Monday, April 15th 2024
Pimax Reveals Two New High-end VR Headsets at its Frontier Event, Starting at US$699
Pimax, a leading innovator in the Virtual Reality industry, announced two new high-end VR headsets at its Frontier 2024 event, held on YouTube this Monday. The Crystal Super is an ultra-high-end headset, packing 29.5 million pixels and the world's first changeable optical engine, allowing users to swap between QLED and micro-OLED panels. The Crystal Light offers the same 16.6 million pixels as the Pimax Crystal, but is much more budget-friendly, starting from 699 USD. Additionally, Pimax unveiled the 60G Airlink module, which leverages WiGig technology to enable true high-fidelity wireless PCVR.
The Crystal Super represents a substantial leap forward from the highly successful Crystal, with its greatly increased number of pixels, enabling a much larger field of view (FOV) and higher pixels per degree (PPD) simultaneously.
Besides FOV and PPD, the choice of displays plays a critical role in user experience. QLED and micro-OLED each offers distinct advantages, and Crystal Super allows users to choose between the two or opt for both. This flexibility stems from the world's first replaceable optical engine system invented by Pimax, which combines the displays and lenses as a single detachable module.
Pimax Crystal Super starts from 1799 USD (excluding VAT), and ready for shipping in Q4.
The Crystal Light serves as a streamlined iteration of the Pimax Crystal, retaining the core specifications that underpinned the Crystal's success while removing features less essential to PCVR. Such adjustments have significantly reduced costs and also decreased the weight by 30%. This enables Pimax to position the Crystal Light at a starting price of 699 USD, offering unmatched value in its category.
The Crystal Light is available for pre-order now and shipping in May.
Pimax also clarified that they will continue to evolve the Pimax Crystal, which has been designed from the start as a high-end wireless PCVR headset. This requires extremely broad bandwidth and highly efficient utilization, necessitating the XR2 chip and battery, which have been integral parts of the Crystal.
An extra set of hardware, the 60G Airlink from Pimax, is introduced to complete the wireless solution. Utilizing Wigig technology, Pimax's 60G Airlink offers significantly higher bandwidth than conventional WiFi.
The 60G Airlink is priced at 299 USD, ready for shipping later this year.
Source:
Pimax
The Crystal Super represents a substantial leap forward from the highly successful Crystal, with its greatly increased number of pixels, enabling a much larger field of view (FOV) and higher pixels per degree (PPD) simultaneously.
Pimax Crystal Super starts from 1799 USD (excluding VAT), and ready for shipping in Q4.
The Crystal Light serves as a streamlined iteration of the Pimax Crystal, retaining the core specifications that underpinned the Crystal's success while removing features less essential to PCVR. Such adjustments have significantly reduced costs and also decreased the weight by 30%. This enables Pimax to position the Crystal Light at a starting price of 699 USD, offering unmatched value in its category.
The Crystal Light is available for pre-order now and shipping in May.
Pimax also clarified that they will continue to evolve the Pimax Crystal, which has been designed from the start as a high-end wireless PCVR headset. This requires extremely broad bandwidth and highly efficient utilization, necessitating the XR2 chip and battery, which have been integral parts of the Crystal.
An extra set of hardware, the 60G Airlink from Pimax, is introduced to complete the wireless solution. Utilizing Wigig technology, Pimax's 60G Airlink offers significantly higher bandwidth than conventional WiFi.
The 60G Airlink is priced at 299 USD, ready for shipping later this year.
21 Comments on Pimax Reveals Two New High-end VR Headsets at its Frontier Event, Starting at US$699
When I clicked this, I thought "hey new VR headset", "I'll read the article. I wonder what the FOV is"
The FOV is "massive". Jesus Christ. Time for bed.
or is 4k per eye still only taxing as a single 4k monitor? or is 4k x 2 hitting the gpu?
VR employs many tricks to exploit the fact that ultimately what's displayed on both screens has a high level of commonality and share the same scene, one of them being multi-res shading for example. This headset apparently supports fixed foveated rendering as well, which allows the edges of the screens to be rendered at a lower resolution. This exploits the fact that human vision is only really sharp in the center. The problem is this is fixed foveated rendering and not just foveated rendering. Fixed foveated rendering implies the center of the screen will always be high res and the edges low res as compared to real foveated rendering that uses eye tracking to determine where you are looking and by extension which parts to render in high res and which parts in low res.
DLSS also works in VR, not DLSS Frame Generation though. VR is more demanding in general but there's a lot of optimization that can be done as well.
We don't even have proper VR benchmarking tools for the past and current era and no...
VRMark does not count. SteamVR Performance Test gets pinned to the ceiling under an i9-9980HK but the real head scratcher is that Ryzen gets dunked on by the FX:
Something somewhere went seriously wrong. We need some set standard benchmark tool for VR performance before getting into this. Until then, PiMax go BRRRRR.
They still didn't figure it out. They need to come to terms on a bottom line wrt specs and featureset. 'The market will figure it out' they think. Yeah, right. The point isn't selling four hundred different kinds of HMD. The point is making and selling content. Content will drive VR sales. Not a neverending stream of iterative hardware improvements.
I can somewhat understand why Apple wants to enter the arena here. They can be the one defining that bottom line. Except if you do it with a 3500 dollar headset, I'm not sure its going places.
A 4060 mobile at low settings can run it at 60Hz. (Normal profile.)
This counts on what games you want to play. HL:A, Superhot VR, and Beat Saber all run fine. Similar fidelity level games preform the same.
A 4090 lets you play higher end games like DCS or War Thunder at high settings and low frametime.
Calculation are as follows : 50 pixels per degree, for a 3840 pixels horizontal that gives 76.9 degrees to fill out. I hope I'm wrong but the fact they didn't show any numbers or ranges for the FOV kinda worries me
I'm still favoring the pimax 12K due to the dual 6K panels