Ok - in Device Manager - for your Rift DK2 Sensor Properties - does this match up?
Banding
- Thread starter ilgello
- Start date
Yes, it's a match. Sorry it took so long to reply.
It's quite alright! I charge by the hour
Seriously though - I wonder if it's worth plugging in a secondary hard drive and a fresh install of windows / Elite / DK2 drivers just for testing. Just make sure your main OS drive is safe!
Yes, to be honest, I'm considering that too. This build is only about a month old, so would not want to go through the setup again this soon. Well, I'm almost ready to order CV1 or Vive... Or put that 37" telly on the desk and play the old fashion wayIt's quite alright! I charge by the hour
Seriously though - I wonder if it's worth plugging in a secondary hard drive and a fresh install of windows / Elite / DK2 drivers just for testing. Just make sure your main OS drive is safe!
But thanks again, I truly appreciate your support with this. I think I'll settle for now, take out my T-9 and haul some gargo before going to bed 
Spud is enabled normally on the CV1. It has something to do with how they calibrate the screens. The problem is they did a poor job on some units and they had a terrible red tint. So if they thought you had a problem, Oculus customer support would give you a tool to disable spud. It removed a lot of the extra red tint, but also removed some of the good red tint and made it look a bit like 256 colors banding. I don't know if the DK2 uses spud.
I thought your pics looked more patchy rather than rings of banding, but as you know, it's really hard to tell with pics through the Rift. It got me a little interested, so I took some pics myself. I just did the star field, like you did, but it didn't really resolve the banding as well as you can see it in-game. You can see less red in the no spud pics, and maybe you can see more banding and a more patchy appearance.
One problem, imho, is that FD modeled the galaxy way too bright and it looks a bit like patchy gray storm clouds, only with a black background rather than sky blue. Also, things look totally differently on my monitor than they do in the Rift. I really think they need to model different sky boxes for monitors and for VR! Anyway, the pics are below, fwiw:
Spud enabled (normal), gamma 0%, long exposure
Spud disabled, gamma 0%, long exposure
Spud enabled (normal), gamma 50%, medium exposure
Spud disabled, gamma 50%, medium exposure
Spud enabled (normal), gamma 100%, short exposure
Spud disabled, gamma 100%, short exposure
A couple more with spud disabled showing how bad it looked, but it still looked better than the red tint!
Spud disabled, gamma 0% - visible artifacts, herring bone looks really bad
Spud disabled, gamma 0% - bandy, looks terrible
Just for fun, huge multi-cannon, looks pretty sharp to me, but blurry around the edges
Now what I'd like to do is find samples of real banding. I think maybe in shadows on planets. If I can get some good pics I'll post them. Of course, not that I'm not disabling spud, I don't think I'm having much of a banding problem - it just looks different in the Rift than on a monitor. But I do believe some people do see a lower color depth, and I'm curious if it is similar to when spud is disabled. Btw, the displayport adapter didn't help me with I has spud disabled, and it doesn't look any different to HDMI.
Do DK2's have this spud thing?
I've not see it mentioned anywhere - and I don't have a CV1 to test.
I've not see it mentioned anywhere - and I don't have a CV1 to test.
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Sun coronas are good for banding at its worst... just jump in and scoop, turn so you're skimming the star and usually the banding will be obvious.
You're right, a sun's corona, with the ship blocking the sun, really reveals the banding. I normally scoop while looking at the sun so I don't usually see banding that strong.
Here's a pic with spud enabled (normal). Gamma was at 30% and it was a pretty long exposure:
Here's a similar pic but with gamma at 40%, which allowed a much shorter exposure. This pretty close to what it looks like in-game.
Now what I'm wondering is if I saw this banding when I first got the Rift. I don't think it was this bad, but it's hard to remember - even 10 days ago! I just know that the red tint eventually got so obtrusive that I asked for the spud tool. It made the blacks look so much better that I decided to live with the increased (imho) banding. When they released the visual fix about 10 days ago, it really fixed the red tint issue, but I thought there was more banding than I remembered as well. I'd bet that people that said they didn't have banding, or fixed it with the display port, probably now see banding similar to what's seen in the second pic. Like I said, I don't think I saw this a month ago, but I just can't be sure. My mind ain't what it used to be.
Anyway, here are a couple pics with spud disabled and gamma set at 30%. Again, the reds are washed out pretty dramatically. The first pic is a long exposure. The second pic was a faster exposure for some reason, so it looks a little closer to in-game.
You might be able to see in the second pic how the dirty yellow band abruptly goes to black. This is the reason I think the banding looks worse with spud disabled. With it enabled, the orange kind of fades into the black. It's the sharp edge that really looks bad.
I used the Win10 monitor calibration to set the gama at a better value (for the basic output). This fixed a ot of the banding issues (I had my gamma set too high).
However, Elite is a fairly dark game with many dark greys and blacks, especially in this situations like sun coronas and deep space nebulae etc.
Its partly the slightly lower rang of the OLED displays - they're kept turned on at a nearly-black level so its quicker to respond to incoming data. If they turned off completely (as in a TV), you get great real blacks but you won't see 90fps... it'll smear quite a lot and that's a no-no for VR.
However, Elite is a fairly dark game with many dark greys and blacks, especially in this situations like sun coronas and deep space nebulae etc.
Its partly the slightly lower rang of the OLED displays - they're kept turned on at a nearly-black level so its quicker to respond to incoming data. If they turned off completely (as in a TV), you get great real blacks but you won't see 90fps... it'll smear quite a lot and that's a no-no for VR.
@Cliché those first two pictures, the first one is pretty much what I see now through the dk2 and the second one what I saw before. I'm beginning to think that my dk2 is nearing it's end. I have returned to normal monitor. I will upgrade to cv1 or Vive at some point when prizes come down a little (or more).
Sigh... It was fun while it lasted.
Sigh... It was fun while it lasted.
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Update. I tested with 0.8 runtime and got brilliant, deep colors with minimal banding! Difference was like night and day. BUT performance with 0.8 and Steam VR is bad, so it is not a solution. But now I know that there really IS something wrong with the 1.8 runtime for dk2 and nothing wrong with the unit itself. I assume that promised color corrections for cv1 made it much worse with dk2. Now they are starting to really drop of dk2 support.
I did wonder if I was going mad as I swear the banding was really minimal before the 1.3 release and now you have confirmed it, it was the Apollo 11 Experience that really showed the difference for me.