I've had the CL for about a month now. I'm limited in the time I have to play with it but I've got it reasonably well dialed in so that I am getting between 30 and 45 fps in pretty much any scenario. Think that's giving me 60 to 90 fps in the headset with 90hz upscale (lab) if I'm not mistaken. It's smooth anyway except looking to the side near the ground at high speed. I get the odd stutter. I have all the graphics setting on medium and I'm using TAA but I have the render quality at 0.75. I have FFR turned off. Even when its on is says its off in the Pimax Client. But it is on when its on. I don't like it. I can see it in my peripherals and its an immersion killer for me. Leaving it off doesn't seem to effect performance much as afar as I can see. I have very good peripheral vision. Much better then average so that's probably why I don't like it. It's probably also the reason why I'm a bit disappointed with the Lauded FOV. It still looks to me like I'm looking out of a motor cycle helmet.

I have to say its very very very good! It's much better than the last HMD i had which was the Samsung Odyssey Plus. At the time the Samsung Odyssey Plus US$299 exceeded my expectations but the novelty wore off as I became more and more aware of feeling like I was wearing a motor cycle helmet because of the FOV despite the Samsung Odyssey Plus having what was consider a very good field of view at the time. 110 degrees If I remember correctly. I think that's 115 on the CL or is it 130 and its obviously better. The fact that I have to wear glasses might be compounding that problem for me. I do have a pair of glasses with about a 1 meter focal length and I have to say that with the  render quality at 1 i.e. 2880 X 2880 Per Eye the image is razor sharp and you can read everything in the cockpit.

I'll need better hardware to get the best out of this Headset. I'll may buy a 5090 when they come out but I am very happy with the image quality and performance with my current system (see sig).

The recent controversy with customer service is interesting to me because I suspect that my headset my have a fault and I have opened a ticket with Pimax. I see this intermittent flash in the headset. I asked about it in the Pimax Discord and another user said I had the setting to high for my hardware. I went with that but despite lowering the setting a great deal I still see the intermittent flashing. It's been an open ticket for a couple of weeks or longer but the slowness of progress in resolving is on me not pimax. They respond to every post on the ticket pretty quickly. At this point they have a through the lenses video of the issue so the ball is in their court.

Where I go from here is prescription lenses so that I don't have to wear my glasses. I think If you wear glasses don't plan on wearing your glasses under the headset. I've tried it without my glasses and its fair more comfortable plus my glasses sometimes steam up.

So the question is would I go back to the very good TrackIR 4K 55" screen experience I had before? The last time I had to deal with this question was with the Samsung Odyssey Plus and the answer was yes I would. But that was before I got the very high quality big 2D screen experience I used before the CL. So it's definitely not what you would call an apples to apples comparison.  With the CL the Answer would be no I wouldn't go back.

So my conclusion is that the best  VR experience that I can manage now is definitely better than the best big screen 4K 2D TrackIR5 experience I could manage and that defines a watershed in my experience.

And with the CL it will definitely get better once I get the 5090 and prescription lenses.

There is a setup learning curve and I am surely still on it but despite the short comings and there are some I would highly recommend it over the high quality big screen 2D trackIR experience.

Any interested in a used TrackIR5? 😁

 

 

Just a short follow up on the issue I was having with flashing in the head set. Pimax told to to turn off Smart Smoothing and it has fixed the problem and had no impact on performance. I'm very happy with the PImax Crystal light. It totally elevated the flight Sim experience to new heights. The realism in unreal!

good to hear that. As said I'm very happy with my PCL too, not only it has far better sharpness and nearly edge-to-edge clarity, it also gives me higher fps than G2. 

One minor issue I'm having now is that the passthrough video is way overexposed. It's black and white and not meant to be that much useful, but in some occasions I actually use it like flipping on ForeFlight app on my iPad during the middle of my VR flight. 

Would be nice to have way to adjust the exposure of these passthrough cameras. 

 

2 hours ago, FlyIce said:

One minor issue I'm having now is that the passthrough video is way overexposed. It's black and white and not meant to be that much useful, but in some occasions I actually use it like flipping on ForeFlight app on my iPad during the middle of my VR flight. 

Would be nice to have way to adjust the exposure of these passthrough cameras.

Yes indeed.  I absolutely LOVE my Crystal Light.  What a difference.  I thought the G2 was great but, once you've got the settings sorted, the CL is simply on another level.

But yes, the pass-through is surprisingly poor.  For other stuff, I recently got a Quest 3 and what a pass-through that has!  They have to be at the extreme two ends of the pass-through scale.

But that said, pass-through for me is just to find my controllers on the desk the very few times I need them...I still love the CL and think it's an absolute triumph.

Quest 3 passthrough is fantastic. I'm not expecting PCL to be anywhere near that, but I see it could easily be a lot better if the exposure of passthrough cameras can be reduced.

I googled and strangely seems nobody is talking about how overexposed the passthrough is on PCL. 

I wrote extensively here about how amazing the CL is once you get it dialed in.  I never fly without it and amazed every time I use it.  Can't wait for this technology to get mainstreamed but until then nothing currently touches the CL for it's price point...😎

7 hours ago, Dillon said:

I wrote extensively here about how amazing the CL is once you get it dialed in.  I never fly without it and amazed every time I use it.  Can't wait for this technology to get mainstreamed but until then nothing currently touches the CL for it's price point...😎

I totally agree. One of the things that I am absolutely astonished by is that even though I know the environment in am in is not real, if I look at a object in the cockpit like yoke or a stick, I kid you not its shocking how real it looks. You cannot see that on a 2D screen. Net even remotely!😃 ANd by the way I really appreciate you changing my mind about the Quest 3. Thanks!

9 hours ago, FlyIce said:

Quest 3 passthrough is fantastic. I'm not expecting PCL to be anywhere near that, but I see it could easily be a lot better if the exposure of passthrough cameras can be reduced.

I googled and strangely seems nobody is talking about how overexposed the passthrough is on PCL. 

I agree the pass through image could be a lot better.

On 12/10/2024 at 3:06 PM, Dillon said:

I wrote extensively here about how amazing the CL is once you get it dialed in.  I never fly without it and amazed every time I use it.  Can't wait for this technology to get mainstreamed but until then nothing currently touches the CL for it's price point...😎

Dillon, you seem to have a good grip on the CL. I must say that as far as clarity goes, it is almost night and day compared to the G2 I am moving from with my 3080Ti. 

The only problem I am having is tracking. Some days, it works perfectly, and some days, flying becomes frustrating as it constantly loses tracking. Are you aware of this problem, or is there any way to mitigate it? I have tried different lighting levels in the room, but it makes no difference. It seems the problem occurs more frequently at night, though this may be just because I fly more at night.

Any advice is appreciated.

6 hours ago, Romeo_Tango said:

Dillon, you seem to have a good grip on the CL. I must say that as far as clarity goes, it is almost night and day compared to the G2 I am moving from with my 3080Ti. 

The only problem I am having is tracking. Some days, it works perfectly, and some days, flying becomes frustrating as it constantly loses tracking. Are you aware of this problem, or is there any way to mitigate it? I have tried different lighting levels in the room, but it makes no difference. It seems the problem occurs more frequently at night, though this may be just because I fly more at night.

Any advice is appreciated.

For MSFS2020🤔:

First off, in the Pimax settings turn your 'Room Lighting Frequency' down to 50hz.  Make sure 'Lock to Half Framerates' is checked.  Uncheck 'Fixed Foveated Rendering' and 'Smart Smoothing'.  

Did you watch the video from 'VR Flightsim Guy' concerning tuning the CL?  You can't have your MSFS settings turned to your G2 and get a good experience with the CL.

MSFS2024 is a whole other ball game in which I haven't dived in yet.🙃  

Edited December 16, 20241 yr by Dillon

7 hours ago, Dillon said:

First off, in the Pimax settings turn your 'Room Lighting Frequency' down to 50hz.

I thought in US the AC frequency is 60Hz? I did set to 60Hz and seems to be working fine. 

I also keep the FS2020/2024 window rather small on my 65 inch TV monitor which is right in front of me. I heard that the moving picture on the screen may confuse the inside-out cameras. 

Edited December 16, 20241 yr by FlyIce

🤔 50hz works best for me.  Concerning the monitor from my testing it made no difference. Back when I was having tracking issues, I turned the monitor off and it still lost tracking.  The update before the last one from Primax really improved things overall.  So if you have your headset tuned properly to your setup tracking should be a non-issue unless the add-on scenery you're flying over/around is a hog.  I can't stress it enough, make sure you IPD settings are set correctly for your eyes or you will have a bad case of eye strain.

Good to know that. Tracking of my G2 occasionally was a bit erratic so I thought may be the moving image in VR window on the big screen could be the reason. 

I don't have eyestrain problem with PCL, but I have a feeling the world looks a bit small in PCL, and this is after I set my IPD correctly. Don't know whether you guys have similar feelings. I now set world scale to 105, maybe I'll further increase it a bit.  

15 hours ago, FlyIce said:

Good to know that. Tracking of my G2 occasionally was a bit erratic so I thought may be the moving image in VR window on the big screen could be the reason. 

I don't have eyestrain problem with PCL, but I have a feeling the world looks a bit small in PCL, and this is after I set my IPD correctly. Don't know whether you guys have similar feelings. I now set world scale to 105, maybe I'll further increase it a bit.  

Another thing of note I found after having the CL (2020) for awhile is when you get Head Tracking issues when normally you don't have an issue in a particular area (or lag when turning your head).  A simple restart of the headset using the Pimax software sorts the issue.  Another thing is when adding new scenery it's always best to run a Disk Defrag (even on a solid state drive) and delete your local cache file (in FS), have MSFS rebuild it in the same location.  You'll see your issues go away (this is only after you've fully tuned your headset to your hardware and normally have great performance).  Sometimes more often than less, flushing your cache solves performance problems both in 2D and VR.  For me it works every time to resolve headset performance issues.😉

I've just been fiddling with settings lately and I don't know exactly what I did but I think I hit the sweet spot. I was running the Crystal light on medium resolution and getting over 40fps as indicated by PimaxXR and if I'm not mistake that's doubled by 90hz(lab) so about 80. But today I noticed I was getting north of 50fps flying the 787. I was surprised because I don't recall doing anything other than Setting 3d setting NCP to prefer maximum performance which I forgot to do when I installed the current driver. I changed the resolution of the headset to full and was getting around the same FPS  as I was getting earlier withe the resolution at 75% Weird!

Anyway did I say I am very happy with this VR headset?