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PC VR gaming is still alive and well, but it’s getting harder and harder to find headsets that give you its original appeal. Most new headsets today focus on the convenience of streaming and wireless connections when it comes to gaming, and in their standalone modes, they just don’t have the power to match up against a desktop PC. So, if you want that crystal-clear visual fidelity and lossless connection from your PC’s graphics card, there are fewer and fewer places to turn these days. That’s why the Pimax Dream Air is such an interesting VR headset to review right now.
Up against PSVR 2, the Meta Quest 3, and most recently, the Steam Frame, it and the HTC Vive Focus Vision seem to be the only ones that actually want to give PC gamers the ultimate visual feast with a lossless DisplayPort connection. But for how old-fashioned a wired connection is, the Dream Air has a more futuristic, lightweight design than any of its rivals. It bears a striking resemblance to the Apple Vision Pro, but that’s more of a statement of intent rather than an appeal to disappointed Apple fans. It’s the PCVR gaming headset the Vision Pro never turned out to be, and Pimax knows it.
But that comes with its drawbacks too. For example, it might harness tiny OLED displays that look absolutely breathtaking, but the flipside is an equally breathtaking price tag of $2,000 / £1,542 for the headset on its own. If you want the privilege of controllers bundled in and inside-out tracking, it’ll set you back $2,299 / £1,774.
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Design
Where the Pimax Dream Air strays from its creator’s previous headsets is in its design. We’ve tested a few products from Pimax now, including a few failed attempts with the Pimax Crystal, and a successful review of the Pimax Crystal Light. We know the sorts of visuals this brand’s headsets are capable of if you can afford them, but even the lighter version of the brand’s better-known headset is so bulky and awkward on your head that we only really recommend it for stationary simulation games. The Pimax Dream Air is the polar opposite of that.
With a Vision Pro-reminiscent design, it’s absolutely tiny when sat next to even the Meta Quest 3. It’s almost bordering on a hybrid between a headset and a pair of smart glasses with extra cushioning – it’s that lightweight at only 170 grams.
Cloth and fabrics wrap around it, giving you a lovely, comfortable, Velcro fastening headband and a facial interface that’s surprisingly breathable despite feeling like a dense blanket you’d wrap up in during the winter.
It’s hard to fault the design of the Dream Air – I never got to try out the Apple Vision Pro, but by all accounts its weight made all the lightweight fabrics, the soft headband, and the removal of a battery pointless – it still dragged down on people’s noses and made the experience of using it uncomfortable. The Dream Air doesn’t have that issue because its facial interface has such a strict border that immediately tapers off, allowing for less contact on your face, but a more noticeable field of view I’ll come onto in a bit.
Although you’ll need to be connected to a graphics card and USB to play with the Dream Air, I am a fan of how Pimax has streamlined its cabling. There’s nothing on the headset end you need to plug in or worry about coming unplugged. Two splitter cables, one for each display panel, split off from the rear of the headset on either side, combining into one before meeting in a small cell that hangs just at the top of your back. One long cable then spans all the way down to a divider block that splits into USB and DisplayPort, as well as a power adapter you’ll need to plug into the wall. There’s a lot of cabling to make this work, but Pimax has designed a system that means you barely notice it once you’ve set it up.
Features
The Dream Air is available in two different bundles. The first is the “Lighthouse” version, which comes with the headset only, a model with Base stations and outside-in tracking. Hand tracking isn’t integrated, and passthrough isn’t supported, so this is likely going to be for people upgrading from a previous wired PCVR headset who already own controllers and tracking stations. That’s the one that will set you back $2,000 / £1,542.
The version I’m testing is the SLAM version, which comes with two controllers and features four cameras on the headset itself for inside-out tracking. Hand tracking is also supported, as is passthrough.
Pimax claims the Dream Air is the world’s smallest full-feature 8K resolution VR headset, and I’d believe it. With Sony Micro-OLED panels you view through ConcaveView pancake lenses, you’ll get an absolute feast for your eyeballs with a stunning 3840 x 3552 resolution per eye. The Dream Air also supports eye-tracking, so there’s scope for some foveated rendering to enhance performance and resolution at what you’re actually focusing on. In the Pimax Play software, there isn’t a formal toggle for foveated rendering, but you can enhance the middle of the displays and lessen their borders to aid performance.
There’s a quoted 110-degree horizontal FOV in this headset, but personally, I’m not so sure. That would bring it up to par with PSVR 2 and the Meta Quest 3, but I think because of the design of the Dream Air, you notice the borders around its display a lot more easily than on those rival headsets. Because it’s such a small border around your eyes, it’s far simpler to spot the Dream Air’s vision cone bordering your game, providing this glaringly obvious black frame around every game you play. That isn’t a problem I have when using those other two headsets.
Pimax Play is where you’ll get access to other settings and specs of the Dream Air. It was there I found that the Dream Air has a maximum refresh rate of 90Hz, which is good enough, certainly when you’re looking at the kinds of visual quality the micro-OLED panels can beam into your eyeballs. There are some motion-blurring capabilities, upscaling settings, and interpolation tricks you can use to smooth this display out if you’re not quite getting 90fps, but in my experience testing this headset with an RTX 5080 PC, all of those things just resulted in a lot more visual noise and a wavy, warped distortion effect when I didn’t keep my head exactly still.
Pimax Play is also your home for room tracking settings and firmware updates, all of which are fine, but I do have some problems with Pimax Play I’ll come onto shortly. It’ll serve as your method of controlling IPD adjustments, and the only onboard controls for the headset itself are volume keys for the integrated speaker and a power button. Speaking of audio, there’s an in-built microphone, and talking to friends in multiplayer games works just fine. Windows recognises the Dream Air as an audio source for input and output, although I did have to unplug it when not in use to prevent it from repeatedly disrupting my regular desktop audio.
Controllers
Before we get to the performance stuff, a word on the controllers.
They’re fairly traditional VR grips that still use the tracking ring of older generations. I like the feel of them in the hand, especially because they have a slightly larger thumbstick diameter than a lot of rival VR controllers do. Unfortunately, that’s really where their design peaks.
They’re very light in the hand, and as a result they don’t feel like they match up at all with the premium design and build quality of the Dream Air headset. What’s worse, despite their tracking rings, they can be very inconsistent and glitchy when you’re playing a game with them.
Sometimes they’ll register well below the height you’re holding them, other times they’ll twitch and shake uncontrollably when your hands have been perfectly still. Worst of all, the trigger on my left controller got stuck in a down position while I was mid-game at one point – not ideal for such an expensive bit of kit, or when you have to pay extra for the version of the Dream Air that comes with the bloody things.
The haptic feedback in them is pretty decent on the whole, even creating a bit of sound when you come into contact with surfaces in Half-Life: Alyx. Again, though, because the controllers themselves feel a bit hollow and cheap, they don’t give you the sort of game feel of even the Meta Quest 3S, which is so, so much cheaper. That’s a bit disappointing.
Thankfully, controller tracking works well – for the most part. I have tested it in different lighting conditions to see how well the internal cameras keep up, and they do a good job of positional tracking with the headset in a room, but the controllers leave a bit to be desired. In Walkabout Mini Golf, there are annoying twitches and glitches that happen that can lose you a hole (or at least a good putt), and that’s more often the case here than with other headsets. Then again, in Blade & Sorcery, tracking was really good and worked arguably better than I’ve had with other headsets.
Performance
When it works, the Pimax Dream Air is one of the best VR headsets I’ve ever had on my face. The visual clarity this thing is capable of is stunning, jaw-dropping, astounding – pick literally any adjective you hope applies to a good VR headset, and it’ll be appropriate. At times, words don’t do it justice.
The panels have a way of bringing out the absolute best parts of any VR title I played on them. The softer cartoonish look of Walkabout Mini Golf was more vivid and colorful than I’d ever seen it. The sunsets beamed onto water and reflected a lovely atmospheric calm over me; the detail of the environments was likely exactly as the developers intended.
In Half-Life: Alyx, environments looked so photorealistic I questioned why any game would need something like DLSS 5 – games are already capable of looking utterly lifelike. Even Blade & Sorcery, a game that isn’t really supposed to look all that good because its main priority is its sickeningly violent physics and combat, looked unbelievable. I’ve known for a while that Micro-OLED displays in VR headsets are the gold standard (thanks to PSVR 2), but the Pimax Dream Air takes things to a whole other level. Because you’re looking through pancake lenses, the area of focus you can appreciate makes it all a deliciously balanced cocktail of visual flavour.
Pimax has somehow converted its extreme visual fidelity from its bulky headsets into a headset that weighs next to nothing, and that makes a massive difference to gameplay. The Dream Air is so light on your face you barely notice it strapped around your head, and when the visuals in front of you look so crystal clear, it’s impossible not to be completely drawn into the games you’re playing. It is quite simply VR hardware all working together to show the absolute best this genre of gaming can do.
But sadly, because the highs are so high, the times when the Dream Air doesn’t work so well become even more frustrating and glaringly obvious.
To begin with, a smaller, lighter headset means it can be hard to sit it exactly where it needs to be on your face. For me, it ends up being right on my brow line, and it’s prone to moving around if I have any sort of expression through my eyebrows. Thankfully, the headset is ventilated really well, and I never feel my face is sweating like it is in PSVR 2.
This is the sort of VR headset I’d love to see in the future – more immersive and far more functional than a pair of glasses, but a lot more convenient and comfortable to wear than the bulky headsets of previous generations.
Like I’ve mentioned, the smaller border around the display means you can spot the FOV limits so, so easily, and that’s very hard to unsee once you notice it. In Walkabout Mini Golf, and even MaestroVR, where you’re focusing so much on the middle of the displays, the periphery being so obviously blocky can tend to take you out of things, as it reminds you you’re wearing a $2,000 headset, not actually conducting an orchestra. There’s also very little space inside the headset – this is definitely a no-go for glasses wearers. That would usually be an issue for me, but in fairness, I haven’t had any eye strain or headaches using the Dream Air without my glasses. Your mileage may vary, however.
But design side effects aside, that isn’t even the worst of the troubles I’ve run into while testing the Dream Air. It’s great having a portal for the headset’s settings and its own array of apps and games, but Pimax Play/Pimax Home might be the thing causing 90% of the technical issues I’ve run into with this headset. The reason I say that is that the games themselves run absolutely fine on my PC. I never noticed the frame rate lacking, and performance in them always runs perfectly fine on other headsets while using their max settings. But anytime I pull up either SteamVR’s overlay or the Pimax Overlay in the Dream Air, the most annoying stutters, freezes, and crashes happen. It’s consistent, and even after lowering settings and the overlay render scale, it still causes entire PC crashes.
My only guess is that it’s to do with the fact that multiple overlays are working at once, and that means Steam’s VR settings and preferences are arguing with the Pimax ones. I’d say that it’s a pretty safe bet that most PCVR players will be using Steam to launch games, so that’s a must. It’d be nice if Pimax accepted that and made its own overlay optional. It’s at the point where me getting an achievement in a game and that popping up on my display risks the entire headset, or sometimes my PC, stuttering and crashing. It’s hard to know if this is actually what the issue is, but in fairness, it’s not the first time we here at GamesRadar+ have faced a very volatile and demanding Pimax headset that’s bordering on unusable.
Pimax does recommend a minimum of an RTX 2070, 3060, or 4060 for basic VR play with the Dream Air, but I shudder to think what kinds of performance issues users on lesser PC hardware will face.
One of my freelancers and I tried to get the original Pimax Crystal to work, and despite having very reasonable mid-range specs in our builds at the time, the headset wouldn’t play ball. I’m testing here with a PNY Slim RTX 5080 GPU, an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, and 32GB of G.Skill DDR5 RAM. Pimax may recommend an RTX 5090 for the best performance with this headset, but I think it’d be completely unreasonable to say that a 5080 and 270K Plus are the reason I’ve faced performance issues with the Dream Air. They certainly aren’t responsible for inconsistent controller tracking, the headset completely swapping my height mid-game, or the borders of the display freezing, even as I move my head around.
Those things seem to be weaknesses of the headset and its software that’s running the show – I’m on the most up-to-date firmware and drivers for everything here. My PC also runs these games just fine, on their highest VR settings when I’m using other headsets, so the volatility definitely seems to be a Pimax issue.
Should you buy the Pimax Dream Air?
It’s hard not to recommend the Pimax Dream Air because its visuals and lightweight design feel nothing short of revolutionary. This is the sort of VR headset I’d love to see in the future – more immersive and far more functional than a pair of glasses, but a lot more convenient and comfortable to wear than the bulky headsets of previous generations. Not to mention it has some of the most stunning visual fidelity you’ll find.
But at such a massive cost, I do wonder who Pimax thinks this is for. It’s bad enough the new Steam Frame has drawn the line so close to the grand mark, but other headsets around that area make so little impact that we barely hear from the HTC Vive Focus Vision or the Samsung Galaxy XR. The Dream Air is double their price tag. Yes, it’s no Vision Pro at £3,500, but especially in this day and age of technology being nothing but extortionate, who on earth is the market for a headset like this?
I think when it works, the Pimax Dream Air is VR at its very best, but I’m not sure the leap is good enough to warrant the massive price jump over the other headsets that manage to do things really well for under $500, under $700, or even $1,000.
If you’re going to price a headset this high, it needs to work flawlessly without any issues or problems, but in true Pimax fashion, there’s a lot of volatility and headaches here that you’re paying a massive premium for.
If you can afford it, you have equal, if not better PC specs than me, and you’re alright wrestling with settings and performance issues to avoid crashes, then I can thoroughly recommend the Pimax Dream Air. For everyone else who loves VR gaming, you’re going to be absolutely fine with a Pico 4 Ultra, Quest 3, or PSVR 2. And that pains me to say, because I’m dying to see more lossless, wired headsets in this day and age.
How I tested the Pimax Dream Air
I used the Pimax Dream Air as my go-to VR headset for over a month before writing this review. In that time, I used it plenty to play Walkabout Mini Golf, Blade & Sorcery, Maestro VR, and more. I compared it closely with the other HMDs I’ve tested and reviewed. I tested it with my own gaming PC, which uses an RTX 5080, Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and multiple NVMe SSDs. I surveyed the price of this headset and its rivals to give me verdict on whether or not it’s worth your money.
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