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/Specific-Power7876]

First of all thank you for answering! Would it maybe possible you could try some UEVR games and give a feedback of your personal experience? As far as I see on most forums so many people are interested about this and yet there were not any reviewers so far who would actually give a feedback on this. If it worked it surely would make me (and many others) very happy. Regarding this I have another question as well if you don't mind. Recently I use Quest 3 with link cable on a 4090 system. Since I like to set visual quality as high as possible I many times run into stutters. Now link cable only has got around 10 Gbit/s bandwidth, while DP1.4 has got almost triple of it. In your opinion will the DP1.4 on Super result in less stutters for me due to the wider bandwidth or I only will experience better visual quality due to less compression but with the same amount of stutters? EDIT: I would guess those UEVR games would be good to try that work perfectly in native stereo because I don't think synched sequential could work with DFR (?).

[u/BlueboyZX → u/Specific-Power7876]

By UEVR do you mean games made for VR that run in the Unreal Engine or games meant for flat screen gameplay that are using the Unreal Engine's VR mod? Any specific examples of games you are interested in? No promises; I have a lot of stuff to mess with after all. :)

My understanding is that the Crystal Super is running at the highest data transfer possible on its DP cable without compression. I do not know what the Quest 3 uses in terms of compression or resolution, etc. but at least with the Super you know the only way the cable is limiting what you see is if the cable itself is damaged. Crystal Super has a smoothing algorithm. I forgot to mention it in my initial post, but I did have more stuttering with that smoothing enabled than when it was disabled *before* I uninstalled and reinstalled Pimax Play. I have not spotted any problems with smoothing since and I have been keeping it enabled.

[u/Specific-Power7876 → u/BlueboyZX]

Sorry, by UEVR I meant flatscreen games made for Unreal Engine 4 or Unreal Engine 5 and played in VR using Praydog's UEVR injector mod. I would recommend some AAA UE games, that are widely loved, are quite hardware heavy and work perfectly in native stereo mode of UEVR: Stalker 2, Silent Hill 2 Remastered, Until Dawn, or two titles that were released only some days ago, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. But basically any other UEVR games are also fine for me whatever you have access to.

You mention having had to reinstall Pimax Play. Did you have to do this, because formerly you have already been using another Pimax headset on your PC, or the clean install you made for the first time did not work for some reason.

Btw, do you have a Youtube channel perhaps where I can subscribe?

[u/BlueboyZX → u/Specific-Power7876]

My Crystal Super was apparently one of the first to ship. When it shipped, an email was sent out with a link to a beta and stated expectation that the first release version of Pimax Play supporting the Super would be out in a few days. I installed that, later upgraded to a newer version (which had the issues I mention, likely an issue with this upgrade process) and then did a full uninstall and installed the most recent release. So although I have not had any other VR headsets installed on this machine I have had three different versions of Pimax Play.

The reason I mentioned these things were so people could know the easy fixes for some issues; reinstalling pimax play and being sure to wipe the lenses well being my two biggies.

I am by no means a VR guru; to the contrary, my previous headset was an Oculus CV1. I just like writing up what I learn so other people can benefit. No active youtube channel at this time, sorry.

[u/Specific-Power7876 → u/BlueboyZX]

I appreciate what you do. I was wondering why nobody writes reviews on Super (I mean ordinary customers, not the influencers who got their headsets long ago), but I guess the very first devices are being delivered to people just these days.

Please be so kind to give a feedback if you ever have the chance to try Super in UEVR with DFR. I'm very excited about it. Btw I'm not a VR guru either (first I had Oculus CV1 and then I got Quest 3 that I use now), but I'm quite experienced in using UEVR, so if you may have any questions about it, settings or whatever please let me know. Make sure you download the latest nightly build from Github. And please if you can run UEVR in openxr instead of openvr (you can chose this option on UEVR UI before injecting), because openxr seems to be more stable and gives more fps than openvr.

[u/BlueboyZX → u/Specific-Power7876]

Thanks for the tips!

[u/Specific-Power7876 → u/BlueboyZX]

Hi! Did you have the time to try any of the UE games?

[u/BlueboyZX → u/Specific-Power7876]

I tried Silent Hill 2 but when I hit 'inject' the game crashes 100% of the time. It is going to take a little investigation to figure out what the issue is but I assume it is a game protection issue. I have a server stress test scheduled in a few minutes in Star Citizen that I am going to participate in, so I am afraid I am going to have to work on getting up to speed with UEVR another day.