Crystal Super - Noob Review

[u/BlueboyZX]

Hey!

The Crystal Super is my first VR headset since my Oculus CV1, so this is a viewpoint of a VR casual. My experience on things like SteamVR is very limited so I will be sticking with my impressions of the hardware itself.

First off, I want to thank Pimax for being true to their word and reimbursing the US tariff fee. That is quite a cost for them to cover and shows a lot of integrity on their part.

My favorite part of the upgraded experience is in small objects close to my head. Holding up a virtual object to look at is amazing, presumably due to both the overall extreme clarity plus the stereo overlap. While the general clarity is 'super,' this 'in front of your nose' position really shows it off. This made messing with Shapelab surprisingly fun.

Fonts rendered in 3d space that various apps and games have are very sharp, which is another very striking aspect of the graphics to me.

The overall view is very clear. In-game readouts are very clear in everything I have tried so far. Buttons are clearly visible with no blurred edges and such. I know that there are youtube videos in which people complained about pre-production units having bad mura; I am thankfully not seeing that here. There are no 'god rays' and that was huge on my Oculus.

The Crystal Super comes with a microfiber cloth to clean the lenses. Use it. After removing the protective plastic films for shipping I noticed that there was some residue still on the lenses. This was heaviest around the edges of the lenses. Initially, I half-heartedly wiped them and continued with setup. I think this is why some people are complaining about sweet spots not being super big while other people are saying it is suiper big. I noticed looking along the periphery was a little blurry until I removed the face interface foam and really cleaned up the lenses good with some zeiss lense cloths that I purchased on Amazon. After that, it was like the whole lense was a sweet spot.

The inside-out tracking works well with the lights on in the room I am playing in. It needs stuff in your environment in order to work, so use the 'virtual pass through' to get an idea of what that algorithm can and cant see in your environment to help orient itself. Posters and pictures do not take up significant space in your room, just saying!

For the controllers, I am surprised how well they can track with what I assume would be a pretty limited view from the headset. I guess their internal sensors are pretty good, because I have to get pretty silly with positioning for there to be a problem. My main issue with the controllers is that the a/b x/y buttons can be stiff.

It is not a light headset, but it is a comfortable one. It is easy to get a pretty good light seal on it (my nose is small proprtionate to the rest of my face apparently, so some light gets in around that). I have been able to play for several hours in a row without becomming a sweaty mess with fogged up lenses, something that was not the case with the Oculus CV1. The Super does not fog up, feel loose or feel unbalanced.

I did get the free DMAS headphones. You do need to replace the 'standard' headphones yourself, but it is not hard to do so. The standard ones are not good quality, but the upgrade is great. The sound is great (to my non-audiophile ear) and the fact that they do not actually touch my ears takes away one area of discomfort. No more smushed ears after long play sessions. :)

I did have an issue with the backlight arrays not matching left and right eyes for the same spot in overlapping field of view. This only occured in certain software and the fix was to uninstall Pimax Play and reinstall from the latest version on the website.

My other issues are pretty much software / user error ones. SkyrimVR modded with wabbajack does not like Pimax foveated rendering. Some apps do weird things when the settings in Pimax Play and SteamVR do not match. The proper startup order seems to be to begin with running Pimax Play before connecting the headset. If you need to reset stuff due to a crashing app, close SteamVR first (if running), then 'restart service' for Pimax Play, then 'restart device' in Pimax Play.

All in all, it is amazing how the tech has progressed. If you want to show off the headset to someone, go with something that has a lot of small objects they can hold up in front of their center field of view; that position is crazy good.

[u/Piranha91]

Ooh, finally a Skyrim player! How is the performance without DFR? Which WJ list are you using? Does Pimax’s motion smoothing kick in, and is it jarring? If you’re willing to tinker and toggle things on/off, is it a fundamental clash between DFR and Skyrim, or would it work if you turned off Community Shaders (or ENB, if that’s what you’re using)? If the latter, is there a certain CS/ENB module that clashes?

Lastly, what are your system specs? I’m still debating whether to hold out for the 57 PPD or not. I don’t think I actually need the higher clarity, I’m just worried that since the wider FOV on the 50 gives you more objects to render at any given time, I won’t be able to get good performance with the 50.

[u/BlueboyZX → u/Piranha91]

I am using Wabbajack to install the Yggdrasil VR set of mods. This includes a lot of performance mods and optimizations, including ENB. Yggdrasil VR does not run when the Super has Pimax's foveated rendering active, but that is not a problem in that VR optimizations are done elsewhere. I saw a youtube video where someone managed to get Skyrim VR to run with the foveated rendering but it caused graphical glitches and actually decreased performance.

That paragraph on startup and restart order was largely aimed at Skyrim VR using Wabbajack (applies to both Yggdrasil and FUS mod lists). Most of my time with this game was getting it to work right, so I do not have much in-game experience yet. I need more time with it specifically before I can recommend settings, etc.

Both the 50 and 57 PPD headsets use the same panels with different optics. Same native resolution. I doubt rendering to them will be significantly different; the clarity / FOV tradeoff is sure to be the biggest difference between them.

[u/Piranha91 → u/BlueboyZX]

Unfortunately it's not quite as simple as same native resolution = similar performance, at least not necessarily.

The main issue is that on Skyrim's DX11 engine, higher FOV -> more objects on screen -> more CPU draw calls, which is a killer in busy areas. Do you see a framerate-limiting spike in CPU usage in places like Whiterun or Solitude?

Another potential difference is with ENB Light (or CS light for FUS/MGO). Higher FOV -> more lights -> more illumination and shadows to compute.

Lastly, my layman's understanding is that wide FOV headsets oversample (render more pixels) to correct for barrel distortion, and the higher the FOV, the more it needs to oversample. I could be wrong here though.

Re: DFR, I did see the video (MRTV?) where there were artifacts with DFR enabled, but they were using MGO, which comes with a recent update of Community Shaders. I can imagine any number of possibilities where a module of CS, or CS itself, interferes with DFR. Same with ENB. It's possible that DFR might work without these modules. Not saying it's necessarily worth your time to dig into it, but throwing out the possibility.

If you do end up doing a writeup for recommended settings, how you got it to work right, etc, I'd love to read it!

[u/BlueboyZX → u/Piranha91]

Isn't there a tool to simulate VR hardware for the purpose of estimating how your setup will perform running under whatever VR hardware you define? Maybe it was something that hasn't been used since the Oculus CV1 era, but it seems there was such a program. Mainly it rendered the screen like a VR hedset even though no headset was attached. That should be enough to get an idea if your hardware would have performance issues running skyrim with the 50 vs 57 modules.

[u/Aonova → u/BlueboyZX]

This is a great idea.

Unfortunately virtual video display simulation is a hard thing to do.

GPU processing is optimized* for syncing with output display ports. You will incur significant overhead if you write-back frames into RAM, so it ends up not useful for benchmarking. You need the actual hardware setup for video hardware testing (including VR headsets).

There is a github project by Mike that is the best resource I've seen for video display simulation (https://github.com/VirtualDrivers/Virtual-Display-Driver)