- Last updated 4/27/2024 -

It is April 2024, and I have decided to create this page to share my settings for my Pimax 8K X VR headset that gives me awesome looking graphics and 90 FPS in iRacing. But first, there is a LOT of misinformation out there. I've looked at different posts on different forums and on Reddit and there and some of it is garbage. I used to be a professional game developer (Bethesda Softworks, Rainbow Studios, THQ) working mainly with graphic engines so I should know what I am talking about when it comes to this stuff.

Even though these settings are what I use for my Pimax 8K X VR headset, these settings also apply to other Pimax headsets such as the 5K Super, Crystal (all versions including light and super), as well as the upcoming Reality 12K.

My current PC consists of these hardware, and it's pretty high end. If your PC setup is not as high end as this, don't worry - there is a lot of headroom with my setup and options you can turn on and off to hit that sweet 90 FPS with your setup.

• ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero mainboard
• Intel Core i9-13900K CPU
• MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid X 24 GB
• G.SKILL Trident Z5 64GB DDR5-6400
• Pimax 8K X VR headset

Unfortunately, Pimax headsets are not the easiest to configure and set up for the best possible experience. But if you follow these steps, I promise you that you will experience a night and day difference between the “default” settings and these settings.

These are the software you need to download and install.

https://pimax.com/downloads-manuals/

https://github.com/mbucchia/Pimax-OpenXR/releases

The file you want to download and install looks like PimaxXR-X.X.X.msi. This is the only file you need to download and install.

https://github.com/mbucchia/OpenXR-Toolkit/releases

The file you want to download and install looks like OpenXR-Toolkit-X.X.X.msi. This is the only file you need to download and install.

These are the settings you want to use in the Pimax PC Client. I will explain the reasoning behind some of these settings.

• Tracking mode = Lighthouse
• Light bar = Off
• Panel Mode = Native
• Refresh Rate = 90 Hz
• Backlight = 50

I turn my light bar off because it's purely cosmetic and generates heat. Definitely use Lighthouse tracking (with 2 lighthouse base stations) and keep your window blinds closed as the glass will confuse the tracking and introduce jitter (because of reflections).

• Field Of View = Large or Normal
• Render Quality = Balanced
• Fixed Foveated Rendering = Aggressive
• Parallel Projection Compatibility Mode = Off
• Smart Smoothing = Off
• Lock to half framerate = Off
• Hidden Area Mask = ON
• Compatible with Vive Only Game = Off

You will want to choose the Large field of view if you can hit 90 FPS with that. If you cannot, then choose the Normal field of view option.

For the Render Quality choose Balanced. You might be tempted to choose Maximum or Customize and slide the slider to the right. Do not do this - the “Balanced” render quality is actually the closest to the native panel resolution of your headset. Choosing “Maximum” or sliding the slider to the right in “Custom” is really introducing a form of super-sampling that is slow and inefficient. We will turn on super-sampling in a different way that is native to your graphics card and much more efficient later. Choose “balanced” here.

Setting FFR to “aggressive” would normally look bad, but combined with the hardware super-sampling that we will turn on later, it'll look just fine. For those of you with headsets supporting dynamic foveated rendering - turn that on instead, along with eye tracking!

Definitely don't turn on smart smoothing - it looks terrible in iRacing.

Turning on the hidden area mask prevents the game from rendering graphics where your eyes cannot see, boosting the frame rate.

Note - the FFR and hidden mask settings here might not actually do anything here, as they would be overridden by the OpenXR Toolkit settings later. I like to set them here as well anyway to be consistent.

These are the settings you want to use in Pimax OpenXR. I will explain the reasoning behind some of these settings.

First, note that it says “Resolution: 3830×2370” in my screenshot. This is proof that selecting the “balanced” option for render quality setting chooses a resolution that is closest to the actual panel resolution (which is 3840×2160 for my headset).

• Prefer framerate over latency = Off
• Lock to half framerate = Off
• Allow use of the eye tracker = ON if you have it!

That's pretty much it for the settings for the Pimax OpenXR software.

There are really no settings to set here outside of iRacing simulator. All of the settings you want to set in the OpenXR toolkit will happen later, when we are actually running the iRacing simulator. What you do want to set up here are the “On-screen menu hotkeys” so you can actually bring up the OpenXR toolkit settings in-game. I just have mine mapped to the arrow keys on the keyboard so I can find them by feel without taking the headset off.

There is only one more place to configure settings before we are ready to dive into the iRacing simulator itself.

iRacing has a problem rendering transparent objects such as the chain link fences that go around most tracks. They look bad. Fortunately, Nvidia offers us an easy fix that doesn't really cost anything in terms of graphics performance!

Open up the Nvidia control panel, and click on the “Manage 3D settings” option in the left-side menu, then click on the “Program Settings” tab. If the “iRacing: Motorsport Simulator” option is not already available in the drop-down list, go ahead and click on the “Add” button to add it.

The only setting you need to change is the “Antialiasing - Transparency” setting - change it to “4x (supersample)”. That's it. Now your chain link fences shall look glorious!

Some people will tell you to change some of the other settings here such as setting the max frame rate to 89. Please don't do this. The “Antialiasing - Transparency” setting is the only one you need to modify.

Now we are ready to move on to the settings within the iRacing simulator itself!

Launch the iRacing UI and join a random practice session or start up a test drive session. Make sure you use the OpenXR display mode. You should not be using the OpenVR display mode because unfortunately it does not have some of the features we need (such as foveated rendering) that is critical to hitting 90 FPS.

Once you are in the game, head on over to the graphics settings. These are the settings I have set up for myself.

• Resolution = 1024×768
• Align = Top Left
• Enable SPS (VR) = ON

Setting the resolution to 1024×768 is important because iRacing scales all of the UI graphics based off of this resolution. I also have it aligned to the top left corner of the screen so I can easily find the game window blindly with my trackball without taking my VR headset off. I do recommend using a trackball with a VR headset - the trackball never moves position and I can easily find it without taking my headset off.

Sky/Clouds, Cars, Pit Objects, Event, Grandstands, Objects, Foliage, Particles are all set to “high detail”. The only thing in this area that I have switched off are “Crowds”. When racing, you don't really notice them anyway, and they do take up significant render time, especially when passing the start/finish line on oval tracks.

For particles you should also turn on the “full res” and “soft” options as well.

Set max cars to 63 and also select “draw 20(8) cars” and “draw min pits”. That's plenty of cars to see on screen in front of you (20) with 8 cars in the rear view mirror. There is no need for more than this when racing. As for the rest of the settings -

• Dynamic World LOD = Off
• Dynamic Cars LOD = Off
• Frame Rate = No Limit
• Max Prerendered Frames = 1

I have the dynamic LOD turned off, and my reasoning for this is that if you can hit 90 FPS, then there is no need for it, so why spend the CPU time calculating LOD. The frame rate should be set to “no limit” to allow your VR headset to control how often the frame refreshes - it'll be naturally capped at 90 FPS - artificially capping it in the game as this could lead to jitter.

• Anisotropic Filtering = 16x
• MSAA Samples = 4x

Remember earlier I was talking about using native hardware antialiasing? This is it. Setting MSAA samples to 4x produces wonderful antialiasing (no jaggies) and I can still easily maintain 90+FPS on my rig. This form of antialiasing is done by your graphics hardware and is the only true antialiasing method. All other forms of antialiasing (the options you find in the lower right corner of the graphics options settings) are fake software based antialiasing that's pretty much garbage.

• Render Dynamic Track Data = ON
• Shadow maps/Cloud Shadows = ON
• Object Self Shadowing = ON
• Dynamic Objs = In Main View
• Night Shadow Maps = Off (Walls = Off too)

The reason I have night shadow maps off is because iRacing does this pretty poorly and there are serious / weird artifacts when you have this enabled. I prefer to have this off so I have a cleaner screen that doesn't have these distracting weird artifacts.

• Number of Lights = 3
• Shadows = pcf8p filter
• Dynamic Cubemaps = 0
• Fixed Cubemaps = 0
• Shader Quality = Ultra Detail
• Hide Obstructions = None

The PCF8P filter is just a method of generating soft shadows. I cannot see a difference between 16 taps and 8 taps.

It's important that you have the dynamic and fixed cube maps set to 0. They are ridiculously expensive to generate and contribute very little to the quality of the image.

• Show Driver Arms = ON
• Two Pass Trees = ON
• High Quality Trees = ON
• Cockpit Mirrors = Off
• Higher Detail In Mirrors = Off
• Headlights = High Detail
• Headlights on track in mirrors = ON
• Virtual Mirror = ON (120 degrees)

I currently use the virtual mirror, however a lot of people prefer to use the cockpit mirrors. Using the cockpit mirrors instead of the virtual mirror adds roughly about 0.5 to 1 ms to the render time (out of the 11.1 ms render time budget for 90 FPS). If you do want to use cockpit mirrors then use these settings instead -

• Cockpit Mirrors = Max: 3
• Higher Detail In Mirrors = Off
• Virtual Mirror = Off

And now the rest of the settings mostly have to do with post-processing. Most of these will be off.

• Motion Blur = Off
• Antialiasing = Off
• SSR = Low - Rain Only
• Sharpening = Off
• Distortion = Off
• HDR = Off
• Heat Haze = Off
• SSAO = Off
• Video mem swap high-res cars = Off
• 2048×2048 car textures = ON

This fake software based post-processed antialiasing method should be always off. Sharpening definitely should be set to off as that is the opposite of antialiasing - it makes aliasing worse. The other effects such as distortion and heat haze are so unimportant to racing that you should have them off. If you have a decent video card with plenty of video memory you should have the swap high-res cars option turned off to increase performance. However if you have an older card with less video memory you might have to turn this on.

Now, after making all of these changes to the graphic settings, you MUST click on the done button and quit the iRacing simulator. Many of these settings (including the important MSAA setting) do not take effect until you restart the simulator.

After you quit the simulator, but before you start it up again, there are a few graphics settings that the iRacing simulator has but they don't give you a way to change them via the UI. You'd need to open up the “rendererDX11OpenXR.ini” file using a text editor such as Notepad. These are the settings that are worth changing.

• VirtualMirrorSize = 0

It's mind boggling to me why iRacing does not give us an easy way to adjust this. Setting this value to 0 (the default is 1) gives us the largest possible virtual mirror, which really helps you avoid these nasty race-ending wrecks. Obviously you do not need to change this setting if you use cockpit mirrors instead of the virtual mirror.

And now we have finally arrived at the end of this guide with just one last thing we need to do. Launch the iRacing simulator again (join a practice session or test drive) and tweak some OpenXR settings via the OpenXR toolkit.

To open up the OpenXR toolkit while in the game, I hit CTRL+Down arrow. This is how I have it configured using the OpenXR Toolkit companion app, your configuration might be different. Once I hit CTRL+Down the OpenXR toolkit window pops up in the game in my VR headset, and there are a few options to set here.

• Overlay = Off
• Upscaling/Sharpening = Off
• Fixed foveated rendering = Preset
  • Cull outer mask (HAM) = Yes
  • Mode = Performance
  • Pattern = Wide
• Turbo mode = ON
• Frame rate throttling = Off
• Record statistics = No

What's important here are the foveated rendering settings - this produces quite a significant boost to the frame rate with very little hit on quality. The reason the quality does not suffer so much is because we also have MSAA antialiasing turned on, which really goes far to improve the quality of the image.

I have turbo mode turned on, but be aware that this is an experimental feature of the OpenXR toolkit. If you experience issues such as the game crashing then turn turbo mode off.

Then on the next screen, we have the appearance settings. This screen is completely optional - on this screen I have post-processing turned on and the vibrance setting turned up to around 75 to make colors pop a little more.

And… you're done!

You may want to tweak the FFR settings to squeeze some more performance out of your graphics card. To do this, bring up the OpenXR toolkit window and change these settings -

• Fixed foveated rendering = Custom
• TODO

If your hardware set up is similar to mine, you should be racing at 90FPS consistently on most tracks.

TODO - explain how to use the OpenXR toolkit overlay to show the FPS and CPU/GPU utilization.

Our goal is to keep this number at or below 11 milliseconds. 1 second divided by 90 frames is 0.01111 seconds per frame, and multiply that by 1000 milliseconds in a second, to get 11.11 milliseconds.

If you're not quite getting below 11 milliseconds, there are a few options you can ease back on, to help you get there. Try them in the order listed:

1. Use “normal” instead of “large” for field of view in the Pimax Client settings
2. iRacing graphics settings
   1. Two Pass Trees = Off
   2. High Quality Trees = Off
   3. Event = Low Detail or Off
   4. Objects = Low Detail
   5. Pit Objects = Low Detail
   6. Cars = Medium Detail
3. Enable FSR
   1. TODO
4. iRacing graphics settings
   1. MSAA Samples = 2x

As a last resort you'll need to change MSAA Samples to 2x instead of 4x. Don't forget to restart the iRacing simulator if you do that.

Here are some tracks that I've tested these settings with so far, and the resulting frame rate. These were tested with all of the recommended options without resorting to doing any of the things listed in the above “Still Not 90 FPS?” section. This list will grow slowly over time.

Here are a few screenshots showing different things - these were taken by enabling “Show mirror window” in the PimaxXR runtime control center. These are screens of the left eye - the “center” of my view is actually closer to the right edges of these images, where you see the iRacing UI.

In this screen shot the most obvious thing you can see is the hidden area mask working - the pixels around the four corners of the screenshot are not rendered - saving significant render time. You can also see that the guardrail running towards the left side of the image gets more and more jagged the further away from the center of the image. This is the foveated rendering working. Because that part of the image is far away from the center of the view you really don't notice the jaggy edges.

In this screen shot take a look at the area above the brige, below the Hagerty sign. There is a chain link fence there - note how clean it looks. Also note how clean and smooth all the edges that makes up the bridge trusses look.

More chain-link fences in this screen shot - Take a look at how smoothly the chain link fence goes off into the distance without any jagged edges.

At some point I plan to put up a video of what my settings look like, probably going to be a cropped left eye view of some oval racing.