Thank you Pimax for providing us with a loaner review unit!

Pimax was founded in 2014 with a passion for pushing VR to its limits by being the first manufacturer to reach a 200-degree field of view and offer 4K and 8K headsets, with a 12K one coming soon. In 2017, they had a Guinness World Record breaking Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly 4.3 million dollars. Since then, they have released multiple headset models including the Crystal Light, Crystal Super, and Dream Air (coming soon!). Pimax VR headsets have premium features, and their prices reflect this.

The MSRP price for the Crystal Light is $899, though there have been online sales that took off $80. If you use the coupon code CCGR, you can take $18 off. Every little bit helps, right? Payment plans are also available if needed.

Getting the headset is half of the battle. You’ll need a powerful PC to utilize it to its fullest potential. At the very least you’ll need a 12th generation i5 CPU (or AMD equivalent) and 16GB of RAM. The graphics card is key for driving the VR experience, and a GeForce RTX 2070 is the bare minimum, but an RTX 4070 Ti or better is recommended.

To set up the Pimax Crystal Light, it’s wise to begin with charging the controllers. The built-in batteries are convenient and last quite a while. You’ll need to download Pimax Play from their website to configure your device in Windows. Pimax Play is needed to have your controllers and headset recognized in SteamVR.

Pimax Play is also used for calibrating your room setup and borders. Unlike other VR headsets, it was necessary to recalibrate the room's borders several times a day, often between games. In SteamVR, you’ll want to set the Pimax OpenXR Runtime as the default OpenXR Runtime instead of SteamVR, which is the default. Some games like Assetto Corsa EVO are unplayable until you change this setting!

When running Assetto Corsa EVO on our other VR headsets, we had no trouble, as the default settings seemed to work fine. However, once it was switched over to the Pimax, AC EVO and the host machine in question completely froze for over fifteen minutes while trying to launch the game. Some people track frames per second; this was minutes per frame. It took days of troubleshooting and working with Pimax support before learning we had to set the above setting. Once that setting was changed, it ran dramatically better. It would have been a much better experience if we could have somehow been notified that the setting was wrong when launching Pimax Play; hopefully this can be a point of improvement for them.

Once everything is working properly, the experience in Assetto Corsa is incredible. The Pimax Crystal Light has really clear lenses, with a much larger readable sweet spot than most VR headsets. I was easily able to make out the dashboard inside the cars driven, and the environments look great. Driving from the seat of a car, you can look around inside as well as out the window - just like while driving. It’s a much better experience in many ways than just a normal monitor; the downsides are it’s more work for your PC, so the demand on the CPU and especially GPU is much higher; and the cars all look a bit smaller than in real life, despite you sitting in one. There are other small immersion-breaking aspects as well. For example, by default, the mirrors reflect a static direction rather than dynamically update based on your position. AC EVO does allow you to enable dynamic mirrors, but the performance impact is quite significant. Even with those caveats, it’s an awesome experience that we highly recommend. We hope to do VR racing a lot more going forward; we’re really grateful that the opportunity to test it with this Pimax finally forced us to try out something we should have a long time ago.

Rhythm games like Synth Riders run great, and many perfect song performances were acquired using the Pimax Crystal Light headset. Like many games, lag can dramatically hurt your performance, and we did not experience any using our 5070 TI-powered desktop. When we streamed this title, the audio sounded great, and the built-in microphone picked up my voice nicely.

We streamed Final Fury on our 4090-powered laptops, and the game ran decent. It performed much better after setting OpenXR as the default runtime. After making that change, online games have run much better for us; we remained undefeated during one of their weekend skirmishes. We did have some issues with the game skipping at times, but this happened on multiple headsets and wasn’t specific to the Pimax Crystal Light. Final Fury is a very active game, and you’ll have to master offensive and defensive maneuvers. With all of that movement, the headset may shift due to its weight. You’ll need to have it on tightly, which will cause you to sweat a bit. For one of us, the face mask fits a bit strangely in that the sides of the face pads don’t clamp down, while it fits the other fine. The foam lining is nice for absorption, but it can be a hygiene issue if sharing the headset with multiple people with little breaks between uses.

The Pimax Crystal Light VR headset has the highest resolution per eye compared to the other VR headsets in our possession. However, this luxury has a steep price tag. Our PSVR 2 is less than half the price of the Pimax Crystal Light at $399. Is the Pimax worth $899? That depends on your budget. If money is not a concern, and your system specs can power all of those extra pixels, it’s a nice headset to own, especially if you can snag a good coupon code. It’s well built and powerful, there’s no question there. Pimax has an active Discord community and top-notch tech support. It’s nice to know that they stand behind their innovative products. The Pimax Crystal Light needs a powerful gaming computer to realize its full potential. This may not be a good headset for gamers on a tight budget, but for those who can afford it, this Pimax headset has a lot to offer.