My impressions of the 8K Plus

I didn’t pay any attention to subtle temp differences, sorry

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Who, me? Why, yes; Not only do I know, but I can see it with my own eyes, being an index owner.

…and it is this knowledge that formed the basis for my numbers above:

Repeating: The index has screen/lens assemblies that are canted 5° each, and the corresponding number for the p8k/5k series is 10°.

So setting the index lenses into adapters for the pimax would increase their canting, from their previous placement, by 5° on either side, adding that much FOV in the periphery, to either side, and taking away equally much in the binocular overlap area (boo!).

Then, you have the concave “nailclippings” in each cardinal direction, in the index, where you can see the edge of the screen, making the last bit of the lens show only the black of the inner wall of the “eye tube” – the larger screens of the 8k/5k should reasonably cover those thin slivers, so that you get imagery in them, instead of just black.

Hence 120°, and perhaps even a tiny bit more…

EDIT: I thought the (non-BE) Pimax 4k already had the 4k resolution?

Just threw up a sell ad for my 5k+, by the way, to see whether I can offset at least the taxes on my recently ordered 8kX… :7

Noticed there were other sellers, who were rather more… shall we say “optimistic” than me, in their asking price, and who were pre-emptively declining “shameless offers” in their product descriptions, so I figured I might as well add a fifty bucks “haggling room” buffer to my “starting” price, given it sounds like haggling will happen. It’s going to interesting to see how that goes. :stuck_out_tongue:

Even with that buffer, I am still valuing my HMD way under even the lowest asking one of those others, even though mine is with base stations and wands, and their’s only the HMDs – I guess they are either really, really, really impressed with their headsets, or just underhandedly trying to pass a lemon on at minimised loss to self… :7

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Just wanted to give a small update, as today i bought the Aerofly fs 2 Flight Simulator which i played at the meeting.
I completed the flight school in the same plane, and besides the fact that it is serious fun, i really miss the 8K Plus :frowning:
Reading the controls is of course possible, but very blurry, and reading the small plate to the left of the head is pretty much impossible from the normal distance.
The image of the 8K Plus is so much better than this, that i am thinking about buying it and sell it once my 8K X arrives :thinking:

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Awesome to hear this… Thanks so much for the update! Now if someone could just put me into a medically induced coma until the end of the month that would be great!!! [;]-)

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“For dummies” this is his 8K at home

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For any of the guys who got to try out the 8K+ or 8KX I have a question. I own the 5K+ and was wondering if the improved graphics on the 8K+ eliminates some or most of the shimmering/aliasing that’s so prominent in the 5K+. So many titles I have struggle with details in the distance. My hands or the weapons in my hands, or objects up close look phenomenal, but pretty much everything else in the distance is either slightly blurry or shimmering. I’ve tried with AA on or off, and with supersampling up a bit, but that tends to make graphic heavy games run like crap even on my 2080ti. I also notice that when mirrored on my monitor, games look so much sharper and smoother than inside the headset. I’m wondering if the 8K+ or 8KX improve these details and eliminate the aliasing/shimmering?

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While I have tried neither, I might be able to offer some guidance.

The 8K+ has the same res as your 5K+, so it won’t help with “details in the distance”. I have an 8K and the shimmering is present, but somewhat blurred. I would assume that the 8K+ will be noticeably better, in terms of reduced SDE, but will be blurrier than your 5K+.

If you can afford it, the 8KX is the better choice. It should reduce the shimmering/aliasing and increase the details (probably most noticeable in the distance of driving games or reading cockpit gauges). It will have the same barely-visible SDE as the 8K+. What you see on your monitor will probably be most similar to the 8KX, due to the increased resolution.

The downsides to the 8KX (compared to 8K+) are reduced refresh rate (at native res), the cable length is currently limited to 5m, and higher price-tag. If you need a faster refresh rate for some games, you can run it in scaled mode (same res as 5K+, 8K, and 8K+), so the refresh rate is probably a wash, but note that this will increase the shimmering/aliasing and blurriness.

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Thanks for the info. I ordered a 8KX. One more question, do you typically enable a custom resolution in The SteamVR settings, or do you leave it unchecked? I typically leave it unchecked and only raise up the PiTool Render Quality depending on the game.

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You’re welcome. That’s the way I used to run SteamVR and it’s a simple way to get good results.

I read (somewhere on this forum) that you can get clearer graphics if set PiTool quality at 1.0 and you manually set SteamVR to either 25%, 50%, or 100% and leave the App video at 100%. You can only get 25% exactly by editing a SteamVR settings file, so I’m currently using 50%. I only have a factory-overclocked 2080, so I had to lower my App setting (in SteamVR) to 80% to get an acceptable framerate in Elite D. I’m honestly not sure that it’s actually any better than what I use to see.

Have you changed the maxRecommendedResolution setting in SteamVR’s configuration file? If not, Large and Medium FOV are probably not as clear as they could be. This is most noticeable when PiTool Parallel Projection compatibility mode is enabled. It makes a big difference.

That config file is here: C:\Users\ your user name \AppData\Local\openvr\steamvr.vrsettings

It defaults to 4096. It should be at least 8192 (2x4096), but I have mine set to 12288 (3x).

I envy you. I’d love to upgrade, but due to a number of major unexpected expenses, I will have to wait a while to order one.

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I always thought that the shimmering (very prominent in Elite) was a combination of two factors:

  1. aliasing (or bad antialiasing) in the game engine
  2. uncompensated jitter in the tracking

I guess, rendering at the higher res (and displaying in higher res as in 8K-X) could help, but would expect it still be present, until the engine does some work to. In particuar wrt aliasing and jitter tracking.

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I got much less aliasing in most situations with my wmr headset and good supersampling with my 8k so it’s not the engine, i think it will be fine with the 8kx

Elite is bad for anti-aliasing in some parts, it was very bad when the game first came out, especially on orbital lines, they did fix some parts like orbital line but never fix all of the problems, mostly on space stations.

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I had thought it was the engine creating the shimmer but I’ve noticed on my monitor it’s less prominent and that games always look substantially better than inside my 5K+. Obviously it’s hard to compare the lower resolution of the 5K+ to a 4K monitor and also having those screens an inch away from my eyes. With the native 4K resolution of the 8KX, I wonder how much of the aliasing is diminished. I’m sure the engines that some games are built upon make it worse. Valve’s creations always have a very minimal amount of aliasing. The moondust demo, the Lab, and even their steamVR home creations have very little aliasing/shimmer. I really wonder how those will look on the 8KX.

I’m not sure about “blurrier” - I mean, the improved upconversion works really well - sure there isn’t more actual detail, the source image is still 1440p, but a good upconversion algorithm can interpolate between pixels, and can sense edges and things and make them sharper (a bad algorithm can go way overboard with that though).

This is what you get with a really zoomed in image:

If you look at the text plate in the upper-left corner, the text is actually readable on 8K+ but not on 5K+ (but even more readable on 8KX)

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It was a painful purchase on the wallet, but I factored in selling my 5K+ once the 8KX arrives. If in a few months I’m able to sell it for $400-500 (with the Vive DAS), I figure it’ll be worth it.

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Wow, that is a stunning improvement over the 5K+.

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And with the 8KX you are definitely future-proofed, you shouldn’t feel a need to upgrade VR in quite a long time

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Imo, the shimmering in ED is due to:

  1. Deferred rendering (in the game engine) which is incompatible with “true” anti-aliasing.
  2. Object models, which have many closely spaced parallel thin rods (grills and such), which is worst case for aliasing.

ED needs high levels of super sampling to get rid of the shimmer. By high, I mean 3 or 4x in both x and y, so 9 or 16 samples per pixel on screen. I actually tested this, but it’s unusable for game play (extremely low framerate).

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Going for about $300 on ebay

Sold mine 500 euros as soon as i preordered my 8kx as i figured the 5k+ would take quite a hit price wise in the near future
I’m left without a headset, but i could partly finance my 8kx

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