Just tested Elite Dangerous. Most quality settings at high, ultra, etc (will be posted later). Same stuff I was using with the Pimax 5k+ at something like 2.1 Total SR.
Pimax Vision 8kX just works with Total SR 1.5x, at 75Hz. And I went a bunch of places to be sure, including planetary rings and Jameson Memorial station.
No haze, crisp HUD like never before. Even the shadow under the spinning radar dish at the station looks like I’ve never seen it before.
Now it does touch on Smart Smoothing a bit at these settings, even in empty space. Mostly this causes the just the sky background to double frame just a little, which is not really annoying. Bumping down to 1.25x Total SR helps with that and still looks really good. NVIDIA 3xxx Ti GPU may also prove to be just enough to eliminate the need for Smart Smoothing in ED.
Then again, FDev could save us the same amount of load by eliminating Parallel Projections…
There is however a tiny bit of shimmering around some objects in the cockpit, despite something like max MSAA settings. Also I see now that the power management HUD panel really lacks any solid black regions between bars.
_
On an unrelated note, after something like a year an a half of waiting, the near-tidally-locked station I tend to use as home base at Hydrae Sector AQ-Y c11 is finally showing a bit of a sunrise. And on my way to Jameson, CMDR Legorobot saw fit to interdict my Courier with an FDL multiple times…
Maybe you’ve already put in the specs of the gear you’re using and I haven’t seen them, but could you detail their specs?
For example, if I remember correctly, SweViver is using
CPU: i9 9900K, all cores at 5,0Ghz
GPU: MSI 2080 Ti Gaming TRIO (1635 MHz / 14 Gbps factory OC), +80Mhz OC, max boost approx 2060Mhz. +250Mhz Memory OC
RAM: 32GB a 3600Mhz
I think the Pimax software needs to be optimized much more, while being more stable, We can’t always depend on buying cards that are not yet on the market; The necessary equipment is already expensive enough.
We can’t expect the developers to do that, after more than two years.
I agree that FDev won’t fix the need for Parallel Projections, however the point is that the hardware we have is capable enough, and better software isn’t too far off either.
Improvements to Pimax software aren’t going to make as much of a difference going forward. As things become more complex, as with Star Citizen, things like depth sensitive brainwarp will be more computationally expensive, negating gains made. Any doubling in performance, or SLI support by sim VR apps, will negate the need for low-framerate motion smoothing. We are in a sweet spot in time where these things are more crucial than they are now or will be again.
Octofox, I don’t know about the numbers you posted, but 1.25 PiTool, 100% SteamVR, and 1.25 HMD Quality is what I am using IIRC. Moving towards lower PiTool settings will allow SteamVR to introduce more blur, moving towards lower HMD Quality will result in more HUD graphics blurring in ED internally.
I’m sure the links you posted address this but I had a hard time trying to download them or understand those. If you don’t mind, could you say what you recommend for things like steam config resolution scale percentage, and then your recommendation of pitool render setting and steamvr as well. I only run iracing so there is not SS options with that app anymore.
If you have RTX card , play with FFR balanced that give you extra 7~10 fps in all scenarios.
My ED is quite optimized and I have stable 90 fps with resolution 3750x3150 per eye , at normal Fov. Only inside stations and engineering sites drops to ~75 fps.
(@ spec Strix 2080ti, i7 8700k)
EDIT: Intended to add, further testing shows a little bit of stutter in Coriolis stations. Ice rings require bumping down the HMD Quality to 1.0, for a Total SR of 1.25. For better or worse though, there are many hours of things to do in Elite that don’t involve those two things. The tradeoff for reducing Total SR slightly is a little more pixelation of some edges on ship flight deck and station objects. HUD graphics looks fine at both settings.
I suspect this slight quality tradeoff can be dealt with by refining NVIDIA control panel settings…
@TonytotheB Black levels are fantastic, much better than the 5k+. The improved dynamic range also makes the PiTool brightness/contrast sliders much more useful than they were with the 5k+.
@Cmorg I will post the exact settings when I get a chance. Right now I am extremely tired and have things to do tomorrow.
@Yata_PL Resolution is 3400 vertical pixels or something close to that IIRC. Ambient Occlusion is off. Last time I tried the shader fix, it didn’t help, and FFR hasn’t worked in Elite for me. I should probably try both again. Also, I am running Elite in SteamVR mode, not Oculus mode if that was what you were thinking. Performance may be better in Oculus mode, but my AFAIK overlays won’t work there.
Cool that you wrote the make it [Elite] Dark Again guide! I very much agree about the haze that FDev added.
Thanks for the post and quick review, can you comment on any perceived eye strain, Did you experience any eye strain with your 5K+ and last but not least can you tell us your approximate IPD? Thanks!
My IPD is between 60-61mm. Usually I move the IPD to 60, then 61, then rock it back just a touch to move the lenses sweet spot a bit toward my nose without the software apparently catching the IPD change. (edit: To be clear, that technique may be a bit of a superstition, as it takes a while for my eyes to adjust to headsets, it is hard to know what works/doesn’t. Also I am extremely skilled at viewing cross-eyed 3D auto/stereo pairs.)
In any case, from what I have read, I may be lucky to have an IPD within a 61-64 ideal range for Pimax headsets.
The Pimax 5k+ was tolerable compared with the Vive/Oculus I had been using before that. However, it was nowhere near as comfortable as this headset, and it will certainly be much easier to keep using VR for many hours at a time with HUD graphics and such with the Pimax Vision 8kX.
Room scale stuff is another matter though. I never had eye strain in things like Onward or Pavlov VR.
Ok cool thats reassuring. My IPD is about the same at 59 or 60 so maybe the difference in panels will help with the small but very noticeable eye strain I had in the 8K and 5K+
What are the upcoming events in the USA that I can attend to test the 8KX? I don’t want to spend another $1500+ without knowing the black levels are better
I know this is slightly off-topic and probably useless, but wouldn’t it be great to have filter film that passed all light except weak light? Tweaked for dropping grey lcd haze to black but pass through anything above that light level? That would solve the blacks problem.
