Was finally able to re-test the dk2 with ED at my friends.
After downloading and using Bilagos app to stop the services everything ran great. No more weird skewing, rotational and positional head-tracking was fine. I would imagine updating to 0.4.1 of the sdk and stopping the relevant services would have the same effect. Looks like my initial test failed as I didn't realise you had to stop the config.exe too.
First impressions, ED on the dk2 is a pretty rad experience, there are issues but the immersion is just enough to mitigate them.
Resolution is fine in the cockpit, you have to lean in a bit to read some of the UI, but not much. I was worried that the vertical lines for targets on the scanner might not be visible, but they are intact. Elements such as your hull strength are perfectly readable . Targeted objects (stations, star system, enemies) appearing outside of the cockpit are hard to read and leaning forward doesn't help, might be something Frontier can improve or provide some options to increase the size of the text in the future.
Beyond the cockpit the resolution is not so great for distant objects. Inside a space station or approaching one to dock is quite pixelated and isn't helped by the screen-door effect. I could imagine some people being very put off by that, but for me it was borderline acceptable.
The poorest aspect of the dk2 for me was that the peripheral vision was very blurred. Looking straight ahead was fine, very clear, no chromatic aberration, but to the sides, especially if you looked left/right with your eyes things got very blurred. For example on the loading screen, the text beneath the rotating ship was unreadable at the sides if you glanced left/right, but was clear straight ahead. Overall I don't think this is a problem, after all the whole point of VR is that you turn your head and not necessarily slide your eyes left/right.
For me it was the experience that sold it, you just felt so immersed in the world. I was flying around in a Lakon Type 6 and the cockpit was amazing. Being able to see your virtual body is always a cool and weird experience, but being able to look up or down through the cockpit and see the space dust whizzing by was exhilarating. The cockpit surrounding your body really sold the feeling of 3D and was just so pretty.
If you really value visual quality you will probably be disappointed with the dk2, it just doesn't currently have the resolution. However if you value the experience, then you can probably look past the current failings and just enjoy the ride. Certainly it was good enough for me to place an order for a dk2, though i'm going to have to get a new PC too. I was testing with a Titan and even then in the space stations performance was off, so my gfx465 is just not going to be up to it at all.
My hope is that in the coming releases of ED Frontier will be able to invest in further graphic optimisations. In basic testing i'd say the game currently is fill-rate limited (i.e jumping from 1080 to 1440 results in a loss of fps across the board in any scenario). Changing any or all options down to low/off have minimal impact, a few of the more expensive ones such as AA can give you a bit of a boost, but unlike other games going to low quality isn't going to double your framerate or even increase it by 50%.
I feel there is much that can be done for inside space stations, for example Wyrd (I think that's the right one, the very 'white' looking interior stations), really kills my framerate currently (20 fps), indeed the newer non dodecahedron ones all have worse performance than the older stations (40 fps). I'm hoping here some form of model LOD will be beneficial to dramatically improve performance here as there currently doesn't appear to be any, and it would be pretty easy to just remove some internal sections of the stations for vastly simplified versions without affecting gameplay or the experience too much for lower setting set ups.
One thing I really hope Frontier will deliver soon is a benchmark scene, something that us beta testers can use to provide some accurate stats concerning cpu/gpu vs resolution and framerate. It doesn't have to be anything fancy a simple scene starting in a space station, exiting, flying around, then docking, probably all pre-canned animation (since AI docking is so unpredictable). I'm kind of surprised it doesn't already exist since its vital for a game like this in order to profile any optimisations they make to ensure they are beneficial.
