The HMD Settings tab also includes several options. From here you can disable the Lighthouse tracking system, which enables the headset to operate without spatial tracking and allows you to use it even if you don’t have SteamVR base stations.

The HMD Settings tab also includes an option called Hidden Area Mask, which is supposed to help with some games. But we didn't find any need to use it. It also lets you toggle an option called Compatible with Parallel Projections. During the early stages of testing the Pimax 8K M1, we toggled that setting often for game compatibility, but we haven’t found a reason to disable it recently. The option is likely there for obscure titles that may not be compatible with Pimax’s wide FOV.

When Pimax launched its Kickstarter campaign, the company announced that a GTX 1070 would be powerful enough to drive the company’s flagship 5K and 8K headsets. Pimax had shown the prototypes operating on a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 but in only a handful of experiences.

To truly sign off on a GPU’s ability to power a headset, it must provide acceptable performance across all titles, not just a select few games. In July, Pimax conceded that Nvidia’s GTX 1070 falls short of the Pimax 8K performance requirements. Pimax introduced new display modes that would reduce the FOV to lower the performance needs, and the company suggested that backers switch to the Pimax 5K if they don’t plan to upgrade their GPU because the 5K headset would be less demanding.


The Pimax PiTool software offers three different FOV options to enable lower-end graphics cards to work with the headset. The options include Large FOV for the full 200-degree experience, Normal FOV, which is closer to 170 degrees, and Small FOV, which is roughly 120 degrees.

The Pimax 5K+ is capable of displaying a 200-degree diagonal view, but that doesn’t mean your computer can drive that kind of experience. In early tests, Pimax discovered that it might have bitten off more than it could chew with its ultra-wide VR headset. Even the most powerful graphics cards on the market have trouble delivering smooth frame rates and consistent frame timing with two side-by-side 1440p displays at 90Hz.

The Pimax PiTool software also includes an option to adjust the rendering quality to help you dial in the performance. The default setting is 1.0x, which sends a full resolution signal to the render pipeline and into SteamVR. You can also dial it down to 0.75x and .05x, which lowers the output resolution for higher frame rates. The Rendering Quality setting plays a critical role in the clarity of your image, however. If you go lower than 1x, you will notice the visuals get blurry.

The Rendering Quality setting enables you to crank the image quality up to a maximum of 2x, which effectively doubles your output resolution. That said, don’t expect to use the supersampling options unless you have an RTX 2080 Ti in your system, unless you're willing to sacrifice frame rate for image clarity.

Playing Oculus Games in Ultra-Wide


Pimax also created a software layer that works somewhat like ReVive (software that lets you play Oculus-exclusive games on the Vive) and enables you to play Oculus exclusive content on the Pimax 5K+ or 8K headset. Pimax has not disclosed how the emulation works, but we've tested it and can confirm that it's true: You can play Oculus-exclusive titles on the Pimax headsets without using the ReVive software. The My Games tab features a list of all the VR games that you have installed on your computer and makes them accessible with a single click.

Pimax's Oculus game emulation software enables you to play Oculus games, but it's not a perfect solution. We found a handful of games that require adjustments to the controller orientation, but that shouldn't be hard for Pimax to correct with a future update.

Pimax also created a software layer that works somewhat like ReVive (software that lets you play Oculus-exclusive games on the Vive) and enables you to play Oculus exclusive content on the Pimax 5K+ or 8K headset. Pimax has not disclosed how the emulation works, but we've tested it and can confirm that it's true: You can play Oculus-exclusive titles on the Pimax headsets without using the ReVive software. The My Games tab features a list of all the VR games that you have installed on your computer and makes them accessible with a single click.

Pimax's Oculus game emulation software enables you to play Oculus games, but it's not a perfect solution. We found a handful of games that require adjustments to the controller orientation, but that shouldn't be hard for Pimax to correct with a future update.

Pimax’s 5K+ headset specifications call for at least a GeForce GTX 1070 to drive the displays, but if you’re planning to buy for a Pimax 5K+ or you already backed the Kickstarter, I would suggest that you plan to buy a top-end GPU to go with it. In our own testing of the Pimax 5K+ we’ve learned that the headset’s requirements still exceed the GTX 1070’s ability. Don’t expect to see clear visuals and high frame rates with a 1070-caliber card; a GTX 1070 can provide only one of those things at a time.

We snagged an RTX 2080 GPU to drive our Pimax 5K+ headset for this review, and even that card ran into performance trouble. We haven’t tossed a 2080 Ti into our VR test bench yet, so we’re not sure if one could drive Pimax’s headset properly, but the 2080 fell short of the mark. We can’t say that we’re surprised by that revelation, but it will surely disappoint many backers who put their faith in Pimax and backed the Kickstarter based on the company’s word.

The Normal setting enables better performance than the more-taxing Full FOV mode, but it’s still a tall order for most GPUs. If your computer struggles to deliver acceptable frame rates, you can enable the Small FOV setting, which trims even more from your peripheral view. The Small FOV setting offers a wider view than an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, but the black bars on the sides of the screen are prominent, while also defeating the main purpose of this headset. If you can avoid it, don’t use the Small FOV option.

Performance Analysis

We chose a selection of five games to test the performance of the Pimax 5K+: Space Pirate Trainer, Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, Arizona Sunshine, The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstoneand Beat Saber. Each of these games taxes our system in different ways, which gives us a good feel for what it takes to feed the Pimax 5K+.

The test system that we used to evaluate the Pimax 5K+ features some older, yet still capable, hardware. We used an Intel Core i7-5930K 6-core processor with 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4-2666 RAM in an MSI X99S XPower AC motherboard. It also includes a 500GB Crucial MX200 SSD. Typically, we use a Zotac GTX 980 Ti as our VR test platform, but that card is outside of Pimax’s range of approved GPUs, so we put that card aside and pulled out a GTX 1070 and an RTX 2080 for this review. After seeing the results of our FCAT VR analysis, we immediately wished we had an RTX 2080 Ti on our test bench.

Test Procedure

The Pimax PiTool software offers a wide variety of customization options, resulting in hundreds of different combinations. We tested a select few configurations to get an overview of the performance without spending countless hours fine tuning. You could probably achieve better results if you put in the time to test every configuration.

For our purposes, we chose a few basic configurations. We set the PiTool scaler to 1x to eliminate that variable for the first set of tests. We then launched SteamVR and enabled Steam’s dynamic resolution scaling option to set the scaling at Steam’s recommended level and then switched it back to manual mode to lock that scaling setting. We compared the reduced scale results with results from 100 percent scaling.

We recorded each test with Nvidia’s FCAT VR so that we could analyze the effects of each setting change. Our test results focus on the Normal FOV setting and omit the Small and Large settings. We didn’t test the small setting because we doubt many are buying a Pimax 5K+ for 120-degree FOV. We would have tested the large FOV setting, but our headset locked up unless we reduced the rendering scale.

The PiTool software also lets you limit the resolution scaling independent of SteamVR. We ran a few tests with PiTool set to .5x and .75x scaling, but the image quality is reduced such that you lose the benefit of the high resolution of the displays when you use these settings. If you need to rely on lower than 1x image scaling, you aren’t getting what you paid for from the Pimax headset. The PiTool render scaling tool is better-suited for the future, when more powerful GPUs hit the market that can handle higher than 1x scaling.

Space Pirate Trainer

Space Pirate Trainer was one of the first games to grace the SteamVR platform, and the developer spent a lot of time optimizing the game to run well on low-end hardware. In theory, it should run well on almost anything, but the resolution of the Pimax 5K+ pushed our GPUs beyond their limits and our system relied on reprojection often.


First, we tried the normal FOV setting with PiTool set to 1x scaling, and SteamVR set to 100 percent scaling. With these settings, our GTX 1070 managed an average of 42.56 fps, which isn’t even fast enough to use reprojection to hit the desired 90 fps to match the refresh rate of the display. The game was playable, but we wouldn’t recommend it because it was hard to hit a moving target when reprojection is in use. The process also produces a distracting ghosting effect that surrounds moving objects.

Our RTX 2080 didn’t fare much better with SPT with 100 percent render scaling. We achieved a 55.73 fps average with the fancy new card, which still falls far short of the desired 90 fps. We could dial back the image quality settings in the game to achieve a higher frame rate, but it would be unlikely for the in-game settings to net enough gains to negate the use of reprojection


Surprisingly, SteamVR’s recommended resolution is still too much for our RTX 2080. Steam suggested setting the resolution scaling at 76 percent, which produces a 2686 x 2295 image per eye. Despite the significant reduction in pixel count, our RTX 2080 still couldn’t keep up with the 90Hz display. Our system pumped out an average of 67.55 fps, which is barely enough of an improvement to merit the image quality reduction.

The GTX 1070 didn’t do much better with the SteamVR recommended resolution scaling of 36 percent, which reduced the resolution to 1849 x 1579. This resulted in lower image quality than what we’re used to with the Vive headset.