

[anton_Chez]

Well, it's here. The Pimax 5K+ headset I backed on Kickstarter in October 2017 has finally made it from the depths of hell and everywhere else in between to my house in Australia. What a ride it's been.

To start, the box is fairly nice, nothing too fancy but definitely of Rift quality, nothing flimsy or cheap. The smell is actually like a brand new paid of shoes! I'd say that's the padding. Anyway who cares about the box, hey?

Upon fitting the strap, I was horrified at the comfort. Only after I messed around with it a little bit did I feel I could actually make it work. It's not as intuitive as the Rift but it's workable for me at least. One thing that's immediately struck me is I've nearly got my nose poking through the lenses from the inside out. My face is literally ON the lenses. We are going to have to order custom cushions. It's insane that they've left this unaddressed. I think additional face cushions are a stretch goal reward but I've not see them being any different to the standard one. We need thicker pads, Pimax. I have a small face and a not so overly large nose and I'm struggling. If it turns out my IPD is able to have the lenses moved to the outside of the headset I might just get away with it.

The strap does tighten on your face pretty well. I did not expect that based on other feedback. It's not ski mask type like the Rift but it does have the ability to stick to my face and feel pressure so there's some modular possibilities there especially for larger faces that won't need to tighten the straps as much. Between the side and top strap you should be able to get the HMD sitting nice and flat on your face without any tilting at least while sitting down.

I've yet to power it on so I'll go and do that now. One thing you'll notice is you need an additional power point for this. It comes with an external power source that plugs into the PC side of the cable. It isn't recognised by the PC unless you power it on.

 

[anton_Chez]

Well that's the only way to know. If you have the best stuff, you can't really worry if the performance is still not perfect. At least you know. Expensive but! A 9900K and motherboard to suit would have ran me over a thousand Aussie dollars.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Well that's the only way to know. If you have the best stuff, you can't really worry if the performance is still not perfect. At least you know. Expensive but! A 9900K and motherboard to suit would have ran me over a thousand Aussie dollars.

If it helps I ran just over a thousand USD, but I got a pretty nice MB with 4 x8Gb DDR4 that I can add a couple NVMe drives to later and got another Noctua NH-D15 cooler.

 

[RobertR1]

I got a 9900k mainly because I don’t want to upgrade my core (cpu/mobo/ram) for another 5 years.

The nocuta will mean your vcore in bios is limited to about 1.35v or below. Otherwise you’ll hit temp and thermal throttling.

VR issues come from unoptimized rendering pipelines and the need to oversample rather than other things. It should improve overtime. If you look at the xtal video from sweviver, that’s a perfect example of an optimized experience in VR.

 

[anton_Chez]

My Evo 212 air cooler is keeping my 9600K around 90-95C at the most intense loads. Normally it sits around 70C even with 1.4v+ into it. I've had this thing for over 8 years and it's the only thing I've never upgraded since getting back into PC's in 2011.

 

[Tim Palmgren]

@RCHeliguy AC was bottlenecked hard for me on an i5 6600k at 4.4ghz, primarily due to AI and the Shaders Patch / Sol these are fairly compute heavy and then the AI piles even more load on. I run a NLM V3 with associated software, crewchief, Simucube software and simhub all in the background.

I did an intermediate upgrade to a second hand 7700K as I could utilise the same motherboard/ram/etc, (but I did have to upgrade to a 240mm radiator and AIO to cool it properly at 4.9ghz). The upgrade bought me performance in both AC and RF2 as well as some other titles and it is paired with a gigabyte windforce 1080ti.

The performance gain in AC due to shader/SOL was actually ridiculous. In the order of 50fps up to 90fps at the same settings, meaning that it was fully choking out the threads.

 

[Tim Palmgren]

My Evo 212 air cooler is keeping my 9600K around 90-95C at the most intense loads. Normally it sits around 70C even with 1.4v+ into it. I've had this thing for over 8 years and it's the only thing I've never upgraded since getting back into PC's in 2011.

@anton_Chez mate....you don't want your cpu even climbing to 90....I would be upgrading cooling even if it is tickling 80.....that cooler should have been binned for a noctua or some sort of dual radiator long before now!

 

[RobertR1]

@anton_Chez mate....you don't want your cpu even climbing to 90....I would be upgrading cooling even if it is tickling 80.....that cooler should have been binned for a noctua or some sort of dual radiator long before now!

Intel CPU’s in recent generations will self thermal throttle. 90’s for the 9xxx series isn’t an issue. However, Dumping a lot of vcore/as/vicious will create silicon degradation however.

 

[anton_Chez]

It's a hunk of metal with 2 aftermarket fans attached in push pull. How much better can another air cooler be?
It's always served me well, and for the type of OC'ing I do, it's completely fine. I'm not a 'hold a CPU / GPU for 10 years' type person, so it is what it is.

 

[Mark Burton]

I just recently upgraded from a 6600K to a 9600K. I don't know for sure if it's made a massive difference as I've only done one race with it with stock content. But it was with 27 real drivers in VR and the experience was absolutely perfect. For me. I'll need to test it with a full grid of real people on a server with the V8Corsa mod on a mod track to really test out if it's made the difference I was hoping for, but so far, it's been really good.

I was running fpsVR while driving and I was getting anywhere between 25 - 40% CPU usage. While driving the mods online with the 6600K I was getting 90%+ CPU usage and the experience was very sub par. I don't understand why the CPU is hammered so much by being online but it was making it hard to race especially when I knew that it wasn't like that offline.

On the server last night, it might have been my best racing experience I've ever had. 45hz smoothed LOCKED and around 20M pixels per eye being rendered (equal to around 200 - 250% SS on the SteamVR slider). I'm not sure if it was actually hitting a wall and just not rendering that amount of pixels and that's why the frames were still really good, but the main thing is the overall image appeared perfect.

I doubt that going from an i5 to an i7 is going to make a difference at all for VR. The good thing is the new i5's now have 6 cores instead of the old ones that had 4 so it helps to make up some of the difference anyway. I've read people upgrading from i5 to the i7 and they haven't seen a tangible increase in performance, when searching whether it was worthwhile for me to upgrade to a new gen CPU. I mean bare minimum I have received 400Mhz on the core in clock speed, so there's that. I only thought about upgrading when I saw such a high CPU usage online and knew that it wasn't that bad offline.

Hi mate, quick question. How are you getting 45hz? I only see an option for 64, 72 and 90? I’m probably being stupid but this is all new to me!!

 

[anton_Chez]

Nah man all good. When you enable Smoothing, the frame rate gets halved but the HMD still is able to output the 90hz via Brainwarp. That's the same as the ASW feature of Oculus. So if you choose 90hz with smoothing and push the graphics and supersample rate high enough the graphics card will only render 45hz all the time but the HMD will still output the 90hz because of Brainwarp. It's like a fake 90hz if you're not familiar with it. I use the 90hz option and then jam the supersample slider super high so that there's no way the graphics card can ever attempt to run native 90hz, thus the locked 45hz remains.

 

[RobertR1]

Can you notice a PQ diff running SS at 200% or above? you're editing your vrsettings.ini to make sure steamvr is rendering that resolution?

 

[anton_Chez]

Hmmm not really Rob. You get to a point where it looks great going up over 100% but over 200, you're having to run smoothing so the image slightly suffers anyway. The % numbers don't really mean much though person to person. You have to pay attention to the actual resolution. I've played with so many settings that affect what the res is at a given % that it makes my mind boggle how anyone makes sense of it all.

 

[Tim Palmgren]

It's a hunk of metal with 2 aftermarket fans attached in push pull. How much better can another air cooler be?
It's always served me well, and for the type of OC'ing I do, it's completely fine. I'm not a 'hold a CPU / GPU for 10 years' type person, so it is what it is.

I noticed a significant increase in thermals going from 6600k to 7700k, and from what I hear 8 and 9 aren't running any cooler. I ran the 6600K with no problem on O/C stress tests without it going over 65deg on a single 120mm AIO, but when I stress tested the 7700K it would ping through the 90s as soon as it hit load within 1-2 s. Soon as I threw in a 240MM radiator thermals were completely stable again and only OCCT loading every core will push it past 70deg, no game will get it past 65.

I'm just saying the CPU's from 8 years ago ran a lot cooler. If you are getting temps in the 90's then IMO the EVO isn't up to the task and should probably be on the upgrade list...

 

[anton_Chez]

It all depends what you value. I don't care how hot the CPU gets under Prime loading. It's never going to touch anywhere close to that in a real world usage for me. If I'm under the spec'd thermal limit for the chip while thrashing it, all good for me. I know my volts are holding me back anyway so temps are not causing any loss of performance. If I knew I was hitting a thermal wall well below 1.4v than I might consider. That said, cheap AIO solutions are said to not even be worth it compared to their air cooling counterparts. Whether that's true or not I've not dug into fully.

I understand your concern, but do not share the same sentiment regarding my current setup.

Anyway, back on topic, just had an amazing race in rF2 with 64hz enabled, no smoothing and around 10M pixels per eye, PP enabled of course. Such a great experience at Spa, 20 drivers and barely a hitch over 60 mins. Might be my best rF2 experience to date. I had to use Small FOV to get the picture quality up to that res on my 1080Ti (PP makes me make this sacrifice) but a 2080Ti owner would be able to run Normal FOV with my same settings basically for free.

Rob, I'd seriously consider giving it another shot. You can really achieve some nice visual clarity if you get the right settings. I mean that was a mod track too (aren't they all in rF2??) and it looked and ran fantastic. Online, nonetheless.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

My Evo 212 air cooler is keeping my 9600K around 90-95C at the most intense loads. Normally it sits around 70C even with 1.4v+ into it. I've had this thing for over 8 years and it's the only thing I've never upgraded since getting back into PC's in 2011.

Holly thing, what load do you use to get there?
I can only get into high 80s with Cinebench torture, 9900K all cores at 5Hz, this is with 240mm AIO.

May be time to clean that radiator.

 

[RobertR1]

It all depends what you value. I don't care how hot the CPU gets under Prime loading. It's never going to touch anywhere close to that in a real world usage for me. If I'm under the spec'd thermal limit for the chip while thrashing it, all good for me. I know my volts are holding me back anyway so temps are not causing any loss of performance. If I knew I was hitting a thermal wall well below 1.4v than I might consider. That said, cheap AIO solutions are said to not even be worth it compared to their air cooling counterparts. Whether that's true or not I've not dug into fully.

I understand your concern, but do not share the same sentiment regarding my current setup.

Anyway, back on topic, just had an amazing race in rF2 with 64hz enabled, no smoothing and around 10M pixels per eye, PP enabled of course. Such a great experience at Spa, 20 drivers and barely a hitch over 60 mins. Might be my best rF2 experience to date. I had to use Small FOV to get the picture quality up to that res on my 1080Ti (PP makes me make this sacrifice) but a 2080Ti owner would be able to run Normal FOV with my same settings basically for free.

Rob, I'd seriously consider giving it another shot. You can really achieve some nice visual clarity if you get the right settings. I mean that was a mod track too (aren't they all in rF2??) and it looked and ran fantastic. Online, nonetheless.

Gonna see how ACC 1.0 is before trying out RF2 again. Don't have much time for multiple sims at this stage

 

[anton_Chez]

"My Evo 212 air cooler"

No rad, just heatsink and 2 fans. I'm running high voltage to stabilise 4.9 and some memory OC, that temp is with a Intel Burn Test. Even Prime95 doesn't really get it that high for most of the run. ITB hits it hard and fast.

Gaming sees it around 70C. So clearly nothing to worry about. I'm still playing with voltages and clocks so if I am able to get it down lower, 1.375 maybe, and stable then obviously it will help temps and I'll leave it there. I'm on an 18 hour bench now so I have to go and check on it!

 

[RCHeliguy]

A heatsink with 2 fans like the NH-D15 is about as good as it gets short of a custom tank system or exotic radiator. In addition it offers cooling to the DRAM as well. I'm a big fan of the NH-D15

http://www.relaxedtech.com/reviews/noctua/nh-d15-versus-closed-loop-liquid-coolers/3

 

[anton_Chez]

Ok dudes perhaps let's leave the random hardware stuff alone for now and refocus to help future and current Pimax users.

 

[anton_Chez]

Righto fellow Pimax users and followers alike, today is a great day! Why you ask? Studio 397 have officially patched out the requirement for parallel projections in PiTool and Pimax headsets. What does this mean? It means (hopefully) we can actually drive the title with a decent level of performance and image quality.

You'll need to adjust a few values in the player.json file, and currently there is a bug that affects the view of the cockpit, but it's a great step in the right direction. See this forum post to solve the issue in cockpit (for the time being until S397 issue a fix) but beware the scale of the cockpit is out of sync with the game world. Nonetheless it's a good way to actually test the patch without destroying your vision for a day or two.

Some things to note re rF2. This fix has not addressed the low GPU usage issue we are still facing which is a shame. I doubt it's anything the boys at S397 can actually fix, however. This seems it's down to a Pimax / Nvidia level issue and let's hope it's not left to Nvidia solely to sort out. I'd much rather it be a PiTool / Pimax issue that anything else.

I've recently bought the Reiza pack, also. Imola is INCREDIBLE and runs like an absolute DREAM. They really know how to squeeze an engine to give them what they want, do Reiza Studios. Amazing work. Hitting 90hz (single 720s on track, High game settings, but running lower resolution than normal, more on that below) Even sitting in pits and it's just awesome feeling rF2 at it's full 90hz potential. It's so smooth I'm going to be dreaming about it. Grab the pack, it's on sale and worth the money for the 4 Imola versions alone. Great race track, have a race there tomorrow night which I'm very much looking forward to.

Some other findings with some recent playing with SteamVR, PiTool and the HMD in general. I've tossed up and actually been using different configs for a while now (hz options, smoothing vs non smoothing, FOV, etc) and come to a small revelation. I've been running SteamVR at an effective render target of around 5.5M pixels the past few days, with no smoothing enabled and 72 - 90hz options. This render target is effectively the recommended resolution by SteamVR and would be pretty close to the 'native' res of the Pimax. There really isn't a perfect number here because of a few reasons but it's the lowest I've ever ran the res at since initially getting the Pimax in hand. It's given me some perspective. The image quality is SUPER good even at this seemingly low resolution. Which is a great thing for achieving better hz options overall. I'd recommend people drop smoothing for the time being if you're using it. turn the sliders down to achieve around the 5.5M pixel per eye count, and go run some laps in your favourite sim. Share some thoughts on what you find. I was pleasantly surprised but what I was seeing.

Overall it's great to see things moving in the right direction as the HMD continues to mature and more people get their hands on it. I very much think it's being mistakenly ignored by a lot of the people looking to move on from their first gen headsets, with most people looking at the Reverb and Index for an upgrade path. The Pimax 5K+ and 8K headsets are fantastic sim racing options and I hope more people wise up to that fact.

Hope to hear some thoughts in the coming days from you guys.