More Crystal Super help needed

[von_Tom]

I lose my mind over this stuff.  I've come from an Index where everything just worked with solid 90hz and no issues at all.

 

System is a 9950X3D with 5090.  Following all sorts of isues this is a clean W11 install and the game drive was formatted before a fresh install of everything.  Bios and all drivers up-to-date.

 

I have dropped in the openvr_api file and am running without Steam VR.  I have not installed Steam yet.

 

Relevant Super settings are:

 

Room lighting - 50(auto)

Refresh - 90

Eye tracking - off

 

Image Quality - Medium (0.75)

GPU Upsclaing - none

Sharpness - 0.4

 

FFR - off

Everything else is off

 

Pimax OpenXR is enabled (or at least there is no option to change it)

 

Passthrough is disabled

 

Game settings are Balanced with view distance at 130km, shadows high and clouds extreme.  SSAO on, AA x 2.

 

In-game I get a solid 72 (when I have set it to 90) and I get terrible ghosting and the ground and buildings flicker like crazy.  Like a slide show. 

 

Does anyonme know how to get to 90 without the slide show?

 

Edit:  Tried SteamVR and it is exactly the same.

 

Monitor refresh set to 144hz (default)

 

Edit 2:  Set Quaqlity to Low (0.5) and its at 90 and smooth.  I'd have thought I could run higher than that.

 

von Tom

Edited yesterday at 01:20 PM by von_Tom

[giftgruen]

For start I'd set SSAO to off and also try without AA ( did you MSAA or FXAA ? ) cause with as much pixels, it's questionable if you still need Antialiasing.

Don't own a Super, but both SSAO and AA ( at least MSAA ) are quite performance intense in my experience.

 

Cloud "extreme" also needs a LOT of ressources, so set it to medium for a start, you can go higher later on maybe if you still have headroom.

Same with Shadows. However, I admit that Shadows are needed for eye candyness

 

( I also own a 5090.  But if I set all to ultra + SSAAO + HDR + MSAAx4 - then I also cannot run my QuestPro anymore with 90Hz and 3500x3500 Supersampling. And your Crystal Super needs even more rendered Pixels at 100% )

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 04:12 PM by giftgruen

[chiliwili69]

18 hours ago, von_Tom said:

Edit 2:  Set Quaqlity to Low (0.5) and its at 90 and smooth.  I'd have thought I could run higher than that.

 

Yes, definetely your should be able to have Pimax Quality higher than Low (0.5) with a 5090.

 

I assume you have the Super with the 50PPD lenses, right?.

If this is the case the number of pixels rendered by your GPU should be these ones with the 0.5, 0.75, 0.85 (Used by Panzerlang) and 1.0.

 

So, at 0.5 you are rendering 19.5 million pixels which is 10 million less than the panel resoltuion, so the image you will get should not be very good.

 

Panzerlang reported to use 0.85 with the Pimax Super 50PPD and a 5090 card. So, for IL-2 (and without using any upscaling/Quadview/CPR etc technique) the limit of a 5090 card is about 56 million pixels at 90Hz.

 

I would set the custom resolution at 0.75 (or even 0.85) and set all the IL-2 setting which could consume GPU load to the minimun ( for example Preset to Balanced, Clouds to Low, no MSAA, no SSAO, perhaps mirrors, perhaps shadows) and check the frametimes with fpsVR app or similar (In SteamVR you have the Developer/Advanced Frame Timming to see GPU and CPU frametimes)

 

18 hours ago, von_Tom said:

Monitor refresh set to 144hz (default)

Regarding this, I don´t know if this could influence the GPU load. What is the resolution of the monitor? What is the resolution of the IL-2 window in the monitor? Do you use full screen option?

Since you play in VR I would try to reduce the monitor freq to 60Hz or 72Hz, just in case

[von_Tom]

4 hours ago, chiliwili69 said:

 

.....

 

 

In order:

 

The game still looks great even when I reduced it to 0.40 to give me more overhead for busy scenarios.  Bear in mind I come from the Index so just the lenses are a big improvement, as is the fov - the game counter says 121.

 

I don't know the interplay between the graphics presets and the headset setting.  Does 0.4 at Ultra look as good as 0.75 with Balanced?

 

I am no longer using SteamVR.

 

Personally speaking I like a game to look good so although online fps > looks there is a point where the trade off is too much.

 

My test scenario is a fast mission on Odessa with 8 Spitfire IXes and 8 x Ju52s with overcast.  at Ultra 0.4/5 gives me a rock solid 90 with only the very occasional drop to 70+   and 0.75 gives it 72hz but very bad ghosting and twitchiness.

 

At Ultra even in a 1 v 1 with a cloudless sky 0.75 gives ghosting and twitchiness.

 

My experience of SteamVR is that it can limit the VR hz to the monitor hz hence I leave it at the native 144hz. 

 

I may test 0.75 with balanced preset to see what it looks like.

 

von Tom

 

Edit:  0.5 with Ultra settings - distance 130km, extreme clouds and shadows plus SSAO and HDR seems to be my sweet spot.

 

Edited 5 hours ago by von_Tom

[giftgruen]

Well, yes, in Comparison to the Index even a Quest 3 looks good.

However, the question then is .... why to buy a Crystal Super and then use only half the resolution by setting it to 0.4 ?

 

<< Does 0.4 at Ultra look as good as 0.75 with Balanced?

 

There is no objective answer to this question. This is subjective.

And "Does 0.4 at Ultra look as good for you as 0.75 with Balanced?" can only be answered by you.

 

 

[von_Tom]

1 hour ago, giftgruen said:

 .... why to buy a Crystal Super and then use only half the resolution by setting it to 0.4 ?

 

<< Does 0.4 at Ultra look as good as 0.75 with Balanced?

 

There is no objective answer to this question. This is subjective.

And "Does 0.4 at Ultra look as good for you as 0.75 with Balanced?" can only be answered by you.

 

 

 

...because you don't know until you try.  The lenses are way superior and the FOV is wonderful.  I'd rather stress test it than play 1v1 in a cloudless sky - I'd expect high fps with that.

 

With my test scenario anything above 0.5 provides FPS solid at 72 but ghosting and horrible jitters.  There is less ghosting and jitters at 0.6 upwards and it gets unplayable at 0.75.  At 0.75/85 I have played with all settings from balanced to ultra but they do not seem to make much of a difference to the fps/ghosting etc.

 

I have settled on 0.5 and Ultra. 

 

von Tom

[giftgruen]

Sure, it's of course your decision to do so.

 

But ( same as ChiliWili who is the absolute VR expert in this forum )  I am sure that you can go higher than 0.5 with optimized settings.

Just going from Ultra to Medium inside IL2 does not help much, you need to reduce AA, SSOA, Shadows/Clouds and so on.  Did you try this ?

 

However ... if you are happy with the 0.5 we're all fine

 

[von_Tom]

35 minutes ago, giftgruen said:

 

But ( same as ChiliWili who is the absolute VR expert in this forum )  I am sure that you can go higher than 0.5 with optimized settings.

Just going from Ultra to Medium inside IL2 does not help much, you need to reduce AA, SSOA, Shadows/Clouds and so on.  Did you try this ?

 

 

Yes - shadows medium, no HDR, SSAO, AA down to x2 and clouds set to medium.  It didn't look as nice to my eyes and the fps didn't noticeably improve.

 

It is what it is, and when I update again in 4 years with whatever funky CPU and GPU I have I'll be able to run it at max.

 

If I can sort out the fan noise that is.  It just started today...

 

von Tom 

[Dagwoodyt]

On 10/15/2025 at 5:43 AM, von_Tom said:

System is a 9950X3D with 5090.  Following all sorts of isues this is a clean W11 install and the game drive was formatted before a fresh install of everything.  Bios and all drivers up-to-date.

How does performance of the Super in GB compare to settings and performance in DCS?