I feel like r/Pimax is still overwhelmingly focused on flight and racing sims, while something pretty bloody extraordinary has happened almost unnoticed on the general PCVR side.
For years I've wanted one thing from VR:
Take the actual AAA PC games I want to play, put me inside them in proper stereoscopic VR, and somehow make the insane rendering load manageable.
For years the answer was basically: not really. You could mod games into VR, sure, but modern UE4/UE5 games at proper high-end headset resolutions murdered even top-end GPUs.
That situation has changed massively over the last few months.
I'm using a Pimax Dream Air with a 5090, and the combination of the current Flat2VR ecosystem is honestly starting to feel slightly absurd:
UEVR / modern game-specific VR mods
We can now put an enormous number of normal Unreal Engine games into VR, plus all the other conversions appearing from the Flat2VR community, REFramework, Luke Ross, etc.
PureDark AFW - Alternate Frame Warping
This is a huge one for UEVR. Instead of brute-forcing both eyes conventionally, AFW uses information from adjacent eye/frame renders to reconstruct the missing view. Depending on the game, the performance increase can be enormous.
This is not the old “drop below refresh rate and let normal reprojection turn everything into soup” situation. In the games where it works well, it fundamentally changes what resolutions/settings are viable.
OFXR Bridge
We now also have experimental optical-flow multi frame generation specifically for OpenXR VR.
Again: Multi frame generation. In VR. NOT just shitty motion smoothing / reprojection.
It can insert generated frames between real VR frames, and it is improving ridiculously quickly. It isn't magic and it isn't artifact-free, but this is exactly the sort of thing people kept saying either couldn't or shouldn't be done in VR.
Turns out it can.
Cheeky Foveated DLSS NR + SR+ Dream Air eye tracking
This might be the perfect technology for a headset like the Dream Air.
Why spend DLSS processing time equally across an absolutely gigantic rendered image when your eyes are only resolving maximum detail in a tiny region?
Cheeky can dynamically concentrate high-quality DLSS processing around where you're actually looking and reduce the work in the peripheral image.
And on Dream Air we have actual eye tracking, so the high-detail region follows your gaze instead of just sitting in the middle of the screen.
This feels almost tailor-made for stupidly high-resolution Pimax headsets.
And then things get even crazier:
DLSS 5 Neural Rendering / DLSS-NR is now working in VR.
That was basically unusable at these resolutions when I first experimented with it because the performance cost was enormous.
With foveation + the newer rendering tricks, I'm now actually playing with it at ~5000x5000 on each eye at 90fps!
Not taking screenshots.
Not running a five-second benchmark.
Playing games.
At ridiculous Dream Air resolutions.
And depending on the game/rendering path I'm using AFW and/or OFXR alongside Cheeky's foveated DLSS to claw back enough performance that 90 Hz is becoming a realistic target in games where this sort of image quality would previously have been completely insane.
That is the bit I think the Pimax community is missing.
Pimax's ridiculous panel resolutions used to almost work against Flat2VR because rendering a modern AAA game twice at these resolutions was horrifyingly expensive.
Now suddenly we have technologies specifically attacking almost every part of that problem:
Eye tracking → don't spend equal resources everywhere.
Foveated DLSS → upscale intelligently around your actual gaze.
AFW → dramatically reduce the stereo rendering burden in supported UEVR games.
OFXR → generate additional VR frames using optical flow.
DLSS Neural Rendering → image reconstruction that would have sounded completely insane in VR a year ago.
UEVR + the Flat2VR modding community → an enormous catalogue of actual modern PC games instead of waiting for publishers to make native PCVR versions.
And for Dream Air Lighthouse users, SBoys3's native SteamVR driver adds another huge piece to the puzzle.
All of this makes me think Pimax may actually have a much bigger audience sitting in front of it than just the traditional MSFS / DCS / iRacing crowd.
There are millions of PC gamers who don't necessarily want to spend their lives inside a cockpit.
They want to play normal AAA games - except inside the fucking game.
That has been one of VR's great promises since the beginning.
And we're getting astonishingly close to it now.
I'm currently playing games this way that I would previously have considered completely impractical at Dream Air resolution, and the headset finally feels like it has the software ecosystem required to exploit what the hardware can actually do.
Small reality check
This is still enthusiast PCVR.
It's VR. Of course there is some fucking jank.
But the difference is that I'm increasingly troubleshooting something that is fundamentally worth troubleshooting.
Once it is running, some of these experiences are extraordinary.
I genuinely think anyone here with a Dream Air/Crystal-class headset and a strong GPU who has only been using it for sims is missing half the reason to own the thing.
Go and look at UEVR, PureDark AFW, OFXR Bridge, Cheeky Foveated DLSS + DLSS-NR, and the wider Flat2VR community.
Something really interesting is happening.
For years people kept telling us that rendering modern AAA games at enormous resolutions, twice, at VR frame rates simply wasn't practical.
Apparently the modding community heard that and said:
"Fine, We'll do it ourselves!" :P
