$499 VR Headset VS $1599 VR Headset // What's The Difference? (Quest 3 & Pimax Crystal)

[Music] this is a quest 3 if you'd like to buy one of these it will set you back around $499.99 and if you'd like to play pcvr with this headset you can do in two different ways firstly you could play wired with a single cable it's USB to USBC or you can go Wireless in two different ways you can use the free service which is called airlink it's pretty good but isn't the best and then you've got virtual desktop which will cost you around $14 99 or £14.99 it's an application you need to buy and it allows you to play Wireless pcvr pretty much seamlessly if you have the right Network infrastructure at your house now this headset is currently my daily driver and I can see it being that way for a very long time I truly believe that this or its older brother The Quest 2 will be more than adequate for 90% of people 90% of consumers who are looking to get into VR and have a good time time playing virtual reality Games and this handsome Beast is the pimax crystal now if you'd like to buy one of these it will set you back around $1,599 199 or the price of three meta Quest 3s now if you'd like to play pcvr with this which is what it's specifically designed to do you can currently only do so via a wired connection that connection is quite complicated there are more than a few cables to plug in but a wireless version is coming soon in a software update now I truly believe that a headset like this with the incredible specs that it has and the incredible price point it has only really appeals to a small niche of the VR market and VR is already a niche so this is a niche within a niche but today I'm going to be playing this alongside the quest 3 back to back in the same games I'm going to see if a Layman like me can really see the difference will I be able to see £1,000 worth of difference between this headset and the quest 3 is there an argument to say that something like the PX Crystal could be viable for a wider consumer focused VR audience or is it really just reserved for those most hardcore VR enthusiasts and people who play VR Sims so that's what I'm going to do today I'm going to jump into three games probably going to go into the quest 3 version first and then immediately after I'm going to go into the same game on pimax crystal I want to do it back to back like that so I can immediately see the differences I want it to be very visceral and very obvious to me now at this point I am a pretty hardcore VR user I use VR basically every day but I still wouldn't call myself a VR Enthusiast when it comes to the technical specifications of the headset I've never found myself needing to Shell out the most money for the highest resolution or the highest fov I'm I'm pretty comfortable going for something fairly entry level like a Quest 2 or three if it gives me the experience of playing these VR games in a high quality way I don't need it to be the very best thing ever so I'm interested and intrigued about what the difference will be for someone like me who is happy to opt for a quest 3 when it comes to putting something like a px Crystal on my head am I going to be that blown away that I would immediately say yeah you know what I would spend the extra 1,000 P or $1,000 on a headset like this okay let's start with some halflife Alex some good old Dependable halflife Alex one of the best VR games for testing things like visual quality and performance because it just looks so damn good there aren't many games that look this good in VR still and it's optimized to hell so it runs really well on most PCS and you can really push it at least I find I can really push it to make it look even better now immediately one thing I really love about the quest 3 and the Quest 2 to be honest regardless of how simple they are in terms of their specs and the price point being quite entry level is the fact that connecting them to play PC VR wirelessly at least for me is so so painless especially if you have virtual desktop it took me seconds to get into this I loaded up virtual desktop on my PC I loaded up virtual desktop on the quest 3 and then that was it I was in I was playing and if there's res around here a combin fabricator super we might be able to upgrade your Firepower a bit and I'm interested to know if that's going to kind of be a positive going for it when it comes to matching it up against the PX Crystal I don't know how easy it is to get in and get going on the crystal I know there's a lot of cables to plug in and a lot of setup to do in that regard um but yeah on Quest 3 and Quest 2 if you have virtual desktop and even if you have airlink which is the free meta version of a wireless connection you just hit one button in the quest and make sure it's running on the PC and that's it you're in now I will intermittently put the specs of both the quest 3 and the PX Crystal on the screen so you can kind of see what I'm working with here inside the headset and I'll try and capture some through the lens's footage as well but I have to say the point of this video isn't to find out which is the better headset it's not a comparison in terms of O what's better pmax Crystal for $1,600 or Quest three for $500 the point really is can I see that difference can I see ,000 worth of difference between these two headsets is it immediately noticeable because in my personal opinion it should be it really should be immediately noticeable when I jump over to the PX the difference the increase in quality the increase in Clarity the fov change the black levels all that stuff I want to see that straight away and be frankly Blown Away by it um oh careful of that because $1,000 is a lot of money at the end of the day we're talking about ,000 difference between two pieces of Hardware that effectively do the same job and I think it's an interesting thing to look at these two pieces of Hardware from the perspective of someone like me who yeah I do play a lot of VR but I am still a pretty standard consumer when it comes to these kind of things um and I'm genuinely unsure whether I would spend that kind of money on a VR headset I mean the big screen Beyond nearly got me I was very tempted to pick one of those up but I still couldn't quite justify the price point you know when we're talking over £1,000 for a VR headset I really want to see I really want to see the difference between that and a 500 100 l or 350 L VR headset is there an argument to say that a lot of the kind of more high-end VR headset manufacturers like voo PX big screen big screen is different because of its form factor it's so appealing because of that small form factor so I kind of won't include them but some of the other high-end VR headset manufacturers is it time to maybe take a different approach is it time to do something slightly different to kind of capitalize on the growing consumer focused Market because I do think 90% of people will be absolutely fine with this level of visual Fidelity the quest 3 looks fantastic it it really really does behind this hatch yeah yeah that's where they keep it the field of view the resolution how smooth it runs with something like virtual desktop the colors they're very natural um I think the only thing that the quest 3 doesn't particularly do very well in terms of its colors um which is very Sim similar to The Quest 2 is the black levels it's not something that's ever really bothered me combine where would I put a control panel but I know a lot of people have spoken about it it's more gray than it is black and I'm interested to see what the pimax looks like when it comes to Black levels I'm actually going to open up this bit and go in here cuz this is a good test for black levels I mean for me personally it it looks great like the darks look dark over here it I don't think it does look gray but I've always been on that side of the argument I can't can't see it my eyes are so basic I I just don't I don't see this as an issue um but I know some people do and maybe when I put that pimax on and I see like true black levels maybe then I'll I'll change my tune you can actually see all these kind of little blades in here on Quest 3 it's it's such a sharp headset it looks Flipping Fantastic you can actually see all these little details like these blades in here are what squished this little Little Beetle when you um when you choose to heal yourself hold on there we go ah look it all s oh it's disgusting so all the blades kind of come together and squish the beetle down into juice and then use it to heal very very clever very very clever this thing has teeth look at the teeth you can actually see the teeth that is disgusting oh there's a rat there um should I shoot that is there a reason that's there too late done it now done it I can't really remember if I'm supposed to shoot that do you hear that oh I love this bit okay this is the first time you see yes all right um can I let him in and let him get in that's the way we got to go I don't think I've ever done that yeah that is the short come on in get [Music] eaten what an idiot what an idiot one thing that will never cease to amaze me in VR games is coming from like a dark area out into like an outside area and it it feeling like you've actually transitioned into to Natural Light my eyes kind of adjust in the right way and the way that they would if I was actually doing it in the real world it is Bonkers to me the VR has that uh effect I don't think I need to kill that one I don't know why I did that was pointless oh buger buger buger buger do they explode when they eat them yes they do yes they do oh oh it looks this just looks so bloody good so detailed eat that kill your friend the teeth they still kind of like Sway in the breeze even when they're dead okay I'm going to play through this bit and then I'm going to switch over to the crystal you going to come through window you trying you're trying try again come on try again maybe not oh God he's tried again see I think the black levels here look great like honestly I do I'm not just saying that I don't see them as an issue on Quest 3 at all um and that's not me saying that people who do see it as an issue are wrong I just do think we've all got different levels of Tolerance and um as I've said a million times I'm kind of in this more for the experience of just playing the games and I'm not super concerned about them looking as perfect as maybe they could but then I might eat my words we'll jump into the pimax and uh I might think okay I can't go back now this looks too damn good any more explosive barrels I don't think there are are there there's one right down the end there um he's going to hit that at me I know he is he always does it so let's just shoot it out the way so we can't do it look at this wa phenomenal can I knock him back ah that that wasn't meant to happen it wasn't meant to happen bloody he that wasn't meant to happen didn't realize if he punched it it would explode in my face crap on a stick okay well look I think quest three looks absolutely phenomenal I will capture some through the lens's um footage in this little Subway area and then we'll move over to PX Crystal you know I I can see why this is enough for you know in my opinion around probably like 90% of the VR Gaming Community I don't think people necessarily need to Splash out on anything more High Fidelity than this unless they are super super focused and concerned about things looking pristinely perfect to a degree that I don't know I I don't know if it's enough to justify that extra cost but we'll see we'll see I'm going to switch over and um yeah we we we'll see we'll [Music] [Music] see [Music] just setting up the pimax crystal to start filming some halflife Alex but before I do that I just needed to show you the level of cabling required for Wired pcvr on this headset now I appreciate it is a beast so it does require some additional oomph some additional power and quite a lot of cabling but it's still kind of crazy that there's like there's there's a lot of stuff going on here um I'm kind of getting psvr flashbacks uh I think that even people who have had amazing experiences with VR don't come back as often as they maybe would because this is the perceived issue you know like the setup time is huge you have to plug things in make sure it's calibrated correctly yada yada yada so eliminating that I think is a big it should be a big focus in making VR more accessible for more people I think it's why Standalone VR is so popular you just put the headset on and you start playing but PC VR at least for like these high-end headsets I think still has a bit of a problem in terms of setup time um all right I'm going to plug all this in and get going one eternity later just been downloading firmware update and troubleshooting for 20 minutes because I couldn't get it to connect to the PC I think it's doing it now so any minute now I'll be able to play this thing better be amazing because there's so many hurdles to get in and start playing it just doesn't feel smooth enough ah okay we're finally into halflife Alex on the pimax crystal now I'm having to do some pretty hilarious things to get this video to work I've had to like duct tape my microphone to the pimax because normally it's connected via like a little magnetic lock but I can't use the headphones that have the other half of that magnetic lock with the pimax because it's so big now I'll start this the same way I started the quest 3 um trial run of this game when I played on Quest 3 jumping in and getting set up took seconds on pimax it took probably 40 minutes of troubleshooting and tinkering to get everything running now immediately that is a problem that that isn't great first off I had to get all the cabl set up and it wasn't detecting the headset at all then there was a few updates when it finally detected the headset then when it got set up halflife Alex wouldn't work it kept showing a black screen I had sound but no but no screen I needed to drop the resolution and put in a kind of start parameter minus no vid to get the game even running so immediately there's a lot of things I needed to overcome to get this working on this pimax Crystal headset yeah these dark areas it does look nice it looks very nice does it look ,000 different nice resolution is is crazy like it looks incredibly sharp um and I'm seeing tiny tiny details really clearly um I think I can rout this with my multi there is no denying this is a very impressive headset who am I going to sell it to these look more like the way that dark Interiors look to my actual eyes in the real world I've got to admit um and that's really nice one thing that's kind of shocking to me though um is how cheap the controllers feel for for a headset this expensive I I would have expected something a lot more premium feeling um do I have any other bullets I don't think I do give me that ammo come on there we go right Bang Yeah I would have expected um some more premium feeling controllers the these feel like kind of um Market stall knockoff Quest 2 controllers they feel very plasticky um they don't feel very heavy they they they feel a bit more like toys um I I would have really expected something a bit more robust okay so there's two things I'm immediately Blown Away by um on the PX Crystal two things I'm really enamored with I guess firstly it's the contrast um genuinely the black levels are really impressive the contrast between the darker colors on my hand and the lighter elements like the hearts and and the bullet counters and the flashing little green lights it looks amazing especially because the resolution is so high and it's so detailed like it looks it looks Absolut absolutely phenomenal the clarity is nuts the other thing I really like is is the sound quality of these of these um built-in headphones really crunchy really really crunchy sound and I don't know crunchy probably isn't the audio file appropriate way to explain how it sounds but it it does sound why did I put that in the back it does sound really um impactful um yeah loving the quality of these built-in speakers uh they're very impressive okay and yeah fov is very nice but I am noticing kind of almost it kind of it's almost like a warping effect like an artificial warping at the very edges of my vision God it's it's it's lovely though like the fov here I can see basically right from the ground to above those buildings you might even be able to see that on the capture but I can see by just looking forward I can see the ground here so that bit of ground where that grass is and I can see right above like that building I can see that all within my field of view which is really nuts and um quite quite magnificent I must say everything looks like it has a better sense of scale um on the crystal and the colors are very natural they look very kind of um yeah just realistic like what I would see with my actual eyes I really do hate these controllers they're so plasticky they do they feel like the the equivalent of you know the controller that you would give to your younger brother or a friend that would come over and you bought like a knockoff Xbox controller from the market that was like a fraction of the price and you use the official controller and they get to use the the cheap knockoff it feels like that um which isn't a nice feeling and they sound awful horrible yeah okay I I see what people are saying now about the black levels like this is dark this is really really dark um whereas on the quest I can still kind of see cuz I guess it's got that kind of gray scale to it rather than black um yeah okay all right all right okay yeah um I see what people are saying if you if you want things if you want your games to look true to life in terms of the contrast the black levels I get it I do get it for horror games this will be horrible so much darker Jesus before I go in there I might actually try and get some uh through the lenses footage just standing here because honestly this this field of view here is um yeah it's I'm I'm really Blown Away by it it looks amazing I'm so scared to take this off in case something goes wrong it took me so long to get this set up I don't want it to not work come on don't break on me [Music] and we go do you know what I think surprises me the most about this headset other than the fact that the controllers are super cheap it's how painful it is um to use the software that you need to use to get this thing working and how kind of unintuitive a lot of it is um again for for a headset with this price I would expect something better so when you first stick it on you have to do things like you hold it in front of you still or on a flat surface to calibrate where it is and where your kind of center of game playay is but then you need to manually put in the distance in centimeters from the floor Flor to where your head is you have to put that in manually this thing can't or it doesn't scan for it um potentially that might be because I'm not using like base stations but this thing doesn't need base stations but it can't figure out where the floor is without you putting in how far you are from the floor manually I I find that strange I find that strange and if you get it wrong you end up really tall in game or really small so you need to like bust out a tape measure which is weird I am really impressed with the overall visual Fidelity of the PX Crystal but I should be for a headset that costs you know nearly $2,000 um for me though it's it's the contrast more than anything it's the difference between these light areas and these dark areas that is so far along with the quality of the of the sound through these built-in earphones like they're the two biggest selling points for me I don't think I would spend the money to get either of those things though the have aay I think I would definitely just settle for the quest 3 because the quest 3 to be perfectly honest running via virtual desktop is comparatively very close to the experience I'm having here yeah this looks way spookier uh because it's so dark oh my God I'm just going to cut out the middle man and just get rid of him now there we go yeah this is really dark horror games in oh my God in a headset like this will be next level absolutely next level mean horror stuff still looks great on Quest 3 but how dark it is makes things feel so much more oppressive um and scary genuinely much scarier okay get rid of all this nice yeah I think the through the lens footage in there is going to be really telling I'll do it in the same place I did it with um on the quest so that it's fair let's kill you woohoo and you don't hit that bucket at me honestly this guy he's always hitting buckets at me he'll hit that Barrel at me if he's given half a chance watch I bet he will bet he will yeah look at that look at that so predictable predict little [ __ ] okay so halflife Alex looks absolutely stunning on the PX Crystal um as I expected it would do the fov the contrast the black levels the resolution it all looks absolutely amazing the smaller details really pop on this headset um probably because of the uh Q LED screen it's it's a stunning thing it really really is but there are immediately some issues that I can't Overlook so the warping at the edges of my vision pulls me out of things the fov is amazing it really kind of makes things more immersive but then that's kind of at odds with this warping which pulls you back out and reminds you that you are using a VR headset secondly this thing is heavy um it's about 840 G I think so it's about 300 G heavier than a quest 3 thirdly the setup is painful uh it took me a long time to get this thing going and I don't like the software you have to use it's very unintuitive um doesn't feel slick it's much better to connect wirelessly via virtual desktop with the quest 3 it takes you know seconds and then lastly these controllers feel super super cheap um they need a better solution than these controllers that they are almost an insult uh if you've spent the money that you've spent I I would want to use something different I wouldn't want to use these right let's capture some through the lens and then do a very quick look at Skyrim and then we'll uh we'll wrap up today [Music] [Music] okay let's finish with everyone's favorite heavily modded Skyrim and when I say heavily modded I do mean that I've uh modded this the hell this is the way I always wanted this game to look I finally got it looking like this and it does look absolutely stunning on pimax Crystal but I can tell it's not running particularly well it's it's struggling quite a bit there there's a fair bit of drag when I move around quickly feels like the frame rate is struggling to keep up um definitely playable but I feel like I would need to drop the resolution to get this running nicely now bear in mind I'm running the IMAX Crystal on a PC that has a 4090 uh GPU and an I9 12,900 K processor so it's no slouch this PC is a bit of a beast um and it's struggling to run Skyrim here smoothly on the crystal which is a real shame because it it does look bloody amazing I cannot fault the visual quality of the pimax at all the screen quality the sound quality both absolutely exceptional the resolution is stunning The Colors the definition the clarity it's all it's all beautiful but it kind of comes unstuck when um you look at things like performance for one and yeah that's right you're dead performance for one and then like the software you have to use for two and the quality of the these controllers they're just not good enough just not good enough man I love the visual aesthetic of this particular set of mods this is just how I always wanted Skyrim to look in VR it looks kind of really Fantastical also really natural the colors pop it's beautiful the trees in particular look absolutely amazing oh it looks so good it looks so good and the fov is blowing me away right now again like I can see from the floor in front of me like this this these rocks here I can see them to the top of that tree there and a little bit beyond like that is my fov it is wide right I'm going to do some through the lenses recording here on the PX Crystal and then I'm going to jump over to Quest 3 and just sum up my thoughts I think I know where I'm at um but I'll talk about that in just a minute this is a very impressive headset it really is but um yeah I'll sum up in a mode Let's just capture some through the lenses recording here so you can see what this looks like like stop talking to me about [Music] [Music] dragons [Music] oh man it's almost embarrassing just how quick it is to put the quest three on load up virtual desktop and get into a game when I'm comparing that to the pimax it is so incredibly painless it took me no time to get this going whereas the pimax it it feels cumbersome using that software you have to use is is really cumbersome however loading straight from the pimax playing Skyrim into the quest three playing Skyrim feels like going from oh man feels like going from psvr 2 to original psvr feels like going from Quest 3 to Quest 2 this looks great don't get me wrong my height is all screwed up by the way I haven't set my height up clearly it's h it's a bit of a mess there we go I've sorted my height somewhat yeah loading into this this on Quest 3 after coming away from pimax is is nuts halflife didn't feel this impactful halflife looked pretty great on both but I don't know if it's because PX really allowed me to see the visual quality of all the mods I've got running I I don't know but Skyrim looked absolutely gorgeous on pimax and on Quest 3 it looks fine but it's definitely like muddier less crisp um yeah this is kind of crazy the game looks stunning on Quest 3 but it looked absolutely mindblowing on the pimax crystal um it really does feel like a bit of a downgrade when I come back to Quest 3 now however the performance is much much better running it via virtual desktop on Quest 3 at the lower resolution I do have a theory however that perhaps it doesn't look quite as good on Quest 3 and it looked a lot better on pimax because I'm using the the VR toolkit uh mod application that basically pushes inovated rendering to Skyrim or whatever game you apply it to to allow it to run better and I don't think that was necessarily working on PX but it is definitely working here this is a much smoother experience but maybe that's why the visuals have taken a bit of a hit here on Quest 3 unsure I'm unsure it just looks more washed out the colors don't look as vibrant things in the distance don't look as sharp and in Focus the resolution here is immediately uh noticeable um the contrast is is very noticeable the Shadows don't look as impactful as they did on the pimax it's crazy yeah this looks this does not look anywhere near um as good as it did on PX uh which I guess is to be expected it is a 1,599 headset versus a 499 headset so with that all being said would I actually spend the additional $1,100 to buy a pimax crystal over a quest three I think the honest answer for me personally has to be no the PX crystal is incredibly impressive it impressed me the most in skym and I only played that for a short period of time but this game looked vibrant and natural and just incredible on that headset the resolution bump the fov bump the contrast the screen quality Skyrim really sang on a headset like the PX Crystal it looks great here on Quest 3 and it's running super smoothly but on the crystal it looked like almost real life still had that stylistic look to it but the Shadows the colors the vibrancy the details they all looked absolutely mindblowing on the pimax [Music] [Music] But ultimately what it boils down to for me personally is the experience of playing these games for me a pretty casual VR gamer I'm not in it for the highest specs the most impressive technical specifications for me personally the experience of playing both these games feels the same whether I'm using the $499 quest 3 or the $1,600 PX Crystal I understand why most consumers will gravitate towards the cheap headset they want that cheap entry point into the VR medium but more than that it's so much simpler to set up the quest 3 for pcvr gaming and get going jump into it start playing almost immediately pimax Crystal made things quite restrictive there's a lot of friction to get into that and start playing firstly there's a lot of cables to set up you're plugging into the display port you also have to plug into like a little Hub The Hub then goes off to a power supply The Hub also goes into a USB be on your PC The Hub then also plugs into the headset itself and even though I had done all that correctly it didn't work for me for a little while I had to keep resetting the software and eventually the pmax came to life and it and it started working there's a lot of friction there immediately just using the software and starting this up as a pcvr piece of hardware and I think enthusiasts won't mind that they won't mind that struggle if they're going to put a, hours into Elite dangerous or Microsoft flight simulator but the most casual gamers they don't want to fight against something like software and setup for 20 30 40 minutes and then you have things like the quality of the controllers they feel plasticy they don't feel like they should be accompanying a headset that costs $11,600 and then there's the warping there's some effects in there that again aren't quite right for me ultimately the fact that I can throw the quest onto my head and start gaming within seconds thanks to Virtual desktop is the true selling point it's so easy to get going there's almost no friction now it's painless to start playing VR and PX Crystal has a long way to go to overcome that kind of friction and get people to start playing with it it's it's just not smooth enough I'm going to capture a little bit of through the lens gameplay now from Skyrim and then I'm going to go and relax cuz I've been filming for hours trying to get all this stuff running and get some decent footage for you hopefully you've enjoyed if you have please leave a like hit subscribe and drop a comment down below I will see you all soon for another one take care of yourselves [Music] goodbye

Channel: Beardo Benjo

Views: 69,500

Keywords: Beardo, Benjo, VR, VR Gameplay, Quest 3, Quest 3 Gameplay, New VR, New VR Headset, Best VR, Best VR Headset, Best VR Headset 2023, Pimax Crystal, Pimax Crystal Gameplay, Quest 3 vs Pimax Crystal, High End VR, cheap vr vs expensive, cheapest vs most expensive vr headset, New VR Games, New VR Games 2023, Quest 3 Wireless PCVR, Quest 3 Virtual Desktop, Pimax Crystal Through the lens, Quest 3 through the lens, VR Games Coming Soon, Pimax, 4090 VR, 4090 VR Performance, vr, Quest 2

Id: kCnkp8pdA1c

Length: 37min 42sec (2262 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023