Getting the Best DK2/CV1/Vive VR Experience: Guide/Compendium

[drkaii]

To answer your question: yes. It does matter - has to be 1920x1080. DSR works by creating the frames at 4x, then downsampling them to 1x, which in the process smoothens all the edges much better than other methods.

To be honest, I'm quite surprised so many people are finding the 4x settings variant that much sharper. When I did it, it was a little bit sharper than my setup. But it introduced weird judder (like from the side-panels). But again, it wasn't THAT amazing. The 4x and the Oculus settings on lowest seemed to almost cancel out.

 

[neXib]

That's what I thought. Constantly tweaking stuff is hard, it's so easy to get "blind" to the previous setting.

I noticed now that I have the same setup as you (i5 and 970). To be exact I adjusted OR quality to probably two steps from lowest, and there was a better blur effect on the whole image, but it wasn't sharper per se. A bit hard to explain, sort of like seeing through a slightly frosted glass, while the normal non-sharp I'm used to is a tad more pixellated. I didn't think the text was better really, but I liked the overall effect. Nothing is a substitute for a smooth image though.

Did anyone test if the planet judder is due to sweet-fx or adaptive vsync? Never had that before. Page down doesn't seem to work for disabling it for me.

 

[Sentdex]

FWIW:

I was experiencing massive judder after 4-5 combat fights in combat zones, ~20 in RES, and usually 1-2 PVP fights.

It appeared to be some sort of memory leak, as the issue was not apparent, and appeared to build up. I would have to restart the game entirely to get away from it.

I wound up uninstalling everything, and re-installing. I had been running ED off a slave drive. I run a 50gb solid state for my main drive, so space is tight. I ended up moving ED to the solid state, and... massive improvement. I get no more judder, I can stick around in combat zones for hours.

Might not apply to many of you, but it helped me.

I run all of my other games off the slave, including BF4, and have never experienced anything like this before. It matters in ED though, or at least appears to.

 

[drkaii]

That's what I thought. Constantly tweaking stuff is hard, it's so easy to get "blind" to the previous setting.

I noticed now that I have the same setup as you (i5 and 970). To be exact I adjusted OR quality to probably two steps from lowest, and there was a better blur effect on the whole image, but it wasn't sharper per se. A bit hard to explain, sort of like seeing through a slightly frosted glass, while the normal non-sharp I'm used to is a tad more pixellated. I didn't think the text was better really, but I liked the overall effect. Nothing is a substitute for a smooth image though.

Did anyone test if the planet judder is due to sweet-fx or adaptive vsync? Never had that before. Page down doesn't seem to work for disabling it for me.

Avsync and sweetfx have no impact

 

[ph2001]

I'm starting to grow massively frustrated with E: D and the Rift. No matter what settings, I get horrible, unplayable, nausea-inducing judder in RES and some stations.
Even at everything LOWest possible, shadows off, no occlusion, no AA, no DSR nothing.

Specs:
Intel Xeon 1230-v2 @ 3.3GHz
8GB RAM
GTX 970 overclocked to near 980 stats (Palit Jetstream)
SSD access for E: D
Win7 x64

I cannot understand why my specs aren't enough when others with nearly identical stats say they can play on all high without a problem...

I tried all the steps in the opening post and I also tried the "black magic" all-max with 0% Oculus quality slider config. And then I've tried all on the lowest I could set it as. Nothing makes a difference. Nothing. Just judder all the time.

 

[SlackR]

I'm starting to grow massively frustrated with E: D and the Rift. No matter what settings, I get horrible, unplayable, nausea-inducing judder in RES and some stations.
Even at everything LOWest possible, shadows off, no occlusion, no AA, no DSR nothing.

Specs:
Intel Xeon 1230-v2 @ 3.3GHz
8GB RAM
GTX 970 overclocked to near 980 stats (Palit Jetstream)
SSD access for E: D
Win7 x64

I cannot understand why my specs aren't enough when others with nearly identical stats say they can play on all high without a problem...

I tried all the steps in the opening post and I also tried the "black magic" all-max with 0% Oculus quality slider config. And then I've tried all on the lowest I could set it as. Nothing makes a difference. Nothing. Just judder all the time.

If I may make a couple of suggestions ? Apologies if you've already tried these...
Connect the VR camera to its power supply or remove if already in.
Disable your monitor so that when the Dk2 is on, it turns off.
Switch from DVI to HDMI or the other way around.
In the nvidia control panel, switch all possible settings to "maximum performance"
If that doesn't work, download Playclaw 5 and use the FPS, cpu, and GPU monitors to observe performance whilst in the rift.
Note them down or take a screenshot.
Also take a screen shot of your custom nvidia setting for ED.exe and post them here.

There is no way your rig can't run this game correctly, so it's just a case of finding out what is causing the issue.
Somebody here will figure it out dude!

 

[ph2001]

If I may make a couple of suggestions ? Apologies if you've already tried these...
Connect the VR camera to its power supply or remove if already in.
Disable your monitor so that when the Dk2 is on, it turns off.
Switch from DVI to HDMI or the other way around.
In the nvidia control panel, switch all possible settings to "maximum performance"
If that doesn't work, download Playclaw 5 and use the FPS, cpu, and GPU monitors to observe performance whilst in the rift.
Note them down or take a screenshot.
Also take a screen shot of your custom nvidia setting for ED.exe and post them here.

There is no way your rig can't run this game correctly, so it's just a case of finding out what is causing the issue.
Somebody here will figure it out dude!

1) just tried, I don't think it made a difference to anything, not even the pretty high camera drift E: D seems to have
2) always doing that with Win+P to turn off the main monitor before I press Play on the Launcher
3) can't; the 970 only has one DVI and one mini-HDMI port - I use the dk2 on HDMI via HDMI-to-miniHDMI adapter
4) I did (I think)
5) I don't have playclaw but I have Fraps, so I tried benchmarking and here are the attached results from the Resource Extraction site with the settings I used; ingame was everything on low (shadows/bloom/AA off), DSR 1.0, 1080p

 

[SlackR]

Sounds like the CPU might be struggling. Did you unpark the cores? Not familiar with your CPU?

 

[ph2001]

Sounds like the CPU might be struggling. Did you unpark the cores? Not familiar with your CPU?

It's unparked, set to 100% with CoreParkingManager.

 

[SlackR]

And what kind of performance are you getting? I would really recommend PLAYCLAW 5... It's free and you can monitor performance directly from the rift.
If it show the CPU isn't struggling and hyperthreading is working correctly then it is most likely an Internet / programming issue.
I am running two 980s in SLI and still get mad stuttering at times.
Did you try the same experiment in solo and open?

 

[CMDR Saari]

I'm starting to grow massively frustrated with E: D and the Rift. No matter what settings, I get horrible, unplayable, nausea-inducing judder in RES and some stations.
Even at everything LOWest possible, shadows off, no occlusion, no AA, no DSR nothing.

I have a nearly identical setup to yours (I have an i7 2600k @ 3.6GHz instead of a Xeon and I don't OC my GPU) and after many hours spent tweaking and trying the various tips and tricks on this forum, I've come to the conclusion that my rig cannot handle RES (after several ships spawn) and will always have some amount of intermittent juddering in large stations. I think the 970 - as beastly as it is - just isn't enough to handle ED in the Rift. Hopefully some optimizations and better drivers will help eventually...

My advice to you: Tweak until everything is smooth most of the time; avoid large stations if possible (hang around outposts, they don't cause any trouble); and stay out of RES. Bounty hunt at the nav beacon instead. This is what works for me and I've made peace with my current less than ideal settings. I could chase the quality/performance balance all day, but then I'd never get to actually play the game

 

[Milamber]

Does anyone have any GEMFX profiles that look great in ED?

 

[pigfumbler]

Thanks drkaii! Really useful. Rep incoming!

 

[VR Cmdr Paine]

+1 Rep OP well done although I found Cpt.America's sweet fx settings better for me with a tweak to contrast at 42 and gamma at 60% to cure black smearing.

 

[Kenpachi]

Anyone have to restart their computer after every play session to get ED to pick up the right the next time you fire it up?

 

[Raptoyd]

Have not played in a little while and today decided to load all the new drivers, launchers, game, etc and start from scratch with my overclocked single 980 card. I followed your directions on here to the T and when I finally got in the game it seemed a little too much at first but then my eyes like adjusted and this is fantastic, wow way better than I was doing. Just picked up my SOL permit finally getting ready to go visit Earth for the first time. Thank you, rep for you and Atlas.

Works well with this set up

Windows 7 64 bit professional
Intel I4790K processor
Corsair Air 540 case
Corsair 110 Liquid cooler
GTX 980 GPU
32 GB Kingston Beast Ram 1866MHZ
Plextor SSID PCIE M.2
Samsung SSID SATA
EVGA Gold Pro 850 watt Power supply
G27 Logitech wheel
Saitek x52 Pro HOTAS
Oculus DK2
Logitech G930 wireless 7 channel headset
Fan controller
ASUS Z97 Wi-Fi Pro motherboard
Obutto Racing Seat
Voice Attack

 

[Kordred]

In your instructions, you do either reshade or sweetfx? Or do you install both of them? I tried sweetfx but I have the win 8.1 problem, haven't tried the workaround yet, but maybe Id just do reshade instead. Does reshade have a 8.1 problem?

 

[Nightshift63]

Well following this Guide has now made Elite Dangerous unplayable for me. I did the SweetFX part. and opened SweetFX link in Atlas974 post using WinRAR and dragged this to the FORC-FDEV-D folder then I copied and pasted the code in drkaii post and I thought great that's done so I tried it out. and when I press play I get a crash report. EliteDangerous32.exe - Entry Point Not Found The procedure entry point CreateDXGIFactory2 could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\WINDOWS\system32\d3d11.dll.

So currently cannot play Elite Dangerous at the moment. I sent off the crash report to Frontier and will open a ticket with Frontier to get this resolved. feeling very sad at the moment I just don't know why or how this has happened as I followed the guide.

 

[Kordred]

I did the same thing. If you read further you see a workaround for windows 8.1. Sweetfx at the first link doesn't work in wind 8.1 and you get that error. Go look at the .rar you downloaded and delete the files you added from the FORC-FDEV-D folder and it will work again.

 

[Nightshift63]

Thanks very much. yeah I did not read further down and installed the wrong SweetFX files will try get rid of those Sweetfx files now Thank Again.