My CV1 looks terrible, and my attempts to research the issue get lost in techno-babble

[Smecca is BMFE]

I've been messing around with this today quite a bit, and re-reading the thread. I noticed that I left out a key piece of info; my 1060 GTX is NOT a true 1060, it's the 3 GB VRAM version (albeit OC from MSI). Regular ole 1060's sport 6 GB VRAM.

As I've said my experience is very smooth, but very ugly. Deductive reasoning tells me that I'm being bottlenecked by my miniscule GPU RAM, and time warp and space warp are just making up for a choked rendering.

I know I'm technically below the recommended specs put out by Frontier. I also only have 8 GB of CPU RAM. Which I need to stop being lazy and fix. Idk CMDRs, is VRAM one of my issues? How much VRAM are you using?

 

[Globusdiablo]

any easy way to check your FPS whilst using Rift?

Ctrl + f while in-game shows your FPS on your secondary screen. Tilt your HMD now and then to see what's what.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Using a GPU with more VRAM would allow a higher frame rate, not higher detail. Cards which run out of memory just swap texture data with the main system RAM (up to a point, extremely large textures aside).

System RAM is slower than VRAM, so if a GPU is running low on memory, your frame rate suffers.
ED isn't particularly heavy on VRAM or main system RAM.

I think your primary issue is the low resolution (VR is 2160x1200, 1080x1200 per eye). That's common - I think we all feel your pain and would love more pixels!
The best remedy we have is adding supersampling, as that makes the image the best it can be using the limited pixels.

Supersampling relies on the GPU itself - more power the better. CPU power has little, if any effect (its job is working out the geometry of a scene).
With HMD Quality or Supersampling turned on, ED is generating a larger image than required, then down-sampling it to give the final (better) image you see in VR.

I would suggest setting HMD Quality to 2.0, and turning everything to absolute MAX. You could even try setting the Supersampling to 2.0x aswell. Ignore the frame rate - your card will tank badly. So would my GTX1080. Even the new Titan XP cards struggle with HMDQ 2.0 as its a lot of work.

But turn everything to absolute MAX and see what the resulting IMAGE looks like. That will be the best result you will ever see, regardless of what GPU is installed.
I will say now you will still see pixels, but it will be smoother. The idea is just to show you the best detail possible in ED VR with that resolutuion.
Ctrl-F will show you the native frame rate in the bottom corner of the ED 2D monitor window. It will be red, and possibly in the 10-30 range (guess) - too low for VR. It will be choppy as hell, but just look at the image itself, not the judder etc.

If you slowly drop the HMDQuality down to 1.75, then to 1.5, try to make a mental note of the point at which it makes a significant change in image quality for you. We all have different tolerances to image quality, judder etc. You just have to find your 'limit' and then we can try to estimate what hardware to throw at the problem.
For me, I like a higher frame rate so I see less judder, and use 1.25 HMD Quality. I could go higher on a 1080 but I like the experience, and the pixelly resolution is something I can deal with. You might 'need' 1.5 or even higher depending on your preference.
Have a go, see what HMD Quality looks like at MAX and let us know what you think. (Remember this is an image quality test, not frame rate!)

At med-high settings, ED is using 5-7GB of system RAM, so with 8 total, your PC will struggle a bit. In space you'd be fine, but on planets and in ststions, ED will likely be trying to swap textures on and off the disk as RAM may be full. If you can pick up a 16GB kit fairly cheaply, do it - it may be cheaper to swap your 8GB now for 2 new chips (RAM always works better in a factory-matched pair).

Ultimately, your best ED or any VR experience will be with at least 16GB of RAM and the best GPU you can throw at it. I don't see this changing any time soon - VR may be a resource hog for quite a while yet!

 

[Smecca is BMFE]

Using a GPU with more VRAM would allow a higher frame rate, not higher detail. Cards which run out of memory just swap texture data with the main system RAM (up to a point, extremely large textures aside).

System RAM is slower than VRAM, so if a GPU is running low on memory, your frame rate suffers.
ED isn't particularly heavy on VRAM or main system RAM.

I think your primary issue is the low resolution (VR is 2160x1200, 1080x1200 per eye). That's common - I think we all feel your pain and would love more pixels!
The best remedy we have is adding supersampling, as that makes the image the best it can be using the limited pixels.

Supersampling relies on the GPU itself - more power the better. CPU power has little, if any effect (its job is working out the geometry of a scene).
With HMD Quality or Supersampling turned on, ED is generating a larger image than required, then down-sampling it to give the final (better) image you see in VR.

I would suggest setting HMD Quality to 2.0, and turning everything to absolute MAX. You could even try setting the Supersampling to 2.0x aswell. Ignore the frame rate - your card will tank badly. So would my GTX1080. Even the new Titan XP cards struggle with HMDQ 2.0 as its a lot of work.

But turn everything to absolute MAX and see what the resulting IMAGE looks like. That will be the best result you will ever see, regardless of what GPU is installed.
I will say now you will still see pixels, but it will be smoother. The idea is just to show you the best detail possible in ED VR with that resolutuion.
Ctrl-F will show you the native frame rate in the bottom corner of the ED 2D monitor window. It will be red, and possibly in the 10-30 range (guess) - too low for VR. It will be choppy as hell, but just look at the image itself, not the judder etc.

If you slowly drop the HMDQuality down to 1.75, then to 1.5, try to make a mental note of the point at which it makes a significant change in image quality for you. We all have different tolerances to image quality, judder etc. You just have to find your 'limit' and then we can try to estimate what hardware to throw at the problem.
For me, I like a higher frame rate so I see less judder, and use 1.25 HMD Quality. I could go higher on a 1080 but I like the experience, and the pixelly resolution is something I can deal with. You might 'need' 1.5 or even higher depending on your preference.
Have a go, see what HMD Quality looks like at MAX and let us know what you think. (Remember this is an image quality test, not frame rate!)

At med-high settings, ED is using 5-7GB of system RAM, so with 8 total, your PC will struggle a bit. In space you'd be fine, but on planets and in ststions, ED will likely be trying to swap textures on and off the disk as RAM may be full. If you can pick up a 16GB kit fairly cheaply, do it - it may be cheaper to swap your 8GB now for 2 new chips (RAM always works better in a factory-matched pair).

Ultimately, your best ED or any VR experience will be with at least 16GB of RAM and the best GPU you can throw at it. I don't see this changing any time soon - VR may be a resource hog for quite a while yet!

Thanks for the detailed reply. I maxed out every setting possible, ignored the frame rate, and the results are what you expected. The FPS were crap, and the IMAGE itself was nothing to write home about. I was careful to keep my head as still as possible to put as little stress as possible on my rig as possible. I just have too high of expectations.

People rant and rave about how good it looks. I just see dull colors and blurry edges. But I'm not mad. I have the patience and pure love of gaming to throw at this, as well as some spare cash to make sure I'm not shorting myself

 

[the100thmonkey]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I maxed out every setting possible, ignored the frame rate, and the results are what you expected. The FPS were crap, and the IMAGE itself was nothing to write home about. I was careful to keep my head as still as possible to put as little stress as possible on my rig as possible. I just have too high of expectations.

People rant and rave about how good it looks. I just see dull colors and blurry edges. But I'm not mad. I have the patience and pure love of gaming to throw at this, as well as some spare cash to make sure I'm not shorting myself

There's definitely a trade-off to be made between how good the game looks and fluidity. One of the issues with perceived image quality on VR headsets is that even on a 600PPI screen, you'll still be able to make out individual pixels if you hold your head still. Most displays at the moment are 400-450PPI at 90Hz. A bigger screen with less intense magnification would be nice, but that would also mean more weight, which would not be. Moreover, I think part of the issue is that there's a lot of looking at empty space in E:D, and the background stars don't look particularly attractive - they tend to appear smudged, especially in the peripheral vision. One tip I would suggest is to try to avoid looking at things by only moving your eyes -- the lenses distort the image away from the centre -- and try to get used to moving your whole head instead. This places the centre of the display in the centre of focus.

 

[milligna]

if you have dull colors and it looks washed out you might need to do that trick to switch the input to RGB full instead of limited. Many times after a driver update it reverts back to limited and I have to temporarily plug a monitor into where I had the HMD, switch it to full, plug back in the HMD... colors back to normal, blacks black again instead of soupy grey.

You should definitely not have dull colors, when it happens its generally the RGB idiocy. You'd think this would've been sorted out by now, tho i'm not sure if it's Nvidia or Oculus at fault...

 

[jojon]

It's a Windows thing, innit? ...although I suppose it can't be blamed for assuming a presumed new HDMI device is a television set rather than a monitor, and thus want traditional TV "legal" ranges...

As for VRAM and detail: If one have enough of the former, one can always dig into Elite's graphics configuration file and double or quadruple procgen texture sizes for nicely sharp visuals.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I maxed out every setting possible, ignored the frame rate, and the results are what you expected. The FPS were crap, and the IMAGE itself was nothing to write home about. I was careful to keep my head as still as possible to put as little stress as possible on my rig as possible. I just have too high of expectations.

People rant and rave about how good it looks. I just see dull colors and blurry edges. But I'm not mad. I have the patience and pure love of gaming to throw at this, as well as some spare cash to make sure I'm not shorting myself

That's a good attitude to have... this is first generation hardware, and it does come with some negatives (resolution, screendoor effect, god rays, tripping over the cable etc.)

It takes a bit of time to get everything adjusted. Everyone has different perceptions of colour, judder/low frame rate etc. Some people are very sensitive, while others are not.

Not all 'fixes' actually do anything (at least some do not seem to do anything for my perception), so take what you read in here with the odd grain of salt (including from me)

ie setting the nVidia driver to "Full" clour range instead of the TV limited colour range didn't do anything for me.
However, the next ED patch should have the new dithering enabled for the Rift - which will make the colour gradients a lot smoother. Its in the beta now if you have access.

 

[Verlaine]

Try SS 0.85, HMD 1.50 with AA set to FXAA, which is where I settled. I think it looks much better than 1.25/1.00.

 

[Smecca is BMFE]

Looks like I've got a few more suggestions to try out. Thanks everyone. My PC language is still a little weak, so I'm gonna have to do a little digging into all this "drivers" and "procgen" mumbo jumbo .

I know something is still.....off. That opinion comes from an incredibly dumbfounded and ignorant experiment I came up with. It was pretty complicated. I used my VR graphics settings and plugged in my monitor, which has a lower resolution than my rift. I then took my ugly mug to about an inch away from the screen, to where the pixels were clear as day.

The edges of the HUD text, planets, and pretty much everything were much more defined and crisp on my monitor, even at the lower resolution. So I'm forced to assume one of three situations:

1) I have an obscure setting(s) wrong
2) I have faulty equipment
3) The most probable, this is just how fresnal lenses work.

 

[jojon]

If you can focus on your monitor from an inch away, I'm inclined to believe you must be quite severely nearsighted, and should wear your glasses inside the Rift. (The devkits came with a set of lenses on different depth mountings, which one could swap between, sometimes negating that need, but the CV1 is one fixed focus).

As for "procgen", that is simply a contraction of "procedurally generated". :7

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Looks like I've got a few more suggestions to try out. Thanks everyone. My PC language is still a little weak, so I'm gonna have to do a little digging into all this "drivers" and "procgen" mumbo jumbo .

I know something is still.....off. That opinion comes from an incredibly dumbfounded and ignorant experiment I came up with. It was pretty complicated. I used my VR graphics settings and plugged in my monitor, which has a lower resolution than my rift. I then took my ugly mug to about an inch away from the screen, to where the pixels were clear as day.

The edges of the HUD text, planets, and pretty much everything were much more defined and crisp on my monitor, even at the lower resolution. So I'm forced to assume one of three situations:

1) I have an obscure setting(s) wrong
2) I have faulty equipment
3) The most probable, this is just how fresnal lenses work.

Hmm, interesting test

The monitor doesn't have to go through a barrel distortion - this fixes the image for the lenses in the Vive/Rift and also corrects the red, green and blue outputs differently so that you get better colours near the edges of the lenses.
The barrel distortion does tend to smear detail a little (least near the middle, but more at the edges... this is unavoidable.

Your setting are most probably just fine, and you'll know if something is off with the hardware.

Fact is, the resolution is ok, but its streeeeeetched a LOT and you lose bits at the corners that can't be seen by the lenses. Future generations of VR hardware will improve this, and rendering performance will get faster and more efficient too. it takes time, and they have to start somewhere... remember this is a LOT better than that old Dactyl Nightmare VR experience from (quite) a few years ago!

 

[Smecca is BMFE]

I moved my PC to my 50 inch TV today (4k but set to 1080p) and recreated the experiment. I was exaggerating a bit it seems. I gained perfect focus of the screen at about 3 inches. My vision is 20/15 and I have no problems seeing up close.

Let me try to explain what I see a little better. I'm in a Fer de Lance. The right side of the cockpit has a shallow angled support for the canopy, just above the pip and fuel HUD area. With my face 3 inches away from my TV, it looks very crisp and smooth. My rift? Not even close. It looks like a staircase, making very identifiable jagged steps downward to the edge of my view. I made certain to keep my head completely still against a stagnant background for both the regular and VR portions.

I have tried every kind of settings including insane amounts of SS and HMD quality. And everything in-between. If this kind of stuff is normal, I'll gladly shut up and enjoy the beauty of ED in VR. If it's not, I need to know before I do something dumb like spend a ton of money or search the web for another 100 years!

 

[the100thmonkey]

I moved my PC to my 50 inch TV today (4k but set to 1080p) and recreated the experiment. I was exaggerating a bit it seems. I gained perfect focus of the screen at about 3 inches. My vision is 20/15 and I have no problems seeing up close.

Let me try to explain what I see a little better. I'm in a Fer de Lance. The right side of the cockpit has a shallow angled support for the canopy, just above the pip and fuel HUD area. With my face 3 inches away from my TV, it looks very crisp and smooth. My rift? Not even close. It looks like a staircase, making very identifiable jagged steps downward to the edge of my view. I made certain to keep my head completely still against a stagnant background for both the regular and VR portions.

I have tried every kind of settings including insane amounts of SS and HMD quality. And everything in-between. If this kind of stuff is normal, I'll gladly shut up and enjoy the beauty of ED in VR. If it's not, I need to know before I do something dumb like spend a ton of money or search the web for another 100 years!

Try it 3 inches away from the screen with magnifying lenses in front of your eyes; that will give you a much better comparison.

I'm inclined to believe it's normal. I can definitely see pixels in my OSVR HDK2. You should also remember that Elite's AA implementation isn't very good. In fact, I believe SMAA is broken and has been for a long time. It was definitely broken for 2.0/2.1.

 

[Verlaine]

I moved my PC to my 50 inch TV today (4k but set to 1080p) and recreated the experiment. I was exaggerating a bit it seems. I gained perfect focus of the screen at about 3 inches. My vision is 20/15 and I have no problems seeing up close.

Let me try to explain what I see a little better. I'm in a Fer de Lance. The right side of the cockpit has a shallow angled support for the canopy, just above the pip and fuel HUD area. With my face 3 inches away from my TV, it looks very crisp and smooth. My rift? Not even close. It looks like a staircase, making very identifiable jagged steps downward to the edge of my view. I made certain to keep my head completely still against a stagnant background for both the regular and VR portions.

I have tried every kind of settings including insane amounts of SS and HMD quality. And everything in-between. If this kind of stuff is normal, I'll gladly shut up and enjoy the beauty of ED in VR. If it's not, I need to know before I do something dumb like spend a ton of money or search the web for another 100 years!

Try FXAA, which smoothes most of the jaggies in my Rift.

 

[jojon]

I'm pretty sure you'd find that 4k television set uses a smoothing upscaling algorithm, rather than just identically repeating each pixel from the source image over four of its own, which would have presented jaggies. Additionally, with the pixels being half as large as on a 2k TV set of the same physical size, the infamous "screendoor effect" will be a lot less apparent, and it no doubt has a full set of red, green, and blue sub elements to each of its pixels, unlike the Rift and Vive, which use so called "pentile" screens, which have full resolution only for green subpixels, and only half the amount for the other two primary colours. Finally, it would of course be a bit cumbersome to strap a 50 incher to one's head. :9
...so lenses it is, with all their negative side effects. If you can clearly see the spaces between sub pixels, you are getting about as much physical sharpness as you are going to get. Rendering detail amount can be affected in software, but the headset is what it is.

The two only-post-processing anti-aliasing methods on offer (fxaa and smaa) do help quite a bit with Elite's prominent specular aliasing, if one can live with their overall softening/flattening of the image. :7

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

Try FXAA, which smoothes most of the jaggies in my Rift.

Agree that the OP should try all the AA options (including off) to find what works best for him/her. For me whilst FXAA helps on straight lines etc. I find it makes the cockpit UI text look fuzzy so instead I set AA to Off and increase HMD Image Quality.

 

[Exigeous]

I recently spent a lot of time going through each individual setting for the graphics options, reading about and understanding each. What they add to the visual experience and what the performance impact of that is. I've got a i7 4770k, 32GB Ram and GTX 1080 so not exactly low end but not extreme either. After several hours of testing I'm getting a near solid 90fps with a few dips into the upper 70s every now and then. In my Rift it looks fantastic, only slightly do I see any blur or issues and when I do they are very minor. Below are the custom settings I'm using - as there has been a lot of discussion around anti aliasing I run MLAXX2 with Supersampling at 1.0 and HMD Image Quality at 1.5

I'm not sure if it's been explained but Supersampling is done by Elite where HMD Image Quality is handled by the Rift (or Vive) driver/API. As such it is far more efficient than Elite's Supersampling so IMHO things work far better with this config. Sure there is still some aliasing where you see the "shimmer" effect but it's far better than the stock settings.

One of the more important things for me is turning down the HUD brightness to lowest or near lowest. If you try that you'll see that the brighter settings create a lot of bloom around text/etc. making it far harder to see. I also use a crystal blue color for my HUD which again I feel makes things far easier to read than the orange/red.

Here are my settings, for me they are a great balance of quality to performance

Model Draw Distance = (1 tick to the left of middle)
Texture Quality = High
Shadow Quality = Medium
Bloom = Off
Blur = Off
Anti Aliasing = MLAXX2
Supersampling = 1.0
Ambient Occulsion = Medium
Environment Quality = High
FX Quality = High
Depth of Field = High
Reflections Quality = Low
Material Quality = High
Galaxy Map Quality = High
Terrain Quality = High
Terrain Work = Maximum
Terrain Material Quality = High
Jet Cone Quality = High
Field of View = Maximum
Gamma = (1 tick above middle)

Dashboard Brightness = Lowest (I find that if this is too high there is a lot of bloom around the in-cockpit text maxing it hard to read)
Disable GUI Effects = On (this turns off the little effect you see when the nav/sys panels left/right open, it's cool at first but having them pop instantly is much better)
Reduce Camera Shake = On (keeps the barf-mobile at bay)
Vehicle Motion Blackout = Off
Vehicle Maintain Horizon Camera = On (this is very important IMHO, it will keep you view level when driving the SRV so it moves around you rather than your head moving with it. Off it can make you VERY dizzy quickly and nothing makes me dizzy)

 

[CptXabaras]

Depth of field it's an artificial effect needed on 2D monitors to give the feeling of.. Well, depth of field, by blurring far away or out of focus objects. In 3D and VR is useless, your eyes will naturally create the effect. Ditch it.

 

[Smecca is BMFE]

I recently spent a lot of time going through each individual setting for the graphics options, reading about and understanding each. What they add to the visual experience and what the performance impact of that is. I've got a i7 4770k, 32GB Ram and GTX 1080 so not exactly low end but not extreme either. After several hours of testing I'm getting a near solid 90fps with a few dips into the upper 70s every now and then. In my Rift it looks fantastic, only slightly do I see any blur or issues and when I do they are very minor. Below are the custom settings I'm using - as there has been a lot of discussion around anti aliasing I run MLAXX2 with Supersampling at 1.0 and HMD Image Quality at 1.5

I'm not sure if it's been explained but Supersampling is done by Elite where HMD Image Quality is handled by the Rift (or Vive) driver/API. As such it is far more efficient than Elite's Supersampling so IMHO things work far better with this config. Sure there is still some aliasing where you see the "shimmer" effect but it's far better than the stock settings.

One of the more important things for me is turning down the HUD brightness to lowest or near lowest. If you try that you'll see that the brighter settings create a lot of bloom around text/etc. making it far harder to see. I also use a crystal blue color for my HUD which again I feel makes things far easier to read than the orange/red.

Here are my settings, for me they are a great balance of quality to performance

Model Draw Distance = (1 tick to the left of middle)
Texture Quality = High
Shadow Quality = Medium
Bloom = Off
Blur = Off
Anti Aliasing = MLAXX2
Supersampling = 1.0
Ambient Occulsion = Medium
Environment Quality = High
FX Quality = High
Depth of Field = High
Reflections Quality = Low
Material Quality = High
Galaxy Map Quality = High
Terrain Quality = High
Terrain Work = Maximum
Terrain Material Quality = High
Jet Cone Quality = High
Field of View = Maximum
Gamma = (1 tick above middle)

Dashboard Brightness = Lowest (I find that if this is too high there is a lot of bloom around the in-cockpit text maxing it hard to read)
Disable GUI Effects = On (this turns off the little effect you see when the nav/sys panels left/right open, it's cool at first but having them pop instantly is much better)
Reduce Camera Shake = On (keeps the barf-mobile at bay)
Vehicle Motion Blackout = Off
Vehicle Maintain Horizon Camera = On (this is very important IMHO, it will keep you view level when driving the SRV so it moves around you rather than your head moving with it. Off it can make you VERY dizzy quickly and nothing makes me dizzy)

Very nice write up. I'll be trying similar settings as soon as I upgrade my graphics card.

I should note that I have ZERO problems reading text in my rift. I'm just concerned about jagged lines that shouldn't be. I can see the damn pixels. They're not being used correctly, as in the staircase image I referenced a few posts ago.

Once again, I'm probably just too ignorant about the tech to know exactly what I should be seeing. I need to find someone else nearby that has a high end computer and a rift....