The Pimax Crystal is not worth it at this time. (My experience)
Posted By Darder on r/virtualreality
1st Impressions
So I got my hands on a Pimax Crystal. My father has purchased one for himself, but while he’s away on vacation, he allowed me to borrow it to test it out. I have had it for a week now, and I think this device is not worth it, at least not right now. I’ll keep this brief. TL;DR at the end anyways.
POSITIVES
First, the positives. To the contrary of other reviews I saw, I like the build quality. The plastic feels nice and nothing feels cheap, except the top strap, which feels a bit flimsy. But all in all, nicely built. The DMAS headphones are also nice.
The clarity of the lenses and the image is grand, truly. It finally feels as if the only limiting factor on visual fidelity is the quality of the textures, and that’s saying something! I love this picture quality, and driving around in Project Cars 2 or kayaking in Kayak VR Mirage has been wonderful. Great FOV too.
Audio quality is good. No complaints.
NEGATIVES
And this is where it gets ugly.
Pimax has always suffered on the Software side, and the Crystal is no different. The software is unfinished, unpolished, and outright broken depending on what you are looking at. I set up the Crystal on my PC, everything seemed fine. Kayak Mirage worked fine. Went to bed.
Next day, I try to play: Pimax Crystal is not detected. I tried a lot of disconnecting, reconnecting, disconnecting waiting and then reconnecting, restarting the service, restarting the device, restarting the PC, a bunch of it. No dice, would not detect it despite nothing having changed. Ended up ditching the USB hub, and boom it was detected. The connector is Micro USB B, and is very, very loose and easy to detach anyways, so you don’t want it, except it does provide more power to the Crystal.
So now the Crystal is connected, let’s play. Nope, you need to redo the room setup. That’s right, everytime you start the Pimax app, you have to redo the entire room setup, which is putting the headset in the center of your area, pressing the trigger, then going back to pc to click a button, then setting the headset down on the ground, then going back to the pc to click a button, and then you can finally play. Really annoying.
Ok now let’s play. Wait, the Auto IPD is now broken. My IPD is 62.5mm, but every. single. time. I put on the Crystal now (it used to work before) , it sets me at 63.8mm, making me feel very weird. I have to readjust it using manual controls, which is annoying.
Ok, now let’s play. NOPE. Beat Saber outright refuses to work, it launches alright but its framerate *looks* like 1 or 2 frames per second. I’m not joking, it’s frozen, and then sometimes updates. Unplayable literally. And after a minute, it crashes. Great.
Let’s try Half Life Alyx. NOPE. The game is immediately blocky and blurry, as if you were in 240p but for VR. I searched the issue online for about 45 mins trying different solutions, before finally talking to someone that said “Oh yeah, the Crystal has an issue with Alyx, add this launch command for MSAA and it will be fine”. I did, and sure enough, it fixed it. But why did I have to do it in the first place? I didn’t have any issues like this with the Rift S, or the Quest 2, or the HTC Vive even.
Still in Alyx, tried to play and… There is audio delay of about 500 ms on everything. You look at your pistol, fire, and the sound is clearly delayed. Unplayably so, it’s worse than a bad bluetooth headset. I was done at this point and stopped “playing”. I googled to try to see if I could fix the issue, and sure enough, it’s a known issue that affects people seemingly randomly and Pimax is “working on it”. Oh this Audio only affects people with DMAS supposedly, but it’s all over Steam VR , including other games than Alyx. Looking closer, I could see it affecting SteamVR’s interface, but it wasn’t as noticeable in Kayak and Project Cars.
This headset is heavy , and picking it up feels very bad because of 2 reasons. One is, the power cable that runs between the battery and the front of the headset is above the top strap, but you shouldn’t hold the headset by it, as said by Pimax. Why is this placement there then? It’s really awkward to always remember “Wait, don’t grab the big and easy to access handle here, grab the one under it which is the safe top strap”. And if you want to grab the front unit itself, you got to avoid the cameras, and the buttons, as the power button gets constantly pushed accidentally just by trying to pick it up, or the IPD adjustment buttons.
Once you have it on, it’s well balanced, but you’ll feel the heavy momentum in any fast movement of your head, and after some time over a session.
Oh and the controllers? Bad is all I can say. They feel cheap, the haptics is… mediocre, much worse than the Rift S or Quest 2 controllers, and the tracking of the controllers fails regularly when taking them out of the sight of Cameras, to the contrary of the Rift S and Quest 2 Tracking algorithms which estimate the position very well.
CONCLUSION
So yeah, for a 2200$ CAD Headset, this is a disappointment. I can’t play the games I want to play, or any SteamVR games for that matter. Maybe with time, those issues can be fixed, but at the moment? Boy am I glad not to have pulled the trigger on it. It is a pain to use, and I would not recommend it to anyone. Maybe wait a year, see if the issues are ironed out.
TL;DR
Pimax Crystal is bad because software is full of bugs and unplayable on SteamVR. Audio delay of 500 ms on everything. Tons of troubleshooting and annoyance at each startup. Some games straight up don’t work. But image quality is cool. Does not outweigh the bad, I don’t like it, I don’t recommend it.
EDIT: Forgot to add my PC Specs.RTX 3080 12GB, i7-9700k, 32 GB DDR4 3200mhz RAM, Samsung EVO Nvme SSD
The frametimes were not a problem when running Project Cars 2, Kayak VR, or Half Life Alyx. It was about 9 to 10 ms.
f-bounce: Source r/virtualreality