I'm lucky enough to have a copy of the newer Oculus Runtime, which after yesterdays patch now works natively in Elite Dangerous. Over the next few months many of us will continue to use our DK2's while waiting for our pre-orders to ship so I thought I'd write a quick summary of what to expect in terms of performance with your DK2 come Monday the 28th and to answer some of the questions I saw in yesterdays 'Patch Notes' thread. I am under NDA so I cannot discuss anything in regard to Oculus's 1.3 software, so please do not ask about it or indeed, for it (sorry).
I'll start by listing my hardware for you to base comparisons on:
CPU: 5820k @ 4GHz
GPU: 2 x GTX 980
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Storage: 500GB SSD (Win 7 64bit & Elite Installed on this)
Launching Elite:
I'm just launching ED as normal, after launching I get a new Oculus H&S Warning screen, after this the game continues to load as normal. There is nothing else to it. Sorry, I have no idea what would happen if SteamVR is installed on your system or which would take priority when launching Elite.
Initial Impression:
This was not good, to elaborate; I am used to playing Elite in VR at 1.5 SS which helped improve the visuals in the DK2 dramatically, doing so required me to run Elite with SLI enabled so I could maintain high FPS throughout all in game scenarios. Yesterday, after the new update and Elite loaded for the first time it was immediately clear that SS settings are no longer applying to the image on the DK2, or at least not providing the same visual enhancement they once did. I also noticed odd head tracking glitches and unstable FPS while I sat in the docking bay moving my head around. I attributed these issues to SLI, disabling SLI and relaunching Elite fixed most of the problems but the SS issue remained. As such my initial impression of Elites new SDK implementation was a little tarred.
Elite now displays a mirror Window on your desktop! This is a single eye undistorted view of the game, you can change the size and refresh rate of this window in Elite's graphical options. I am not aware of a way to disable or if it impacts on the game performance in any way but you can lower its quality.
SLI / SS users, expect to be a little disappointed come Monday, you'll have to disable SLI and using SS to enhance the text readability and image quality in your DK2 no longer seems to be the saving grace it once was, at least for now - Maybe it's a bug?
After Tweaking:
I can hands down say that for single card performance, Elite has never worked better in VR. With my single GTX980 I settled on the following Graphics options and maintained a smooth, judder free experience 99% of the time. I still witnessed occasional jerks in head tracking mostly when new planet textures loaded while in supercruise or for a brief second when entering or exiting supercruise. I see these more of an Elite Dangerous issue than something attributed solely to VR. It was also very minor when it did occur.
FULLSCREEN: Windowed (Only effects mirrored screen)
MONITOR: Primary (Secondary is no longer selectable)
RESOUTION: 1200x768 (This controls the res of the mirrored screen)
REFRESH RATE: 60HZ (This controls the refresh rate of the mirrored screen - I think)
VERTICAL SYNC: On
MODEL DRAW DISTANCE: Full (bar to the right)
TEXTURE QUALITY: High
SHADOW QUALITY: High
BLOOM: Off
BLUR: Off
ANTI-ALIASING: SMAA
SUPERSAMPLING: x1.0
AMBIENT OCCULUSION: Off
ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY: Ultra
FX QUALITY: High
REFLECTIONS QUALITY: High
MATERIAL QUALITY: Ultra
HMD IMAGE QUALITY: Full (bar to the right)
TERRAIN QUALITY: Medium
TERRAIN WORK: Lowest (bar to the left)
TERRAIN MATERIAL QUALITY: Low
As you can see, pretty much everything is maxed out other than the terrain settings for planetary landings. I didn't have enough time last night to tweak these extensively so there may be a little more room to push these up a little further. I would conclude that ASync Timewarp is doing it's job, I've never had a smoother experience playing the game on a single GTX 980 with such high settings.
As I have mentioned, SS seems to be nerfed or not working correctly in VR at the moment, with that said I did set it to x1.5 to see what would happen on a single card. The result, with no visible image enhancement there was still a performance drop, however it was very slight when compared to the slide show of low FPS I would get on a single card with SS x 1.5 in the past. For the most part the experience was very smooth, I noticed a few dips in FPS in stations and RES sites but the biggest issue for me was it caused a very slight 'judder' when looking down at my VR body and panning my head. To be fair, the performance considering I was using a single card was very playable and impressed me. I did however return to SS x1.0 due to the slight judder effect described above and there being no visual benefit to having SS set at 1.5.
I also turned shadows up to 'Ultra', again I was very impressed to see Elite operating very well, the only downside I noticed with this option set were slight dips in FPS in RES sites when quickly panning my head while deep in an asteroid belt. A little worse when a sun casts light rays over lots of the rocks. Again, I would say that these dips were very slight and did not really effect the overall experience too much. This is one option I may consider restoring to 'Ultra' but for now I've set it back to 'High' so I can further tweak the planetary landing settings.
IPD / Scale Bug:
In the DK2 at least this does not appear to have been resolved. I can find no way in game to set my IPD or the world scale or via any other software, which is a little bit of a shame... However the old runtime 0.6 IPD DK2 override seems to work fine. Details can be found here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3dugxj/thank_you_oculus_sdk_0601_now_supports_lens/
I had my old runtime 0.6 NetServer.cfg backed up so I just copied it over the new one. If you suffer from IPD / scale issues currently I'd recommend backing up that file and doing the same.
Other Bugs:
I did notice on a couple of occasions that planets which were partially covered in shadow had minor glitches when viewed from the extremity of the DK2 FOV - looking forward you could not see them, but cast your eye in the direction of the planet without moving your head and you could. To be clear, say I have a planet on the right of my cockpit, with the planets right half being on the the very edge of my DK2's FOV I could see white squares, persumably where something is not being rendered. Moving my head to the left while looking to the right caused the white squares to follow where the FOV cut out, but only on planets while in Supercruise.
Summary:
All in all, I'm very impressed with the new Oculus implementation, even with the lack of working SS. Hopefully the CV1's superior screen will negate the need for us to use SS settings any way. I believe those of you using SDK 0.8 and SteamVR with your DK2's will be very impressed with the results SDK 1.3 produces come Monday when it becomes available, it really is a huge step forward when compared to SteamVR. Not to knock SteamVR in any way but for Oculus users native support appears to do the job much better - as you might expect.
Any questions - feel free to ask.
I'll start by listing my hardware for you to base comparisons on:
CPU: 5820k @ 4GHz
GPU: 2 x GTX 980
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Storage: 500GB SSD (Win 7 64bit & Elite Installed on this)
Launching Elite:
I'm just launching ED as normal, after launching I get a new Oculus H&S Warning screen, after this the game continues to load as normal. There is nothing else to it. Sorry, I have no idea what would happen if SteamVR is installed on your system or which would take priority when launching Elite.
Initial Impression:
This was not good, to elaborate; I am used to playing Elite in VR at 1.5 SS which helped improve the visuals in the DK2 dramatically, doing so required me to run Elite with SLI enabled so I could maintain high FPS throughout all in game scenarios. Yesterday, after the new update and Elite loaded for the first time it was immediately clear that SS settings are no longer applying to the image on the DK2, or at least not providing the same visual enhancement they once did. I also noticed odd head tracking glitches and unstable FPS while I sat in the docking bay moving my head around. I attributed these issues to SLI, disabling SLI and relaunching Elite fixed most of the problems but the SS issue remained. As such my initial impression of Elites new SDK implementation was a little tarred.
Elite now displays a mirror Window on your desktop! This is a single eye undistorted view of the game, you can change the size and refresh rate of this window in Elite's graphical options. I am not aware of a way to disable or if it impacts on the game performance in any way but you can lower its quality.
SLI / SS users, expect to be a little disappointed come Monday, you'll have to disable SLI and using SS to enhance the text readability and image quality in your DK2 no longer seems to be the saving grace it once was, at least for now - Maybe it's a bug?
After Tweaking:
I can hands down say that for single card performance, Elite has never worked better in VR. With my single GTX980 I settled on the following Graphics options and maintained a smooth, judder free experience 99% of the time. I still witnessed occasional jerks in head tracking mostly when new planet textures loaded while in supercruise or for a brief second when entering or exiting supercruise. I see these more of an Elite Dangerous issue than something attributed solely to VR. It was also very minor when it did occur.
FULLSCREEN: Windowed (Only effects mirrored screen)
MONITOR: Primary (Secondary is no longer selectable)
RESOUTION: 1200x768 (This controls the res of the mirrored screen)
REFRESH RATE: 60HZ (This controls the refresh rate of the mirrored screen - I think)
VERTICAL SYNC: On
MODEL DRAW DISTANCE: Full (bar to the right)
TEXTURE QUALITY: High
SHADOW QUALITY: High
BLOOM: Off
BLUR: Off
ANTI-ALIASING: SMAA
SUPERSAMPLING: x1.0
AMBIENT OCCULUSION: Off
ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY: Ultra
FX QUALITY: High
REFLECTIONS QUALITY: High
MATERIAL QUALITY: Ultra
HMD IMAGE QUALITY: Full (bar to the right)
TERRAIN QUALITY: Medium
TERRAIN WORK: Lowest (bar to the left)
TERRAIN MATERIAL QUALITY: Low
As you can see, pretty much everything is maxed out other than the terrain settings for planetary landings. I didn't have enough time last night to tweak these extensively so there may be a little more room to push these up a little further. I would conclude that ASync Timewarp is doing it's job, I've never had a smoother experience playing the game on a single GTX 980 with such high settings.
As I have mentioned, SS seems to be nerfed or not working correctly in VR at the moment, with that said I did set it to x1.5 to see what would happen on a single card. The result, with no visible image enhancement there was still a performance drop, however it was very slight when compared to the slide show of low FPS I would get on a single card with SS x 1.5 in the past. For the most part the experience was very smooth, I noticed a few dips in FPS in stations and RES sites but the biggest issue for me was it caused a very slight 'judder' when looking down at my VR body and panning my head. To be fair, the performance considering I was using a single card was very playable and impressed me. I did however return to SS x1.0 due to the slight judder effect described above and there being no visual benefit to having SS set at 1.5.
I also turned shadows up to 'Ultra', again I was very impressed to see Elite operating very well, the only downside I noticed with this option set were slight dips in FPS in RES sites when quickly panning my head while deep in an asteroid belt. A little worse when a sun casts light rays over lots of the rocks. Again, I would say that these dips were very slight and did not really effect the overall experience too much. This is one option I may consider restoring to 'Ultra' but for now I've set it back to 'High' so I can further tweak the planetary landing settings.
IPD / Scale Bug:
In the DK2 at least this does not appear to have been resolved. I can find no way in game to set my IPD or the world scale or via any other software, which is a little bit of a shame... However the old runtime 0.6 IPD DK2 override seems to work fine. Details can be found here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3dugxj/thank_you_oculus_sdk_0601_now_supports_lens/
I had my old runtime 0.6 NetServer.cfg backed up so I just copied it over the new one. If you suffer from IPD / scale issues currently I'd recommend backing up that file and doing the same.
Other Bugs:
I did notice on a couple of occasions that planets which were partially covered in shadow had minor glitches when viewed from the extremity of the DK2 FOV - looking forward you could not see them, but cast your eye in the direction of the planet without moving your head and you could. To be clear, say I have a planet on the right of my cockpit, with the planets right half being on the the very edge of my DK2's FOV I could see white squares, persumably where something is not being rendered. Moving my head to the left while looking to the right caused the white squares to follow where the FOV cut out, but only on planets while in Supercruise.
Summary:
All in all, I'm very impressed with the new Oculus implementation, even with the lack of working SS. Hopefully the CV1's superior screen will negate the need for us to use SS settings any way. I believe those of you using SDK 0.8 and SteamVR with your DK2's will be very impressed with the results SDK 1.3 produces come Monday when it becomes available, it really is a huge step forward when compared to SteamVR. Not to knock SteamVR in any way but for Oculus users native support appears to do the job much better - as you might expect.
Any questions - feel free to ask.
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