Pimax Crystal Light - Question for Colors/Visuals/Brightness

[GiftGruen]

Hello @all

I own a Crystal Light since 2 weeks or so ( coming from a Quest pro )  and after having some problems in the beginning, now with Studioform kit and completely revised graphics setting, I am mostly happy.  Sharpness, FPS, SweetSpot - that's all okay now.

However, I still struggle with brightness/color/contrast. Either, I get it "muddy" and rather dark, or the complete scenery is overflooded with sunlight ( making it rather impossible to see something ).

I am fiddling with InGame gamma, Pimax colors+brightness + HDR but nothing I try is really 'good'.   My QuestPro was way easier to handle regarding this.

What about your settings here ? Maybe I just need another starting point ....

 

[Drum]

Go into your "steam > steamapps > common > IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad > data" folder and edit your "startup.cfg" file by turning off the "bloom" setting "0" to remove the glare, and you'll need to do that every time you change your in-game graphic settings when using HDR.  Bloom turns off automatically when not using HDR.

[GiftGruen]

Mhm - thanks for the hint. Tried it, but did not get rid of the sun flooding the complete horizon in White.

However - found some reddit entries that show brightness at -4 or -5 in Pimax Play and contrast also at negative values - but InGame Gamma quite high. Will give this a try.

[Charger]

I know what you are talking about. Il2 is a sort of dull game colour wise. For my crystal light - in the startup.cfg file i have bloom enable = 0, HDR = 0 and gamma = 1.000. 

Inside Pimax Play its just default. 

I seem to just deal with it really. You could go the opencomposite route as there are more customisable colour settings in there. 

 

Also as this is the first Crystal Light thread i could post my settings for others to see. Using a 5800x3D / 4080: 

Pimax Play is:

90hz mode

Image Quality = High

No GPU upscaling (this causes weird glitches)

No Sharpness (not sure why maybe i should crank it up)

No Pimax Central Priority Rendering (i just dont like the odd effect outside the sweetspot)

Smart smoothing on

Color default

Pimax OpenXR runtime

 

Startup.cfg is:

[KEY = graphics]
    3dhud = 0
    adapter = 0
    bloom_enable = 0
    canopy_ref = 1
    desktop_center = 1
    detail_rt_res = 3056
    draw_distance = 1.00000
    far_blocks = 1
    fps_counter = 1
    fps_limit = 0
    full_height = 1024
    full_width = 1280
    fullscreen = 0
    gamma = 1.00000
    grass_distance = 100.00000
    hdr_enable = 0
    land_anisotropy = 1
    land_detail = 3
    land_tex_lods = 3
    max_cache_res = 1
    max_clouds_quality = 0
    mgpu_compatible = 0
    mirrors = 3
    msaa = 0
    multisampling = 1
    or_ca = 0.00000
    or_dummy = 0
    or_enable = 1
    or_height = 3820
    or_hud_rad = .3000
    or_hud_size = 0.50000
    or_ipd = 0.05617
    or_render_eye = 1
    or_sipdc = 0.00000
    or_width = 3820
    post_sharpen = 0
    preset = 3
    prop_blur_max_rpm_for_vr = 155
    rescale_target = 1.00000
    shadows_quality = 4
    ssao_enable = 0
    stereo_dof = 5.00000
    vsync = 0
    win_height = 768
    win_width = 1280
 

 

This gets me a stable 90fps in game and im happy and havent really tweaked anything in a while. 

 

 

 

Edited November 25, 2025 by Charger

[GiftGruen]

Thanks a lot ! I'll give it a try asap

[Calvin.Pimax]

Not sure if you have played around with the Pimax Play local dimming. 

[GiftGruen]

Well, thanks for your tips!   Have it now and am quite happy.

In summary the Crystal Light puts so much load on my 5090 ( also due to MSAAx4 which I really like ) that I somehow wonder how a Crystal Super 50 can be driven with that much rendering pixels to compute.  Waiting for the Crystal OLED seams wiser to me atm, however I will wait for first real user reviews, especially regarding FOV.

Afaik Super OLED has no more pixels to render than Crystal light ( though visible resolution is higher ) due to a better distortion profile.

[Dash,Polder]

Only 10 million more pixels give or take.

[GiftGruen]

No. The resolution is higher, but the number of pixels to render in the Super OLED is quite similar to the Crystal Light.

[Dash,Polder]

Well than Pimax's own website is wrong, 

https://pimax.com/pages/pimax-crystal-super

Clearly says 29 million pixels.

https://pimax.com/pages/pimax-crystal-light

17 million pixels, there's a published 12 million disparity going on there, so who are we suppose to believe?

[TCW_Brzi_Joe]

1 hour ago, Dash,Polder said:

Well than Pimax's own website is wrong, 

https://pimax.com/pages/pimax-crystal-super

Clearly says 29 million pixels.

https://pimax.com/pages/pimax-crystal-light

17 million pixels, there's a published 12 million disparity going on there, so who are we suppose to believe?

No, you are comparing pixels on screens. You have to render more pixels then on hmd screens, that is because of lense warping. Crystal light has 2880*2880*2 screens, but rendered about 4300*5100 per eye as picture without supersampling (ss=1). Crystal super has screens about 3840x3840, but you need to render (without supersampling) about 5500x6500 (50ppd) or about 4300*5100 (57ppd). 

As you see, the numbers of rendered pixels are not that different. 

[dgiatr]

11 hours ago, TCW_Brzi_Joe said:

 Crystal super has screens about 3840x3840, but you need to render (without supersampling) about 5500x6500 (50ppd) or about 4300*5100 (57ppd). 

As you see, the numbers of rendered pixels are not that different. 

50 ppd needs less pixels than 57 ppd, how is that? Thank you.

[GiftGruen]

Because FoV of the 57ppd is way smaller.  Wide FoV with Aspheric lenses needs a immense "overhead" of pixels to render because of lense warping.

This is a well known disadvantage of the Pimax Super 50 + 50UltraWide ( and also of the Crystal OG and Crystal Light ).

The 57 and OLED are better in that and therefore easier to drive / generate less load on the GPU. It's not sooo simple that only visible pixels need to be calculated. 

Explanation Video

 

In the old forum, user chiliwili69 ( <= hey, where are you when we need you 😆 ) had some very cool excels with conncrete numbers.

Here the numbers for the Super 50PPD ( only a screenshot from chiliwilis excel from a thread in the old forum ) which show that with Quality 1.0 you need to render 78 Mio pixels and 2x6240x6280 to have the complete visible panel resolution ( factor 2.66 due to barrel distortion )

For a 57PPD this factor is much lower and therefore also the number of rendered pixels.

 

Edited December 4, 2025 by GiftGruen

[dgiatr]

16 hours ago, GiftGruen said:

Because FoV of the 57ppd is way smaller.  Wide FoV with Aspheric lenses needs a immense "overhead" of pixels to render because of lense warping.

This is a well known disadvantage of the Pimax Super 50 + 50UltraWide ( and also of the Crystal OG and Crystal Light ).

The 57 and OLED are better in that and therefore easier to drive / generate less load on the GPU. It's not sooo simple that only visible pixels need to be calculated. 

Explanation Video

 

In the old forum, user chiliwili69 ( <= hey, where are you when we need you 😆 ) had some very cool excels with conncrete numbers.

Here the numbers for the Super 50PPD ( only a screenshot from chiliwilis excel from a thread in the old forum ) which show that with Quality 1.0 you need to render 78 Mio pixels and 2x6240x6280 to have the complete visible panel resolution ( factor 2.66 due to barrel distortion )

For a 57PPD this factor is much lower and therefore also the number of rendered pixels.

 

Thank you very much GiftGruen , very informative explanation!