New headset : Pimax Crystal

It’s one review, and she’s honestly not exactly technical… might be more relevant for the mass market if her experience is typical, but someone like myself is more than used to having various stuff like OpenXR toolkit installed (along with lots of other stuff like open composite, OXRMC etc) and adjusting resolution and game settings already.

There were also updates during the beta phase that seemed to greatly improve various aspects and given it’s something she had been working on for a while, there is no knowing what versions she was on.

Her experience also doesn’t really match up to several others… VR flight sim guy is actually one I’m paying more attention to since he is something of a Varjo lover and was very openly negative about his opinions on pimax prior to reviewing it (on his discord in particular). He doesn’t agree with disco’s opinions in that video. To quote “it’s no where near as bad as this video suggests”.

She seems to make out like the displayport connection issues are pimax’s fault when it’s actually a known Nvidia issue with multiple headsets from multiple manufacturers. Not sure why she thinks pimax should include a booster in every box, when it only affects select cards and Nvidia are the ones that usually send out such “fixes” when you contact them https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/ans...n-geforce-rtx-3090-ti-and-certain-vr-headsets

Take what you want from it, but nothing there overly concerns me personally. To call it garbage on account of one persons experience (and as she acknowledges multiple times experience of prerelease hardware, firmware and software) is just a bit daft imo when there’s plenty of counter opinions out there already.

It also ignores all the positives she came out with, and in her YouTube comments she says things such as “More reviews will be coming up to this channel as Pimax Crystal is continuously improving! I definitely will be making more as things are changing fast with this headset.”

We’ll see when mine arrives. I certainly have no allegiance to pimax so I’m not going to sugar coat my opinions, but equally I’m not going to cry about having to adjust a resolution slider, nor blame pimax for MSFS being a pig to optimise settings for.
 
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drakulton said:
This headset is starting to sound like garbage

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Well it is a pimax. Frustration is to be expected. Thank god they moved to camera tracking, as their lighthouse implementation is shocking compared to HTC and Valve.

If bigscreen can hit over 100 fov and dampen down the glare (which they are both working on) it will surely become the go to PC VR headset.

Depends if deckard uses aspherical leneses or not. If they do, I might actually sit this one out :eek:
 
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TheOracle said:
If bigscreen can hit over 100 fov and dampen down the glare (which they are both working on) it will surely become the go to PC VR headset.
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If they can then it’s going to be a very good headset, but still some shortcomings (more than understandable given the form, but shortcomings all the same).

A big one for me personally the individual fit and no adjustable IPD is a complete no go. I always have friends over using my VR setup… I wish it had a means of adjusting IPD and a generic facial interface to go with the custom one.

On top of that no eye tracking, no wireless option (a real shame given how tiny it is that you always need to be tethered), and comparatively low brightness, plus a need for using base stations.

I heard a quote that really summed up the two last night - to paraphrase, Crystal is like the pinnacle of where VR has come from while the beyond is the start of where it’s going. I very much like where it’s going, but to me that relative infancy comes with too many compromises for now.

Can you imagine winding the clock back 6 years or so and showing a rift cv1 or htc vive user the beyond? It would be completely mind blowing!
 
Zeeflyboy said:
If they can then it’s going to be a very good headset, but still some shortcomings (more than understandable given the form, but shortcomings all the same).

A big one for me personally the individual fit and no adjustable IPD is a complete no go. I always have friends over using my VR setup… I wish it had a means of adjusting IPD and a generic facial interface to go with the custom one.

On top of that no eye tracking, no wireless option (a real shame given how tiny it is that you always need to be tethered), and comparatively low brightness, plus a need for using base stations.

I heard a quote that really summed up the two last night - to paraphrase, Crystal is like the pinnacle of where VR has come from while the beyond is the start of where it’s going. I very much like where it’s going, but to me that relative infancy comes with too many compromises for now.

Can you imagine winding the clock back 6 years or so and showing a rift cv1 or htc vive user the beyond? It would be completely mind blowing!
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Yeah it's not for everyone, and if you need base stations and controllers it gets expensive. I pretty much use VR for sims so it's ideal for that, although I will get a quest 3 for things like beat saber and mini golf.

Brightness is a non issue for me, I run my pico 4 brightness at 50% which I think is plenty :eek:
 
Tetiana of DiscoVR whilst obviously being an avid VR fan and very experienced with VR in general is not (imo) a "techy" VR user, it's no surprise she had some issues with her Crystal. Pimax hmd's are not as plug and play as Meta hmd's for example. Pimax hmd's suit people who like to fiddle with settings etc and don't mind troubleshooting issues that pop up from time to time. I've found once past the initial setup phase they just work most of the time without issue.
 
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TheOracle said:
If bigscreen can hit over 100 fov and dampen down the glare (which they are both working on) it will surely become the go to PC VR headset.
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115 is the bar imho, and I’d levy that at the Crystal and ALL other headsets going forwards now unless they are pitching for the value end in which case it is ok to compromise for the sake of price.
 
BigBANGtheory said:
115 is the bar imho, and I’d levy that at the Crystal and ALL other headsets going forwards now unless they are pitching for the value end in which case it is ok to compromise for the sake of price.
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I think they'd really struggle to hit 115 within the form factor. Not even Pimax can manage it and look at the size of the thing. I'd be happy with anything 100 and over.

I've played flight sim at 90 which was still a decent enough experience.

Hopefully over the next few years we can get lightweight and better fov.
 
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Agreed, anything above 100 vertical and horizontal is very playable and enough to not feel like you are looking through binoculars.

I’d take more of course in a perfect world, but that comes with additional rendering load for the wider field and then even more for the additional distortion correction… roll on widespread dynamic foveated rendering at the engine level! I think that’s the key to super wide and super high resolution headsets that are actually usable.
 
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by default I drive my headset at 3700 x 3700 per eye and that brings the 4090 to its knees, with DCS and MSFS I have to lower it further to keep out of reprojection. This is why imho ALL higher resolution headsets need DFR its not an option any longer when a 2k GPU is struggling to drive it
 
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BigBANGtheory said:
by default I drive my headset at 3700 x 3700 per eye and that brings the 4090 to its knees, with DCS and MSFS I have to lower it further to keep out of reprojection. This is why imho ALL higher resolution headsets need DFR its not an option any longer when a 2k GPU is struggling to drive it
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wow, you are doing well at 27m pixels. I'm running mine at 13m which is far, far less than the 18m of the pico4/reverb g2. Even then, I'm running flight sim at medium setting for 45fps.

I've picked 13m as I expect bigscreen will be running 2560x2560 rendered.
 
2560x2560 is the display resolution, the render resolution will depend on the optics I guess but its often 20 - 50% higher with Fresnel lens designs to account for the barrel distortion. Is it 1:1 with the pancake lens design? The other problem you get is viewing distant objects when the render resolution comes down, they can get very blurry similar to the effect of reprojection... Its a cruel trade off I find balancing a clear image with higher performance with blur.
 
BigBANGtheory said:
2560x2560 is the display resolution, the render resolution will depend on the optics I guess but its often 20 - 50% higher with Fresnel lens designs to account for the barrel distortion. Is it 1:1 with the pancake lens design? The other problem you get is viewing distant objects when the render resolution comes down, they can get very blurry similar to the effect of reprojection... Its a cruel trade off I find balancing a clear image with higher performance with blur.
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Yes, rumours are the render resolution is 1:1 on bigscreen. That's what the beta testers are saying on the discord channel. I know my pico4 runs at 3120x3120 so hopefully I'll get a nice fps boost with bigscreen.
 
I mean render resolution on headsets is very arbitrary… it’s not like a monitor. No matter what the render resolution, the native panel resolution is always the sample taken from the pre-distorted final image and sent to the headset.

Pimax could come out and say the 100% resolution is 2880x2880, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t benefit from higher render resolution. It’s just convention that dictates the 100% figure is closer to the optimal value, rather than choosing 100% as the native and higher values such as 150% as the optimal (which btw, are the terms unreal uses for the respective resolutions).

Since all current lens solutions have significant distortion, all will require distortion corrections and the big screen is no different. They may choose to say that 1:1 is the 100% option but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s no different to running any other headset at 1:1 - there will be clarity gains from going above that.

This will always be the case until render pipelines change to render pre-distorted frames, perhaps like this https://ustwo.com/blog/vr-distortion-correction-using-vertex-displacement/ , or we end up with some new optical technology that doesn’t require the distortion perhaps!
 
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Tracking updated - surprisingly enough it actually got picked up today on a Saturday but delivery has been amended to Friday.

I guess technically it’s replacing the G2, although I haven’t actually been using that for a while. The Pico 4 I’m currently using will retire from sim use, but at least until the wireless is actually working on the pimax I think I’ll still use it for non sim stuff… so not really being replaced as such yet. Given the size and weight of the crystal it may remain that way even after the wireless updates unless the visuals just ruin the pico for me.
 
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Zeeflyboy said:
Tracking updated - surprisingly enough it actually got picked up today on a Saturday but delivery has been amended to Friday.

I guess technically it’s replacing the G2, although I haven’t actually been using that for a while. The Pico 4 I’m currently using will retire from sim use, but at least until the wireless is actually working on the pimax I think I’ll still use it for non sim stuff… so not really being replaced as such yet. Given the size and weight of the crystal it may remain that way even after the wireless updates unless the visuals just ruin the pico for me.
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Sold my G2 for the Pico 4 a while back, so will be very interested if you think it's a worthwhile jump over those.
 
Crystal arrived unexpectedly today (was supposed to be this Friday), I’ve opened the box and got things charging but unfortunately I need to look after the kids for a bit before I can have a proper look.

Off the bat though pimax has been a little pimax. I received a service ticket the other day thanking me for my patience and giving me a $30 coupon, but informing me that due to production problems my unit is shipping with plastic lenses (what most of the beta testers got) and the glass lenses will be sent out separately… and that it is also missing the power hub which will be sent out separately.

On the other hand, it got sent with the more expensive fibre optic cable and from what I gather they may be considering changing out the second pair of higher ppd lenses for the more recently developed wide fov lenses instead… so not all bad.

Either way, it has arrived safe and sound… albeit not entirely complete. From the brief look I had in the AIO mode through the plastic lenses though everything is sharp and clear so as long as I get the glass replacements within a reasonable time frame I’m not overly bothered.
 
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