I know, isn't that the weirdest thing? I've noticed when starting Elite that I get stuck with a 1280x720 Windows that render my game on my monitor. It's small but still, it's such an unnecessary thing for my video card. Without this crap I'm sure I could get at least like 5 or 10 FPS and sometimes that makes a huge difference.
Monitor Window effect on performance
I disagree - I doubt that removing the monitor window would increase performance by much, if at all. The GPU can convert the final rendered image in a trivial amount of time (fractions of a millisecond). If you raise or lower the resolution of the monitor window, it makes no effective difference to the frame rate you see. 0.1-0.2fps, perhaps? The ATW, barrel distortion and compositing function is much more complex than simply rendering to a second window and even that is only taking a tiny amount of time (still all well under a millisecond, according to Oculus).
VR app developers (and Oculus) have gone to great pains to make sure the rendering pipeline is as good as it can be given current drivers and mainstream installed GPU technology. If the monitor window sucked up any appreciable GPU resources (like 5-10fps), they'd have done away with it during the last 2-3 years of VR development.
ASW effect on colour banding = none.
I regularly turn ASW off and on, and I am familiar with the effects ASW has on the rendered image. On my GTX1080, I see no appreciable difference between the ATW-only mode (1) and the ASW-enabled modes (Ctrl-NumPad 3 and 4). Upon turning ASW off, I see less rippling in the image, particularly for the solid coloured menu items (default orange for me), and for the vertical lines in the GUI. Most evident in high-load scenes like the SRV on-planet, especially on lateral side-to-side translation.
EDIT - I was wrong - there is a noticeable shift in the colour banding if ASW is turned on. Colour banding is worsened by ASW. AW only works on Win8.1 and higher OSes, with supported GPU's. Colour banding is reduced in the ATW-only mode (Ctrl-Numpad1). Apologies.
Colour Banding discussion:
I agree with dogbite - something is happening in firmware or software. Probably within the Oculus part of the rendering.
Looking back at 2015 screenshots, the source monitor window image is comparable in terms of colour gradients - I do not think this is a problem FD have introduced. My earlier screenshots still show some colour banding, but at the 2D higher resolution it is less noticeable. In the Rift, of course, the colour banding is right in your face screaming look at me!
On the other hand, we saw hard edges on cloud blobs etc when in witchspace transition (before they updated it). This was squarely in FD's court - poor texturing. They fixed it - although a number of the same textures are used in the new transition, all the hard edges are gone. That's not Oculus. Perhaps FD can engineer their texturing to offset the Rift's colour banding issue.
As an idea, is it possible our Rift panels are 'wearing in'? Given several months of hard use (3-4 hrs per day in my case, so I'm up to nearly 400hours now).
I got a couple of decent shots last night, but an actual video might allow the colour banding to be seen as it moves across the camera sensor. Video might actually give a better image and depiction over a still camera shot. Got blasted by the wife last night as it was late "stop playing with your toy" so I'll give that a go tonight
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