VR - Pimax 5K+ Impressions for Racing SIMS

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After gaming stereoscopically for around a decade, I finally invested in a VR HMD. I was waiting for one with almost zero screen-door effect and with a very wide FOV at a somewhat consumer-friendly price point. I ended up with the Pimax 5K+ about 6 weeks ago and have only had probably 20 hours with it on my head in all that time (due to, you know, life getting in the way).

This is just my impressions now that I have AC and PCars2 setup well. I'm running an RTX 2080 super card with a 4.4ghz quad-core liquid-cooled i7. So a pretty capable machine, but not top-end by VR standards.

First, it's absolutely a game-changer in racing titles. I'm less fond of it in regular titles, because you get about 90% of the immersions just doing plain-old traditional stereoscopic gameplay without all the problems associated with VR, of which there are many. Unfortunately the tools for traditional stereoscopic gaming are dying in favor of VR, so it's becoming increasingly difficult to game properly in traditional stereoscopic modes.

But in racing titles, there just can't be any going back. First, you probably won't need 90fps in a racing title to avoid hurling, so that means fewer quality compromises etc. Second, it's utterly, gobsmackingly wonderful to be able to look around as you drive. It's so, so much more natural. Suddenly I'm hitting apexes I always had problems with before, using my mirrors more efficiently, and generally having a LOT less accidental touching of other cars on track since I have a much better sense of what's going on around me. Ran out of gas in AC the other day and sat there for about 10 or 15 minutes just watching the cars go by. What fun.

AC runs brilliantly and is gloriously sharp, crisp and detailed at full FOV and very high frame rates with zero quality concessions. It easily produces double the frame rate of PCars2. PCars2 is fun, but a has that less-crisp look that title has anyway. That's exaggerated a bit because unless you have the gamerig of god you'll have to make quality concessions to maintain acceptable minimum frame-rates - like using post-processing AA. PCars2 also has major performance issues at night with lights coming up from behind you; that scenario will drop your frame-rate by around 1/3 in any scene regardless of all your other quality settings, so 60 will suddenly plummet to 40, for example. Still PCars2 is fun - it's a blast to run through the night/rain etc. Overall I would definitely recommend starting with AC however, since it's a vastly better sim and runs so much better in VR than PCars2. That's especially true if you have a less than top-end VR rig.

Yeah, I know that's pretty basic, but that's as far as I've gotten! I'm waiting to buy another VR compatible racing title. Maybe ACC (I haven't, simply because it's not the type of car/racing that really interests me. I spend about 90% my SIM racing in classic and vintage cars).
 
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A few additional details regarding my setup and the options I've found that work well.

Brainwarp: For AC you will definitely want it off unless you absolutely have to have it on. It causes ghosting around fast-moving objects. For PCars you may have to use it to get acceptable frame-rates. It'll cause some ghosting but it's not as prominent as it is in AC (maybe because AC is so much crisper in the first place you notice it more).

FFR: Does not work in PCars2 unfortunately, where it would be of value. Does work in AC but you might not need it.

FOV: AC works fine with Wide FOV, but PCars2 does not (it works but has quality issues - essentially running PCars2 in wide FOV disables steam SS quality overrides and starts handling them automatically, which can greatly reduce quality). Use Normal FOV for PCars2 if you want to manually control the rendering quality.

Frame rates: Since these are seated games I've found no nausea or perceived lag issues as long as I keep the frame-rates above 40 or so. That's easy in AC (usually 75+) but harder or impossible in PCars2 unless you really reduce the resolution. But even in PCars2 it only drops into the 30s on extremely rare occasion (lights from behind at night), so if you can live with that on occasion you can run pretty high resolutions.

Quality settings: Since I'm not trying to achieve 90fps in these racing games I've been able to run Pimax quality at 1 and override Steam's automagic SS settings and set both games at 100% rendering quality. If you need more fps you can turn down these settings in exchange for lower resolution rendering.

EDIT: Played around with PCars2 a bit more this evening to try and get a bit more performance with lights from behind at night. Unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be a solution. That scenario is just brutal to your frame rates. Nothing I did made enough of a difference to make it worth the quality trade-off. The only thing the finally worked is turning down the Steam VR rendering to 50%, which looks like poo and still only provided frame-rates in the low 40s in that scenario. So if you are going to drive at night you are going to have to make extreme quality trade-offs if you want to maintain a good frame-rate while night racing. On the other hand, the drops are usually only for a few seconds here and there, so it's really not that big a deal as long as it doesn't plummet below too much below 40 (for me anyway, others might have a different tolerance for low frame-rates).

A couple of settings that make a very large difference overall (but not in light-from-behind scenarios):

Shadows: Set this to "off". You still have blob shadows, which really aren't that bad.

FOV: Setting the Pimax FOV to Small rather than Normal also gets you some performance and it's still not too narrow an FOV. Personally I'll keep mine on Normal, but do try Small if you need every frame you can get.

Steam VR SS Rendering: As usual this does make a considerable difference, especially to average and max frame-rates. Unfortunately it makes little of difference to the all-critical minimum frame-rate, so IMHO keep this as high you can possibly can since you won't get a good frame-rate in the lights-from-behind scenario anyway.

Definitely use the "-vrnomirror" launch argument for PCars2 in Steam. This netted me quite a few additional fps. It will disable your keyboard and mouse, but you can use the controls on your wheel to access those functions easily.

Or, just don't race at night.
 
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Have you used any of the other headsets on the market? I'm interested to know how the FOV of the Pimax compares to for example, my Vive Pro.
 
Have you used any of the other headsets on the market? I'm interested to know how the FOV of the Pimax compares to for example, my Vive Pro.

This guy sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger but provides good graphic Comparisons.

 
Have you used any of the other headsets on the market? I'm interested to know how the FOV of the Pimax compares to for example, my Vive Pro.

I've had the Rift and the Vibe Pro on briefly before. The Pimax on wide FOV supposedly provides a 200 degree FOV, but they measure diagonally, so it really isn't a fair comparison. It is, however, still a HUGE difference. For games that work properly in Wide FOV mode it's extremely difficult to notice any intrusion into you peripheral vision whatsoever. Normal is also very good and only in the smallest mode does it feel like you've got a VR headset on. Overall I'm fairly happy with it. (BTW, I do think the YouTube posted above probably exaggerates things a bit).
 
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I think the ultimate setup for me is to have triple screen and a VR setup. I race a fair few endurance races and I just don't like wearing a headset for too long - for a start it makes taking a few glugs of beer whilst relaxing on the Mulsanne Straight almost impossible!
 
Important update to my tips for running PCars2 in VR:

Definitely use the "-vrnomirror" launch argument for PCars2 in Steam. This netted me quite a few additional fps. It will disable your keyboard and mouse, but you can use the controls on your wheel to access those functions easily.
 
Frame rates: Since these are seated games I've found no nausea or perceived lag issues as long as I keep the frame-rates above 40 or so.
This sounds a bit strange to me. How does the hz/fps thing work in VR?
On my screen, if the fps goes below my refresh rate (usually 60) then the motion gets a bit jerky/choppy (whatever you want to call it). Isn't the same thing happening in the VR headset?
 
This sounds a bit strange to me. How does the hz/fps thing work in VR?
On my screen, if the fps goes below my refresh rate (usually 60) then the motion gets a bit jerky/choppy (whatever you want to call it). Isn't the same thing happening in the VR headset?

VR games don't usually get choppy like they do on traditional displays below the refresh rate of the HMD. I think they use some form of advanced sync, where the refresh rate is automatically lowered to match the fps - or at the very least they don't generally suffer from nasty stutter as much as a traditional display can in some titles if you aren't running right up at the refresh rate of the display. You can buy standard flat monitors that implement similar technologies. That pretty much eliminates, or at least helps to eliminate, the choppiness you are talking about until you get down to fairly low FPS (say, below 45). But VR has an entire new set of problems regarding latency of head-tracking to movements (well, and plenty of other problems too that you have to train your brain around, like "walking down steps" in Skyrim VR when you aren't really walking down steps. Really, this kind of things wreaks havoc with most people's equilibrium until you get your "VR Legs", and something like a third of people can never get used to it). Anyway, you really need at least 90hz refresh rate AND 90fps, and it has to be absolutely smooth. Otherwise when you move your head there is enough delay in terms of the game-world reaction that you'll get sick, possibly to the point of hurling. Combine that with the overhead it requires to make a game stereoscopic in the first place, which usually means you get 1/3 the performance. For example, if you have a rig capable of playing PCars2 at 120fps you would only get 40fps in VR, all else being equal. But all else is not equal, because you have to render an area substantially larger than the current field of view, so that when a player turns their head they don't get momentary black areas while the game renders that are suddenly coming into view. So, to push the dual 2560x1440 screens my HMD has my rig has to render well over than double that total number of pixels PER EYE (around 4500x3500 pixels per eye). The low-down being that VR titles (with any fidelity) need some truly serious computing power and it's hard to tell exactly how much because some titles are optimized so much better than others. To get around this VR now utilizes "async rendering" in a variety of forms, and some of it works pretty darn well in many types of games (Skyrim VR, for example), but not quite as well in racing sims, where there is too much constant movement and it causes a bit of blur. What ASYNC rendering does is simply introduce fake frames so that even if the game is running at 45fps, it is able to present 90 frames (every other one fake) to the HMD and maintain the fluid 90hz movement necessary to provide low-enough latency that your head movements are reflected instantly in the game and you don't vomit all over your poor innocent dog who is laying sadly at your feet wondering why you aren't playing frisbee with him, as obviously that is the only activity in the world worth actually doing. However, for myself and so far everyone else who has tried it on my rig, these nausea problems are far less prevalent in racing sims, where you are seated at a wheel and where the real-world environment is incredibly similar to what you see on the screen. I've found no nausea issues of any sort all the way down to around 40fps even with ASYNC off (PCars2 has very poor performance in VR). That's pretty good news for people who want to use VR for racing sims exclusively, because it means you don't have to have quite as much power, and that you won't probably won't have to enable ASYNC unless your framerates are really awful. (Also, if you already own the wheel and pedals, you'll only need the HMD itself, not the motion controllers and base-station, making getting into VR for racing sims potentially quite a bit cheaper.)
 
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Thanks for your tips and insight. I just upgraded from an OG Vive to a Pimax today and am noticing a TON of blurriness in cars that are a few car lengths ahead of me (in Project Cars 2 I should add). Have you noticed this and, if so, have you found a way to correct it?
 
Thanks for your tips and insight. I just upgraded from an OG Vive to a Pimax today and am noticing a TON of blurriness in cars that are a few car lengths ahead of me (in Project Cars 2 I should add). Have you noticed this and, if so, have you found a way to correct it?

Which model did you get? You'll have to push higher resolutions to the Pimax to avoid the image being upscaled.

It's mostly down to pixel density. The first thing to do is try getting your SteamVR SS up as far as you can. Also avoid post processing AA settings if you can possibly avoid it.

PCars2 seems particular soft at distant objects in the first place, so that's also a bit of a problem. In titles where you can really push high resolutions and where the titles is naturally sharp, things look very good. I've found that for true VR titles I have to push an absolutely minimum of around 4K before things look sharp enough to be acceptable, with things getting better from there up (Fallout 3 running through vorpX at 4K with 4X traditional AA looks amazing, absolutely crisp with very little aliasing anywhere), and AC looks absolutely fantastic. Other titles just aren't going to look that good; titles that already tend to be soft are a problem Fallout 4 (through vorpX) and Skyrim VR are both very soft (TAA is unusable, what a joke) and I've had to use an ENB in Skyrim VR to get that to look acceptable even through I'm running it at 122% SteamVR SS (so a very high resolution). For titles that I'm going to turn in "theater mode" through vorpX (so not filling my entire FOV) I can get away with 2560x1440 as long as I don't pull the virtual screen too close to my face.

Last thing - PCARS2 does not work for many of us in Wide FOV - it seems to cause PCARS2 to render at a very low resolution and ignore SteamVR SS or PiTool Quality settings. Try running it a Normal (try Small if you need FPS and need to push the SS for more clarity - at the smallest FOV the Pimax is about the same FOV as most other HMDs, so I kind of hate to do that, but in a handful of really poorly performing titles you might have to).

Hope that helps, a little. The whole VR scene is still a true fustercluck of complexity, so your milage is going to vary a lot title by title, in some titles, mostly titles where clarity and traditional AA methods were the focus of the developers, it blows me away. Just fantastic. In titles where things like depth-of-field and other eye candy like that were the focus of the devs things aren't so great but you might be able to overcome it if the title is really important to you (took me hours to get that ENB working in Skyrim VR and dialed in to my liking).
 
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Just been playing a bit more with PCars2 recently and for some titles the key to FPS is simply resolution, resolution, resolution. Going from Normal to Small FOV adds a full 50% FPS. I know it's not ideal, but realistically on the Pimax the "Small" FOV is around what you get with most other HMDs out there. So for other Pimax users, you simply may have to go "Small" with the FOV for PCars2. The various eye-candy setting have little effect compared to the simply reducing the overall resolution.

I recently picked up Dirt Rally 2, and it's performance is fantastic however. Not quite as good as AC, but far better than PCars2. You'll be able to run DR2 at Normal FOV with very high frame rates and high resolutions with tons of eye-candy and no frame smoothing, or Wide FOV with slightly less crispness and eye candy if you are willing to go with frame smoothing. Very nice!

EDIT: After a bit of judicial tweaking I was able to achieve 60+ FPS in DR2 on Wide FOV and about 120% Super Sampling with Parallel Projections on (Pimax users, you may see that DR2 does not "require" Parallel Projections, but this is that same way that Skyrim VR does not "require" Parallel Projections - If you run with it off there will still be a LOT of stereoscopic rendering problems - it just doesn't completely break the game like it will PCars2; so if you have eyes and or a brain that doesn't notice those problems you are lucky, but most of you will probably need to use PP on). Still lots of eye-candy too, just turn lots of setting to medium or even high, but set that crowd to low. Like most games, the texture quality itself seems to make no difference to FPS unless you actually exceed your available VRAM, so you can probably leave the textures as high as you want.

As I've mentioned above, fake-frame methods don't work well in racing Sims as the extreme amounts of movement cause blur, so they should only be used when you absolutely can't play a title otherwise. Everyone's tolerance will probably differ, but I've found I have no problem in racing SIMs all the way down to about 40fps - a frame rate that would probably make me puke into a bucket in 30 seconds in a title like Skyrim VR.
 
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