Pimax Update Adds Support For Foveated Rendering and Smoothing

[AlphaAtlas]

While Facebook's Oculus and Valve's Vive Headsets dominate the tethered VR headset scene now, some startups have big plans to disrupt the market. At the end of 2018, Blurbusters noted that Pimax, in particular, is a dark horse in the world of VR. Their headsets will supposedly offer a 200 degree FOV, as opposed to the Rift's and Vive's 110 degree view, and they're offering both "5K" and "8K" models. Driving 2 1440p or 4k displays at a consistent 90hz would normally take an absurd amount of GPU power, but a recent software update posted on Pimax's official forums should make rendering significantly faster. The developers added a "smart smoothing" interpolation function akin to Oculus's Asynchronous Space Warp and Valve's Motion Smoothing, but they also added support for foveated rendering, which reduces detail in parts of a scene users aren't looking at. Pimax claims they'll be shipping headsets out to non-backers later this month, while Valve's Vive Pro Eye headset with FR support isn't launching until sometime in Q2. Thanks to cageymaru for the tip.

While we haven't seen Pimax's foveated rendering in action yet, Oculus demoed the tech at CES, which you can see here.

When this function is turned on, the visual field of the headset edge will be visualized. At present, according to the range of visualization, it can be divided into three levels, conservative, ballanced, aggressive. (This function is presently only supports RTX series graphics cards for the time being)

 

[AlphaAtlas]

Update: Pimax just issued a statement saying that the 8K headsets are delayed, and probably won't ship this month. Since DP 1.4 doesn't even support the 8K headset's native resolution and refresh rate, the 5K headset is probably the one you'd want anyway, and it looks like 5K Pimax shipments are unaffected by the LCD production issues.

 

[LstBrunnenG]

Fixed foveated rendering. None of the backers have the eye tracking add-on yet. And the FFR requires an RTX card for the time being.

 

[DrFino]

What's stopping me from using this tech on my desktop with an eye tracking camera on my monitor?

 

[Nobu]

What's stopping me from using this tech on my desktop with an eye tracking camera on my monitor?

The size of your monitor (or distance to it), I'd imagine. If the software allowed it, that's about the only limitation I could think of off the top of my head.

 

[sharknice]

What's stopping me from using this tech on my desktop with an eye tracking camera on my monitor?

You wouldn't want to do it with regular hardware. In order for it to work well you need an extremely low latency eye tracker. With any lag it would be terrible.

Also you probably just wouldn't want to do it unless you're sitting close to a very large very high resolution monitor.

 

[funkydmunky]

That Pimax FOV sure is nice and the rez will be helped out by this technology. I wish they were a bigger player so I would have more confidence in them.