I play mostly driving sims and, try as I might, I really don't care for roomscale VR games.

Now that I have finally managed to build a rig that's powerful enough to run a VR headset, I'm going to finally take the plunge.

Against popular opinion, imma gonna take the Pimax route since I can't stand driving while looking through a peephole.

This post has been edited by ZZR-Pilot: Jun 7 2021, 12:46 PM

They're having a midsummer sale on their website until June 11. Plus some Youtuber's coupon code gives an additional US$20 off, so I just pulled the trigger. It'll probably take 2 weeks to get here from Shanghai.... which is just as well coz I'll be busy finishing up my grad school thesis for submission end of the month. 'Graduation present' is how I justify the obscene cost to my wife.

The stress of academic writing has put me in a particularly vulnerable state... so yeah, I fell for yet another expensive toy despite being in my mid 40s.

I don't think my 5600x + B550 mobo + 32GB RAM + RX6800 combo has the horsepower to drive 2x 4K screens natively in a satisfactory way, so I stayed away from the flagship Vision 8K-X model and stepped down to the Vision 8K Plus. I think it should be a more mature product than the recently released 5K Super.

Bloody expensive coz it doesn't include base stations or controllers, but since all I do is drive car sims mostly I don't really care -- it's that ultrawide FOV I'm really after. Lain semua belakang cerita.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed coz I keep hearing the PiTool software is more biased towards Nvidia GPUs, but since the minimum requirement is an RTX2060 I hope there's more than enough excess horsepower in my overclocked RX6800 to beat PiTool's Nvidia bias to drive this HMD smoothly with sufficient eye candy.

But first... I need to finish my research thesis!

Pimax 8K Plus.

Won't be needing base stations in the near future, but might want to try them later down the road out once I get familiarized and 'build my VR legs' (I'm particularly interested in a new RTS game called Battlegroup VR, which unfortunately needs controllers to manipulate stuff as a fleet commander).

What kind of base stations & controllers will I need to work with a Pimax? Can I get away with having just 1 base station to operate both controllers in a sitting game like Battlegroup VR?

I intentionally bought it for the HMD's upscaling ability.

I don't trust my 5600x + RX6800 combo to have the horsepower to drive a full-on 2x 4K resolution HMD. So the next best thing is the 8K Plus that only needs my rig to push out 2k feed before upscaling it to eliminate the screen door effect. 5K Super was a consideration, but the price diff wasn't that far off and... again... I don't see my rig being able to push out anything beyond 110hz comfortably, nor will I need it to. So between the upscaling ability vs insane refresh rates, I think I'll benefit from the former more often.

On the Dirt 5 benchmark, I get an average of 71fps on maxed out ultra settings on a 1440p x 3440p 100hz monitor from my rig... and based on that, I went for the 8K Plus.




Oh yeah.. I had to pay the customs tax & handling coz it was FedDexed over, which is pretty hefty given the price of the thing... bugger... but even then it still came to a few hundred bucks cheaper than usual.

It arrived today. Handed the FedEx guy a stash of cash for the tax etc, took it for a spin and... man... amazing visuals coz it's so effing W.I.D.E...!! And I could wear my specs comfortably inside the HMD no problems at all, so top marks for that. Didn't have the time to faff about with the PiTool settings just yet coz I was in between meetings, but in Project Wingman (it comes ready with a VR mode) the immersion blew bloody my socks off.

Had to promise myself to keep it in the box until I submit my thesis end of the month... otherwise habis la kerja tak siap...

This post has been edited by ZZR-Pilot: Jun 15 2021, 06:09 PM