HTC Vive resolution and  focus

I have been playing on a Vive. I find the text very readable, not great, but very readable. Big improvement compared to DK2.

I have heard that there might be an issue with the Steam version compared to standalone launcher version. I'm using the standalone launcher version.

The only reason I even know there is an issue is that there is a big difference between the startport services menu text and the HUD text. Starport services menus seem to not have any issue. The HUD seems pixelated comparatively.

To me it's not just the text, while I can read it, it's very blurry and/or has bad aliasing. But overall the rendering quality is low, it's like playing on a very low resolution that has been stretched out to twice or three times the size.. I just can't play like that, it's not at all representative of how the game should look like. You can test this on Vive by downloading those backgrounds in the Workshop through the Vive settings. That's how the game should look like.

"unplayable" is over exaggerated. its perfectly playable and a better user experience then the dk2. I play with it since beginning of april without problems. Its just not look as good as other vr games. I really hope they fix it but i understand thats not a main priority. Stop over exaggerate, really. Its hurt more then it helps. If you over exaggerate like this you stop potential new customers ordering a vive for elite. This means this problem gets a lesser priority... less customers for vive... less priority fixing vive problems.

I disagree and I'm not over exaggerating, I can't distinguish ship shapes from a fairly small distance, text is blurred, overall it just hurts to watch the game on such a bad resolution and having to read quite a lot of text at times is just bad for my eyes and I feel relieved when I take of the Vive or go to another game where it has text.. Also, I'm not going to compare it to the DK2, I never owned one, but it's not a comparison that should be made at all anyway. That's a piece of developer hardware comparing vs. a consumer product which should be ready to go for quality experiences.

If we're just gonna keep quite on the matter we may just as well hear nothing at all anymore from Frontier. Their lack of communication isn't helping either. When I hear nothing for three weeks I start to wonder if there's even been any progress. Any update would've been good, like "We're making progress" or "We're going to push out this fix in the next patch", at least something!
And yes, at this point I'm just warning other Vive owners about the game, that they should not buy the game in this state because it's not the experience Frontier advertises it is.
 
Last edited:
If we're just gonna keep quite on the matter we may just as well hear nothing at all anymore from Frontier. Their lack of communication isn't helping either. When I hear nothing for three weeks I start to wonder if there's even been any progress. Any update would've been good, like "We're making progress" or "We're going to push out this fix in the next patch", at least something!
And yes, at this point I'm just warning other Vive owners about the game, that they should not buy the game in this state because it's not the experience Frontier advertises it is.

Have you noticed the VR UI scaling changelog items since Beta 4? They are working on it, it's just not ready yet.
 
While I'd agree that the VR experience isn't where it should be, saying it is unplayable is an exaggeration. I've been playing every night with my new Vive.

Is it is as good as it could be? Clearly not, because I've seen how it could be, because in Beta 4 I simply wasn't having the same issues Steam users were having, probably because I didn't have to load SteamVR to play. And with SteamVR running, the game looked like crap. Beta 5 greatly improved the SteamVR experience, but it downgraded my non-SteamVR experience to match. Beta 6 requires me to load SteamVR, because without it I lose head tracking in the Vive for some reason, despite the fact it's clearly working on the monitor.

Yes, the god rays can be annoying at times. Yes, the text isn't as legible as it can be, and yes there are way too many aliasing artifacts. But these are minor irritants at best, and the sense of depth, plus greater situational awareness, far outweigh those irritants IMO.
 
Likewise, i've purchased the Vive just to play ED, and i got it hooked up and (sigh) its really low quality... Playable but frustrating coming down from a 60" TV at stunning quality, to something that feels a few years step backwards in quality settings.. I'm so happy they have the techies now looking into this, while I know its not a make or break situation, i'm confident its a massive selling point to have this working.. The Vive looks amazing in other things, but the Rift CV1 currently looks miles ahead quality wise in ED, so it must be something to do with the fact it reports as 1280x1024 (from memory) in the resolution settings...

Happy Piloting.

Thank God. My Vive arrived a couple of days ago. Elite was the main reason. Pretty unplayable at the moment!
 
Is 1.6 supposed to have the same fixes for vive as 2.1 for base game people?

I'm interested to see, but tbh i don't really see what they can do. Everything is pretty nasty resolution wise on the vive. I mean it's a great fun toy but try reading a webpage on it and you see the issues with text very quickly.
It's a fairly low res screen magnified and pressed up against your eyeballs. How good can it get?
 
Is 1.6 supposed to have the same fixes for vive as 2.1 for base game people?

I'm interested to see, but tbh i don't really see what they can do. Everything is pretty nasty resolution wise on the vive. I mean it's a great fun toy but try reading a webpage on it and you see the issues with text very quickly.
It's a fairly low res screen magnified and pressed up against your eyeballs. How good can it get?

This is my concern as well. My only hope here is that the rift has a similar resolution to the Vive (same pixel count distributed differently) and the consensus seems to be that the rift looks MUCH better. I'd be curious to know how much better it really is.
 
I thought that maybe this was overblown, having only looked at the dash and ED:H in the headset.

Then I tried some of the demos, and "theBlu" and...yeah. I don't see the crazy aliasing and jaggies in other apps that I see in ED. The chaperon grid does not turn into a mess of jaggies either. Maybe it;s a choice of colors in the UI? I don't know.

Sure, SDE is there in all apps but not the chunk-style jaggies I see in ED:H.

But hey, compared to what it looked like on my C64 in 1985, I can't really complain. :)
 
Last edited:
Cause Anti-aliasing never worked properly on ED supersampling 2.0 is needed to iron out those edges.

Really... the better AA doesn't look as well as SuperSampling x2 does.
 
Folks, if all you do is select "VR Low" or "VR High" defaults, you'll see massive jaggies and flickering by default on the Vive. It's because all of the anti-aliasing and sub-graphics menu settings are turned off with either of those selected. You can tweak each in turn to smooth out the issues depending on the graphics processing power available on your PC.

First, set your SS to as high of a value as possible. I can handle 1.5 SS, but a few have gotten it to go to 2.0 SS. Set it as high as you can. If you move your head and see tearing, put it down a notch until you find a stable setting that works for you.

Then go down each sub-graphic menu setting and turn each value up a notch, accept it and see what the effect is. As soon as you make a change your "VR Low" or "VR High" will change to "Custom." SMAA is the recommended anti-alias setting, avoid the others. Keep blur off, the rest of them I have set to high or ultra. Do one setting at a time and if you see a performance hit, dial it back. Will take time but you can get a very acceptable VR view. Turn down the HUD brightness as well.

Changes to HUD colors can make the text more legible. Site here: http://arkku.com/elite/hud_editor/

Check your GPU temps to make sure you are not cooking your hardware. Find a decent balance. I also turned off all NVIDIA graphics pre-processing through the Experience program to keep things simple.
 
Since getting my Vive the first week of May, I honestly haven't played Elite without it, so I think unplayable is an exaggeration. Is it where it should be ? Hell no, just look at any other game for the Vive, it's a lot crisper, but playing Elite in VR just adds so much, jaggies or no jaggies. Regardless, I look forward to this patch and seeing Elite come a step closer to perfection :)
 
So the 2.1 engineers patch is dropping. These patch notes contain: "- Provide a graphics option to adjust UI scale in VR with a maximum and default of 0.7 for Vive and 1.0 for Oculus"

However those patch notes were also in Beta 5 despite it never actually being added to the game (confirmed by frontier twitter).

So once its up can anyone verify if the settings actually made it into the update?
 
So the 2.1 engineers patch is dropping. These patch notes contain: "- Provide a graphics option to adjust UI scale in VR with a maximum and default of 0.7 for Vive and 1.0 for Oculus"

However those patch notes were also in Beta 5 despite it never actually being added to the game (confirmed by frontier twitter).

So once its up can anyone verify if the settings actually made it into the update?

I'll check it out when the patch drops, but I'm preparing to be highly disappointed..
 
I'll check it out when the patch drops, but I'm preparing to be highly disappointed..
No reason to be highly disappointed. They only said a text fix was coming and that a fix to the aliasing would be coming later. Set your expectations now and you'll have no reason to be disappointed.
 
Last edited:
So I have to lower my standards to not be disappointed at the rate at which patches and necessary fixes happen?

No. I'm still disappointed. Unless they fix the resolution and readability issues I still can't play this game I specifically got VR for.
 
Last edited:
Hi, Vive user here.
Beta 6 was fine. Not perfect, but putting the HMD quality slider to max made the text quality perfect, and turning up the overall rendering resolution to 1.5x or even 2x makes everything super smooth. It gets to the point where the Vive's resolution and fresnel glare is the only limiting factor.

The only thing they haven't fixed yet is the feeling that the far-off star background isn't really all that far away, and that your body feels rather small. Not a gamebreaker, but it's noticeable.

Bottom line: You'll be fine. The game works great on the Vive. You'll wish you had a Vive2 with 4k resolution.
 
Back
Top Bottom