Pimax Crystal Light

Written by John Yan on 8/2/2024 for PC  

One of the few consumer VR headsets I’ve yet to review is a Pimax version. Having seen them at CES a few times, I just never had the opportunity to take a look at one, until now. Pimax is coming out with a brand new HMD in their Crystal line with the Pimax Crystal Light and they were super kind in sending me one to take a look at.

The Pimax Crystal Light is based off of their high end AIO capable Pimax Crystal. That HMD has a ton of tech built in and can be used like a Quest 3 in stand alone mode or tethered to a computer. It’s also pretty expensive starting at $1449. The Crystal Light looks to take a lot of the extra features that maybe users don’t want to use or need and reduce the cost of the HMD while retaining most of the visual features such as the glass aspheric lenses, high resolution, fast refresh rates, and local dimming to name a few. Before we get started, here's a coupon code for $10 if you want to order something from their website after you read my review: WDBFQWYZ8WR9

There are two current SKUs of Pimax Crystal Lights that you can purchase. There’s the full package with controllers for $899 and without controllers for $799. Pimax has listed a Crystal Light without local dimming for $699, but we’ll see if that gets released anytime soon.

Physically, the Crystal Light is one of the larger HMDs out there. From pictures on Pimax’s website, the Light looks exactly like the Crystal on the surface minus the battery in the back. The size and shape is pretty synonymous with their entire lineup with that recognizable front V like design across the front face plate.

A relatively large front housing holds all the internals and optics for the Pimax Crystal Light. While it’s very wide, the depth is actually close to the Valve Index and HP Reverb G2 when I put them up next to each other. From the edge of the face gasket to the very tip where the Crystal Light extends out is about 114mm using my calipers to measure. From corner to corner at its widest, we’re looking at around 267mm. The height was measured to be about 113mm from the bottom of the headset to the very top of the arch in the middle where the top of the head strap latches on to. Considering Pimax removed a lot of hardware to reduce the price, you’d think they would reduce the size of the housing as well. I do understand that in order to keep manufacturing costs low, it was probably best to reuse as much of the Crystal design as possible and it would have been more costly to try and rearrange the internals to fit into a tighter space as well as change the tooling and assembly line for putting this together defeating the purpose of making a Crystal with the visuals and removal of a few bells and whistles.

There are no extra USB ports on the headset itself, which is a slight disappointment. In the past, we’ve seen people use extra ports to plug in fans or other peripherals, but the Crystal Light has no extra ports on it. Maybe it was another feature removed from the Crystal to save some costs, but I would have liked to have seen one more USB port on here for plugging in something.

On top sits a rocker style button for volume control and a single button for turning the Crystal Light on and off. They don’t feel like the highest quality of buttons, but they’ll do the job. Next to the buttons also sits a LED that glows blue in standby and green when in use. When pressing the volume button, an indicator appears on the screen to let you know what volume level it currently is, something I appreciate. It was a little too easy to mistakenly push the power button when trying to reach for the volume buttons, but it didn’t take me long to do some feeling with my fingers to make sure I was on the rocker button.

The strap system looks to be very similar in design as well to past Pimax HMDs. It’s a stiff but flexible plastic strap that wraps around the side to the back where a larger housing containing the ratcheting dial sits that tightens or loosens it together. On the back inside also sits some nice cushy fabric foam padding for comfort. Along the top is a single velcro strap that helps alleviate some of the weight by having some of the headset sit on top of your head.

Overall, the build quality seems solid. It’s not going to blow you away and won’t feel as premium as say an Apple Vision Pro, but then again you’re not paying those prices. I would say it’s solid for a consumer VR headset and plastic used seems on par with a Valve Index or HP Reverb G2.

Around the glass lenses sits a nice soft fabric foam that feels pretty comfortable on the face. I’m more of a silicone face interface person, but that’s because of the more active games I play on the Meta Quest 3. For the Crystal Light, I envision this to be more of a sim specific VR headset so a nice foam gasket is fine as you probably won’t be sweating that much sitting down flying planes or driving cars unless you are in a pretty warm room. The face gasket does well in blocking out any external lighting helping close out the world around you.

To help block out more light, there are two overlapping silicone nose flaps that sit on top of the bridge of your nose when you have the Crystal Light on. Between that and the nice foam face gasket, the Crystal Light blocks out pretty much everything making you really feel immersed and undistracted by the outside world.

Below the nose flap is the sensor to detect if you are wearing the headset. Once you take it off, the displays shut down in a short amount of time and light up again pretty quickly when you put the headset back on. I didn’t see in the software if there was a way to adjust how much time the displays shut off after you take off the headset, but maybe they’ll add that in a future update to the software.

Comfortability I would say is really good provided you aren’t wearing glasses. There is enough space between the lenses and your face to let you wear glasses with it, but after a small amount of time my glasses would sometimes get pushed into my face depending on how my head was situated. It would really push down when I looked up and then my glasses would get smudged from the oils from my face, making the visuals a little blurry. If you wear corrective lenses, I highly suggest getting some lens inserts as when I tested the Crystal Light without my glasses on, it felt a lot better.

As with most tethered headsets, the cable can get a little annoying and depending on where it lays on the ground, you might feel it pull back at times. If you have it laid out nicely, you can alleviate this or if you have a ceiling mounted cable attachment device, that’s even better. Just know that it is a thicker cable and dragging it around can sometimes make you feel like the Crystal Light is pulling back a little bit. There are two cable guides that help route the cable through to the back of the headset. The one near the left temple is a little finicky on mine and it's prone to having the cable pop out. For those who use an overhead cable routing system, the rear guide is positioned nicely on top of the rear of the headset so you can route the cable up.

The Crystal Light does seem to move a little when shaking my head from side to side. If I do a quick turn in an action game, the front shifts a little bit before pulling back into place. I tightened as much as I could going a step past where I was comfortable, but there was still a wobble when turning. Moving my head up and down was fine though. Compared to something like a Quest 3, which has a more compact design, there was definitely more horizontal movement when doing quick turns. When doing slower sims like Microsoft Flight Simulator, it’s not an issue, but it can appear in quicker dog fighting games like Elite Dangerous or Star Wars Squadron where you can sometimes scan around your cockpit quickly. I would say the amount of horizontal wobble is similar to the Valve Index if I were to compare it to something I have on hand. It’s not something that detracts me too much from the game though and I’m sure there are some third party items that can be purchased if you want to make it even more stable horizontally.

The weight of the Crystal Light is around 930 grams from my not too scientific measurement with my scale. Pimax says with the removal of a bunch of hardware, they were able to reduce the weight from the Crystal by 30%. It balances alright, but is a little front heavy. And even though it’s almost double the weight of a Quest 3 (515 g) and the HP Reverb G2 (550g), I found it to be pretty comfortable to wear even during long playing sessions most of the time due to the foam used and the head straps in place. Although sometimes I do feel it pulling the front of my face a bit until I do some adjusting. The top strap helps take the weight off the front, but I do feel like there should be something on the back to counter the weight. Whereas the Crystal has the battery in the back to help, there’s nothing here on the Crystal Light. There are some third party solutions available to alleviate this and they may be some that I might try should I keep this HMD long term.

A big aspect of HMDs are the optics and how clear it is when viewing the virtual world. Pimax didn’t use the fresnel lenses of the past or the current mobile hotness which are pancake lenses. They went with glass aspheric lenses, which is a type I hadn’t experienced in a long time. In the traditional eyewear world, aspheric lenses are thinner, lighter, and flatter than traditional glass lenses. Aspheric lenses here are used to help with better light penetration and increased clarity around the edges. With pancake lenses, there’s a lot of lost light when the image is seen through the multiple layers. Pimax states that there’s only a 1% loss in light compared to around 90% lost with pancake lenses. That should also translate to a lower power requirement and less heat as well. Aspheric lenses aren’t new in the VR world actually as the original Rift development kits used them. I had the DK2 back in the day so I was a little familiar with this lens type. But we haven’t seen many use them until now. These aspheric lenses eliminate such visual anomalies like god rays that can happen in fresnel lenses, something I really disliked on my older VR headsets.

Field of view is going to be a little different for people depending on their head shape and how close your eyes are to the lenses. Using a program called HMDQ, it gave back the values of 103.3 degrees horizontal and 103.7 degrees vertical. Diagonal was reported back as 121.7 degrees with an overlap of 83.31 degrees. Pimax lists the FOV as 115 degrees on the horizontal with 105 degrees on the vertical. I didn’t get those values in my testing nor have I seen others get the horizontal that’s been posted on their product page. It’s got more vertical and less horizontal than Quest 3 (HDMQ: 108 degrees horizontal, 98.2 degrees vertical, 80 degrees overlap), which is my current go to HMD for quick get in and out VR games.

When going into TestHMD, I was able to get about 104 degrees horizontal and 102 degrees vertical, which closely matches up to the values reported from HMDQ. On my Quest 3 for comparison, I got 106 degrees horizontal and 100 degrees vertical.

Compared to the HP Reverb G2, which is the one I am looking to replace for sims, it has more horizontal and vertical FOV than the Windows Mixed Reality headset. Running HDMQ, the Reverb G2 reported back a 98.6 degree FOV on the horizontal and 98.6 degrees on the vertical with an overlap of 83.8 degrees. In TestHMD, I did get pretty much the same with 98 degrees on both the horizontal and vertical.

Again, FOV is going to be dependent on the shape of your head so it can vary from person to person. Those are the values I was able to see for myself. From my perceived measurements, it’s a clear winner over the HP Reverb G2 if that’s one you’re looking to replace. The Quest 3 gives you a slightly bigger horizontal FOV but less vertical and less overlap.

As one who really, really loves the pancake lenses of the Quest 3 with its huge sweet spot and large area of clarity, I was really excited to see how aspheric lenses in the Crystal Light compare to it. Putting on the Crystal Light, it took me a little more time to find the sweet spot than the Quest 3. Whereas I can drop my Quest 3 on top of my head and see clearly throughout my field of view, the Crystal Light is more finicky. It does take me a little more time even with my top strap set the way I wanted to be able to see completely clear all around. Once you get dialed in though, it does provide a very clear picture all around except maybe the very edge for me. It’s not something that I notice unless I’m really looking for it, but overall, the aspheric lenses in the Crystal Light are superb for both brightness and image quality for most of your view.

An aspect of having a clear image is to get the correct IPD dialed in. The Crystal had motors and eye tracking to be able to do this automatically. The Crystal Light lacks both of those features in order to reduce the cost of this headset, but there is a dial on the inside upper left part of the headset for you to change it. When changing the IPD, the display of the current IPD in the HMD only seems to come up in stages and I’d rather it be constantly showing when I’m turning the dial to really get it dialed in. The Pimax software also displays the IPD setting you have set it at, but there is one caveat. When you take off the headset and rotate the strap up, the cable can sometimes rub up against the dial and accidentally change the IPD. My IPD is 64 and after a few times taking it on and off, I noticed in the software it changed ever so slightly. Slightly annoying, but manageable, if I was keeping this headset for the long term, I’d probably design some piece that I can 3D print and snap in to prevent the cord from rubbing on the dial to mitigate this small issue. The Crystal Light supports an IPD range from 58mm to 72mm so it does provide a good range of support. It’s more than the Valve Index (58mm-70mm) but less than the Quest 3 (53mm-75mm) and much better than the HP Reverb G2 (60mm-68mm).

Under the aspheric lenses sits two QLED displays with mini-LED local dimming technology sporting a resolution of 2880x2880 pixels per eye for a total of 5760x2280 pixels. The resolution makes it one of the highest consumer grade level HMDs and at the top of the list of the ones available without spending an abhorrent amount of money like a Varjo headset or the Apple Vision Pro. Colors are vibrant and crisp with the QLED screen. We’re talking about really good colors here. In theBlu, the fluorescent colors of some of the glowing fish in the Abyss scenario really shine. Detail wise, it’s truly amazing. There are some details in the glove in Half-Life Alyx that you don’t see in other headsets that you do on the Crystal Light. That translates to every other part of this game and other games as well. I was truly impressed by the increased texture detail in some of the clothes in Alyx, seeing the wrinkles and folds up close in high detail, and how the environment looks far more realistic. In games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, I had no problems reading the gauges and dials in the cockpit of the plane in a large area from the center of the view. I can’t tell you how nice it is to not have to squint and try to make out what the text says. It really ups the immersion of a sim game when you can see all your onboard controls clearly. Screen door effect is pretty much nonexistent as well and I could not see any space between pixels. I was pretty much lost inside of the headset for the majority of the time I was playing and didn’t even think about the screen door effect until writing this. There was practically none that I could see. Chromatic aberration is pretty light depending on the scene and I’m one of those that doesn’t seem to notice it as much. I would say on the edges of your view, you’d see it more so.

PPD is around 35 with the field of view that's on the Crystal Light. That’s a pretty damn good PPD. More than the HP Reverb G2 which has 22 and Quest 3 which has 25 PPD. It’s one of the highest for consumer level VR headsets. You’ll have to spend a lot more to get higher PPD and there’s still some HMDs that cost more and have less PPD than the Crystal Light. Or, you get into the XR glasses realm where the PPD is in the 40s but the FOV is so small as well as being a separate class of wearable hardware that it would be like comparing apples to oranges. At 35 PPD, the Crystal Light really stands above a lot of other VR headsets in this area.

While the blacks don’t get as deep as say an OLED display, the combination of the QLED screens and mini-LED local dimming does make it a lot better than the somewhat dark grays you see in other LCD VR headsets. Local dimming is a feature to try and get more granular control over the brightness of an area of your display. OLED displays are the current standard in black levels while we have upcoming technologies such as mini-LED and micro-LED. The Pimax Crystal Light comes in a version with and without local dimming using mini-LED technology. Pimax sent one with local dimming and it’s to really help with black levels and brightness of certain areas depending on what’s on screen. Compared to something like a set of XR glasses using micro-OLED, you can definitely tell the difference in black levels, but that’s not to say the QLED and mini-LED combo isn’t effective. In fact, it gets rather close, and I mean really close.

There are four levels of local dimming that you can choose to use: none, balanced, highlights, and extreme. I tried a few games that specifically had many dark areas to see how well local dimming worked. It’s really game dependent on how effective it is. For example, trying out theBlu and the Luminous Abyss experience, extreme local dimming was highly effective in producing a deep black display in areas of no light underwater. Seeing the glowing fish or jellyfish float by in complete darkness that was really, really close to being true black was awesome. When switching to highlight or balanced, the area becomes more of a dark gray, which wasn’t nearly as immersive.

With Star Wars Squadron, the darkness of space wasn’t nearly as pronounced as the darkness of being underwater in theBlu. The extreme mode still made for a darker gray view of space and sometimes there was a loss of stars visible unless you dialed back the local dimming mode to either highlight or balance. But that in turn produced an even lighter shade of gray in the black areas. It’s here where I preferred the highlight setting in local dimming so as to not lose some of the details outside of my spaceship.

On some scenes in Half-Life Alyx, turning on extreme local dimming just completely washed out the areas. You would lose detail in various objects in your view because it just became way too dark and it’s not supposed to be that dark from the various light sources in the game. Here is another game where switching to balance helped out. While it doesn’t reproduce the dark areas as well, the rest to me looks better. But, there are other areas in the game where turning it to extreme worked really well such as the underground sewer like levels. Even with being game dependent, games like Half-Life Alyx show the different levels of local dimming can work better or worse depending on the level.

So while local dimming can really enhance the visuals of a game, it can also be detrimental to the visual quality. At least you have the ability to choose how much local dimming you want there to be and if I had my choice on choosing a Crystal Light with or without the local dimming option, I’d definitely opt for it because there are cases where maxing the local dimming feature can really enhance the experience.

Refresh rates range from 60Hz to 120Hz so if you have the PC to do so, you can push it to be a buttery smooth 120Hz depending on the game of course. The software lets you choose which frequency to drive the displays at and on some less demanding games, I was able to hold a good 120Hz. For most sims I dialed it back down to 90Hz so that I could push more detail. Even with my AMD 7800X3D and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 setup, games like Microsoft Flight Simulator aren’t capable of getting near 120fps even with DLSS enabled. I do like the screens being 120Hz capable, something like the HP Reverb G2 couldn’t do with its max at 90Hz.

Tracking is done via cameras mounted on the top corners of the headset and two cameras underneath your cheek on the bottom. That means inside out tracking and I’ve always liked inside out tracking for sim type games where I don't have to deal with lighthouse placements and I can pretty much just put my headset on, reset the center of the play area, and get into the game. For those who do want to use lighthouse tracking, the faceplate is replaceable with a lighthouse tracking faceplate. That might be something you want to use for something like a motion simulating rig like a YAW or a DOF Reality or if you want to more easily use lighthouse based controllers. Taking off the faceplate does take a little bit of effort though, compared to say the HTC Vive Cosmos where there’s a button that you can press to help release the faceplate. Here you need to undo two clips with your fingernails on the bottom and it does take more effort. But unlike the Vive Cosmos, you don’t have to switch faceplates to use either the inside out tracking or lighthouse tracking so it should just be changing out once and you’re good to go. That’s good as I would hate to have to switch back and forth depending on which tracking tech I wanted to use with the design of the Crystal Light and even with the easy release switch of the Vive Cosmos, it was still a little bit annoying to interchange them.

That said, the inside out tracking of the Crystal Light is solid and reliable once you get it all calibrated. Unless the game was just having horrible performance, I had smooth tracking of where I was looking without any perceivable issues. This is separate from controller tracking, which I will talk about later, but looking around in any game whether it was a sim or an action game like Half-Life Alyx was stable and dependable. My area’s lighting is bright though and having used multiple inside out tracking solutions, I always make sure there’s plenty of light for the cameras to see.

There is also a passthrough mode with the Crystal Light but it’s akin to how the Valve Index is with a very blurry black and white image. Coming from the Quest 3, it’s a stark contrast, but this isn’t meant to be a mixed reality headset. It’s good enough for you to be able to grab a cup to drink or see someone or something near your play area. I am disappointed that I won’t be able to use some of the programs that let you create mixed reality windows so I can see my real life hands and controls in my sims with the great passthrough that the Quest 3 has. We’ll see if the upcoming mixed reality faceplate for the Crystal series can enable that. You can activate and deactivate black and white passthrough by double tapping the side of the HMD, which is convenient.

Whereas the Pimax Crystal had the hardware to do foveated rendering with Tobii eye tracking, the Crystal Light lacks the hardware to do so. I do wish this had the ability to add it, but I understand it was omitted as part of the features removed to meet the current price point. So without the eye tracking, the Crystal Light is limited to fixed foveated rendering. That means only the center part of the view will be rendered at the max resolution while the outer periphery will render at a lower resolution to improve performance. For those who are used to just moving their head to look around rather than using their eyes, it’s not hard to get used to. There are four different settings: off, performance, balance, and quality.

My Pimax Crystal review unit did not come with the nicer DMAS earphones but rather the integrated audio that I think suffers from low fidelity and low volume. I had to really push everything to 100% no matter how I rotated the speakers. It’s OK and works, but it’s definitely one of the weaker parts of the setup and one that does take you out a little bit from being fully immersed into the game. There’s room though to let you use some over the ear speakers of your choice giving you an alternative to the included audio solution. I’d definitely recommend that over what’s built it or spring for the DMAS update for another $100, which as of this writing is temporarily out of stock.

The microphone on the Crystal Light is more than adequate for game chat. I used OBS to record some gameplay along with myself speaking into the mic and I heard myself fine with volume levels being pretty good. My voice was clear and I would say the mic is comparable to the Valve Index’s in terms of sound quality. It’s definitely suitable for talking with others if you’re gaming online with friends.

Connection to the computer is done through one USB connection and one Displayport connection. You’ll also need to plug the power adapter into it and to a wall as with most VR headsets, you’ll need to power it separately. The cable is rather thick and I would say about as flexible as cables from other headsets. Lengthwise at 5 meters or 15 feet, it’s OK although not as long as the HTC Reverb G2’s which is 6 meters. I don’t like that it’s a permanent connection to the Crystal Light though whereas the Crystal had it as detachable. If your cable becomes frayed or damaged, then you’ll have to send it in to get it repaired rather than just replacing the cable. I don’t know if making it permanently attached saved some costs in producing the Crystal Light, but I definitely wished they kept that feature on this one.

The controllers that you can order with the Pimax Crystal Light are reminiscent of Quest 2 controllers that feature the sensor ring. Button and joystick placements are pretty similar with the addition of one Pimax button on each controller. The analog stick’s springs offer a good resistance when rotating it around and the feedback from clicking the stick in is good as well. The action buttons do feel a little mushier on the Crystal Light controllers and I do prefer the feel of the Quest 2 buttons when pressed. The trigger is responsive and feels about the same as the Quest 2’s offering a nice bounce quick back after letting up. But the one button that I don’t enjoy at all is the grip button. It feels very flimsy and seems to have a weak spring underneath. I like some resistance when using a grip button, but the Pimax’s controller grip buttons feel a bit too light. It also sounds more hollow when being pressed whereas the grip buttons on the Quest 2 just feel more solid and are silent.

Another thing I don’t like about the Pimax controllers is that they are rechargeable and don’t use batteries. I’d rather have interchangeable batteries like the Quest 3 controllers so on long sessions, I can just replace them quickly and get back into the game. The battery life of the Pimax controllers is about 4-5 hours, which will last a good playing session. But if you forget to charge them, then you’re going to have to wait a little bit or attach them to a power source and use them while charging. It’s a criticism I have with some of the other VR headset controllers, but having experienced controllers with the Quest line and the Samsung Odyssey line, I would take a battery solution over those without one any day of the week.

Tracking volume for the Pimax controllers is what you would expect from the inside out solution. It’s comparable to a Quest 3. Using Rec Room, I watched in the mirror as I moved my arms around. It had no problems being tracked in an area just past the front part of your body. Basically, where you think the cameras are pointed at, you’ll be able to get accurate tracking. Coming up close to the face plate area, the tracking was a little inconsistent at times so it’s best if you keep it a few centimeters in front of your HMD. When out of tracking range, it can still do rotations using the IMU, but like all inside out tracking solutions, there’s going to be a loss of it anywhere past a plane that sits on the front of your body.

The controllers tracked solidly and I didn’t experience any stuttering or inaccurate movements unless I moved too close to the face plate or out of camera viewing. I did have a few games where some buttons didn’t register and some were fixed by restarting the game or having the software mimic the Valve controllers. For example, at the start of Rec Room you’re given a menu to adjust various VR settings. Even though my hands in the game were mimicking grabbing or pointing, it would not interact with the menu presented in front of me. After I restarted the game and without doing anything else, it worked fine. Another example is Blade and Sorcery. I had to quit the game and restart in order to get the controller buttons to work properly. This happened in a few other games, but it seemed to mostly happen when you first start up a game after installation. Overall though, the controllers did its job but it’s not one of my preferred ones to use in the inside out tracked category. And of course, it’s not going to compare to a lighthouse tracked controller in terms of accuracy.

Installation of the Pimax Crystal Light along with the software was pretty straightforward. I’ve read stories on how difficult it was back in the day to get the Pimax headsets working correctly, but for my first experience setting the Crystal Light, I had it pretty easy. Well, there was one issue. I have a triple monitor setup so my NVIDIA RTX 4090 would have every single output taken up by a display once the Pimax is connected. All my other VR HMDs worked fine with all three monitors running, but not the Crystal Light. The software kept jumping back from connected to disconnected until it settled on being disconnected. It wasn’t until I turned off my other two monitors that the Crystal Light became stable. I didn’t have to unplug my extra monitors, just had to have Windows disable them as extensions of my main monitor. Even with one extra monitor enabled, it had small bouts of being unstable so to be sure, I disabled both my extra monitors in order to use the Crystal Light without any disruptions.

The Pimax software itself is pretty straightforward as well with different settings to improve your experience. Besides the changes in local dimming as I mentioned earlier, you can change such things as the refresh rate it runs at, render quality, IPD offsets, and brightness settings to name a few. One nice thing is you can even do game specific settings for the render quality and fixed foveated rendering instead of it being a global setting for all games if you don’t want to. I’d like to have some more game specific settings in here as well such as the refresh rate and local dimming option since they are going to be changed for some games as well. I didn’t experience any issues with the software so it seems the years of iterating through various issues has made a very stable experience for me at least.

Even with the ease in software setup, there’s still work needed to be done on a per game basis. Whereas I was able to pretty much jump into any game with the Quest 3 without fiddling with settings, you’re going to need to probably adjust the visuals using the Pimax Crystal Light just because of how much higher resolution this is compared to many of the HMDs out there today. Thankfully, there are a few videos from other users of the Crystal Light that have shared their optimal settings, but it’s definitely not a VR headset that you can just hop into any game and have a smooth experience. The problem, and I don’t think this is Pimax’s fault, is compounded by SteamVR seeming to want to push the resolution way too high so you have to go in and dial it back down a bit each time. So if you see performance just drop way down when using it, check the SteamVR settings and the rendering resolution. Even if you have a top of the line CPU and GPU like an RTX 4090, some games are going to need to be adjusted, but that’s the PCVR way sometimes.

My HP Reverb G2 had been the one I used to sim, but as you may know, Microsoft is deprecating Windows Mixed Reality and will remove it from future updates of Windows rendering the HMD useless. Those who have this have been on a lookout for a VR headset to replace it as their simming HMD of choice and the Pimax Crystal Light just might fit that bill at its lower cost than the Crystal.

It’s got great displays with lenses that are clear throughout except for the most extreme edges for me. The details that you can see in them are top notch and it’ll take immersion in VR games to the next level with how well everything looks. The local dimming feature, while game and scene dependent in terms of effectiveness, does mostly do a great job of producing black levels that are close to OLED. Setup was pretty painless, but you’ll most likely need to do some adjusting of your game's visual settings in order for it to run well on the high resolution displays. Head tracking seems stable offering a smooth experience when moving your head around. I really think the Crystal Light is a solid purchase if you’re heavy into sim type games. For more action games, I do recommend a smaller, lighter HMD, but you can still use the Pimax Crystal Light if you want to. I just feel smaller VR HMDs would offer a more comfortable time in more action type games. I’d definitely recommend this to replace an HP Reverb G2 if you want a high resolution, larger FOV VR HMD for sims. As stated in the beginning, Pimax was nice enough to provide a $10 off code WDBFQWYZ8WR9 should you be interested in ordering something from their store. Thanks again to Pimax for sending over a review unit and giving me a chance to take a look at this solid VR headset.