Nice info on the Pimax Crystal with the Dynamic Foveated Rendering in DCS.
Timestamp is where he demoās it. Setting it all up is the bulk of the YT.
As he mentions YT compression is such that you donāt really see the effect in a video.
TLDR: performance improvement not crazy good but as expected very much clearer no matter where you point your eyes. Early days perhaps.
Itās not a huge gain in the Varjo Aero either, but every frame counts and if thereās no downsideā¦why not?
Iām happy to see more developers using this tech. As you say, itās early days⦠I bet it will get even better with time and effort.
Agreed.
I have the Crystal since about a month and am extremely disappointed. The view has chromatic aberration and the power lasts only 2 hours, even when connected with the powered USB-hub. I am in contact with the Pimax support which is absolutely uselsess. At this point I just want to get a refund, but they just act like they didnāt read that. You hear a lot of bad things about Pimax and I thought it couldnāt be that bad. Unfortunately it is. I would strongly recommend anyone to stay away from Pimax.
Sorry to hear that, @MBot.
I heard that about Pimax but hoped they had shaped up. That battery is a concernā¦
He likes it, as in says it is the best option for simmers without base stations right now.
@MBot - that sucks, was a bit worried about Pimax support, as I think Iām on my 3rd HP Reverb and although they make cables out of tissue paper, HP support has been quite good - they basically just send out a replacement headset whenever I find an issue and I send the busted one back for free, but I did get the $99 business support contract thing anticipating clown like build quality.
Whatās with the power then? I spend about 2 hours setting up a flight so thatās a concern - why doesnāt it take power from the cable?
despite I bought mine Pimax Artisan through Amazon, went through few cycles with the Pimax support anyway as I had an issue with little wobbly tracking.
all in all the support was OK, still we didnt solve it.
so I took advantage of the Amazon return policy.
I wanted to say that my impression of Pimax support was that they were willing to help and were trying to extensively troubleshoot before return/refund.
definitely agree that the approach of āsend us the faulty unit, we send you new oneā could go long way.
It is advertised with 4-6 hours with the cable attached, but I only get 2. Once when I got the low power warning I stopped playing and put the headset aside. After about one hour in stand-by the battery run completely empty and it shut down. So it doesnāt even draw enough power to sustain stand-by mode. From what I can see, the headset does not draw power at all. Hot swapping the battery doesnāt work either, it will crash DCS. Since it is apparently drawing no power through the cable, I assume that the connection is lost when the battery is removed.
The Crystal came with its own powered USB hub, which is probably the cheapest that Pimax could find. The cables attached only loosely and the headset had constant connection failures. Just turning it on would require a dozen attempts at re-plugging the connections. I have switched to my own powered USB hub which at least has resolved this.
There would be the option to attach an additional (i.e. your own) USB-C cable for power and connect this directly to a charger. But I simply refuse to do this, as I do not intend to spend the next years playing with a headset with two cables attached. This is a $1600 headset and you simply should not be supposed to zip-tie extra cables to get it to work correctly. This is a premium priced product and I expect premium quality. Who would accept this from Apple?
Unfortunatly this is a deal-breaker for me. Just two hours is not enough for simming.
My other impressions are that it is pretty uncomfortable to wear and very bulky. Because of the battery at the back I cannot rest my head against my seat and when viewing around I constantly bump various bits of the headset against the headrest. I am constantly aware of this when playing (and try to avoid it), which is a pretty big imersion breaker. It is pretty fustrating, because I think all of that bulk is unnecessary. It is either because of the unnecessary standalone requirement (battery, its own computer) and because Pimax was lazy and they used their existing wide FOV cases (which the Crystal doesnāt need).
This is all very unfortunate, as the Crystal certainly has its merrits. The view is very clear across the whole FOV. I can read almost any cockpit labels by just glancing at them and check-six at the corner of my eyes, which is fantastic. Unfortunately image quality is impaired by very apparent chromatic aberration which starts at about 1/3 from the center of the screen and gets worse towards the edge. When glancing down at the instruments, the white needles have a green ghost needle offset by about half of the needle width. So that is hard to ignore.
DFR is fantastic. I got a 50% performance improvement from 60 to 90 fps with no visible difference. That is certainly the future.
Overall my impression is that Pimax is very keen on advertising their āflagship featuresā, but they have severe quality issues and are unable to provide a fine-tuned product that just works. For this price tag I have higher expectations.
Thank You for infoā¦I presently use a Pimax 8kx and I have been happy with it with no issues for four years.
The whole Needs Battery thing with The Crystal bothers me when Iām plugged in to my PC.
Why should I be dependent on a Battery???
Are you sure that you are using a high-speed/ high power charging cable?
I found when using my quest 2 that all cables are definitely not the same.
Its the proprietary cable that came with the headset.
So it took about a month with the support, but Pimax has finally agreed to refund me. I am not fully beliefing it though until I have the money back. Going to send back the headset now.