No VR in Pimax - Nothing

[Captain Orso]

I have one of the very first commercial copies of Oculus Rift CV1 and have been using it for nearly 10 years. I finally got up the courage and cash to go to something where I can read instruments without using full-zoom AND leaning into the instrument panel.

Pimax Crystal Super

All day long I've been trying to get it to play with DCS. No luck. DCS starts, but only in monitor mode, whether I start through Pimax Play, or disktop links with "J:\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\bin\DCS.exe" -force_enable_VR -force_OpenXR or any combination. DCS starts, but only in monitor mode.

My disappointment is immense.

It must be a ME problem, because I can find no thread here with similar issues.

Can anybody help me (I've already been through therapy, so let's let that aside for now).

[Roadhouse]

I had an issue where meta had installed some virtual display or some dopey thing that needed to be removed in order for the output to be sent to the Pimax. Take a look in device manager and you may see a meta display that should be disabled or deleted. I struggled for hours with this until I used Pimax Play "Troubleshooting" under "General"

 

Hit start and under "Video Card Driver" if it says anything other than "Nvidia"... that's the problem. At least it was for me. 

[Ollie]

I had a similar issue when I first tried to use my PCL. It turned out that the headset didn't like to compete for DP access on the GPU card when loading DCS. I had two monitors connected, so after disconnecting one, the PCL worked fine. Then I was using an RTX 3080, but now an RTX 5090, but still only use one 5090 DP for Pimax and one for one of the monitors, while using the onboard graphics for the second monitor. Also, try lowering all your DCS settings to base line first. Further, If you have OpenXr Toolkit installed that may be a problem too. If you have, then untick DCS in the toolkit companion. If you have OpenXR layers, you can move OXRTK down the priorities and re-tick DCS in the companion if you still want to use the tookit.

May not help, but hope something here may point you in a useful direction.

[Captain Orso]

Many thanks for the replies!!

I think I was not clear in my description. The HMD displays. When I start Pimax Play and put the HMD on, I get a weird outer space planet displayed. I have to press the menu button on one of the controllers to get some rudimentary control bar, where I can then pick a "window" to look at. OMG so clunky.

Under device => general, when I did the first setup it only said SteamVR. Now it had the option of OpenXR/PimaxVR so I selected that and tried to start DCS.

NOW I GOT DCS in VR!! but OMFG it is so clunky wand wrong. It keeps flashing like it were changing from DCS to another window and back randomly. I thought Oculus was a task to get used to but this is literally 10x worse, and I'm not exaggerating. It's like I went to a cheap, off-brand gas station to buy SW from a rack and grabbed something from China, and..... ohhhhhhhh, this is bad. If I didn't know better, I'd say I'd been scammed. I mean literally, like one of those videos you see on YT where some schmuck ordered a super-cheap SSD and they sent him a cheap SSD box filled with sand and dirt, only this is NOT CHEAP 

I think I saw a video somewhere, where they guy mentioned something about the DCS menu flashing and a setting that might fix that *sigh* maybe it's good I haven't put my Oculus Rift CV1 away yet 

[leonsilver]

I had a similar problem. The solution was to turn off (I'm sure I did NOT turn on) this crap in SteamVR.

 

[Dawgboy]

I'm deliberately not installing SteamVR, trying to keep my VR pipeline less complex for troubleshooting, etc.  What are the must-have capabilities of SteamVR?

[Captain Orso]

Short update

Yesterday I was trying to follow Tally Mouse guide to set things up

which is a task in itself.

Today I found this

Pimax Crystal Super: DCS Ultimate Settings Guide

which seems to be Tally Mouse's guide in written form.

Anyway, after re-asserting that I want to use OpenXR and not SteamVR--how I would go back to SteamVR is not apparent, because there is no option to choose (typical Pimax, I guess)--

I got DCS to start through Pimax Play, and I could see that it was running, but it wouldn't swap the display over to DCS. I remember in Oculus at the very beginning, when my PC was rather weak-kneed, when DCS started, the HMD went black for a while, until DCS was up and running, so I was hopping this was a similar situation, but I waited a couple of minutes and then checked the MS Task Manager. DCS and the Pimax task were both on very high power consumption, but neither was very high in CPU or GPU usage, which is very weird to me. What was Pimax doing, sending my power back to China?

I'm going to try to undo all the stuff I did yesterday, which for me is like petting a porcupine against the grain. We'll see what happens.

16 minutes ago, Dawgboy said:

I'm deliberately not installing SteamVR, trying to keep my VR pipeline less complex for troubleshooting, etc.  What are the must-have capabilities of SteamVR?

None that I know of, but I have SteamVR because of Half-Life Alyx, so there's that...

Edited Sunday at 01:41 PM by Captain Orso

[sleighzy]

On 11/3/2025 at 2:37 AM, Captain Orso said:

Anyway, after re-asserting that I want to use OpenXR and not SteamVR--how I would go back to SteamVR is not apparent, because there is no option to choose (typical Pimax, I guess)--

SteamVR has an OpenXR runtime, so it would still be OpenXR. However, don't use SteamVR for Pimax headsets.

[Captain Orso]

1 hour ago, sleighzy said:

SteamVR has an OpenXR runtime, so it would still be OpenXR. However, don't use SteamVR for Pimax headsets.

No, I'm not intending to do that. I was just commenting on the quality of the SW.