Horrendous Black Smearing

[drkaii]

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The black smearing of HDMI is back with a vengeance - it is worse than ever. I believe this is nothing to do with Frontier, it is to do with the way direct mode doesn't allow windows to correct the colours, so basically we are stuck at the dynamic range that is default.

Black smearing is where you turn your head and the darkest parts of the screen (say the shadow of a planet, the black night of the sky) "bleeds" in the direction of your head movement across brighter objects, looking like smudged ink, briefly

1) Can someone with a CV1 confirm if they are seeing black smearing? I am only able to confirm via the DK2
2) Does anybody have a solution? - I am aware this question may take a while to answer as there is no known solution at the moment afaik.

Otherwise, loving every bit of the new drivers, direct mode, timewarp, incredible performance, new second window etc

 

[rich_hard1]

Yeah just turn down the gamma and GUI brightness. It helps to avoid it, apart from that it's just present with current latency of the dk2. It's almost gone with the cv1, still there but minimal.

 

[Karnath]

Agreed the black smearing is present but I can live with that, it's the colours they look washed out and missing a bit of vibrance for me.

However performance is great and just thankful to be flying from inside my space ship again

 

[xondk]

Almost sounds like the amoled issue, that exists with modern phones, blacks will smear faintly because when an amoled screen is entirely black it is essentially turned off, so turning on takes a split second longer then it otherwise would, however make sure you are running in full range hdmi, because then it will not see many certain blacks as 'full' black and they will be (very faintly) turned on, so switching won't smear.

 

[VR andysonofbob]

Almost sounds like the amoled issue, that exists with modern phones, blacks will smear faintly because when an amoled screen is entirely black it is essentially turned off, so turning on takes a split second longer then it otherwise would, however make sure you are running in full range hdmi, because then it will not see many certain blacks as 'full' black and they will be (very faintly) turned on, so switching won't smear.

Yes but previous to 1.3, with 0.6 you could change a few colour settings in nvidia control panels and this pretty much removed the smearing for me. Vanilla was terrible!
I have changed the settings in the nVidia panel which has lessened the effect but this might be placebo?

What are people doing with the in game sliders?

Mid way gamma slider?

 

[Drakfyre]

I actually went full Gamma and I'm happy with it. It slightly yellows the displays (From orange) but otherwise it nearly eliminates the smear and has a surprisingly small effect on gamut on my DK2.

 

[drkaii]

Almost sounds like the amoled issue, that exists with modern phones, blacks will smear faintly because when an amoled screen is entirely black it is essentially turned off, so turning on takes a split second longer then it otherwise would, however make sure you are running in full range hdmi, because then it will not see many certain blacks as 'full' black and they will be (very faintly) turned on, so switching won't smear.

How do you toggle that? Never seen that option in all my months of Frontier Forums tech blogging

I don't think it's an amoled issue, it's a latency thing that can be fixed by changing the gamma of the rift itself, and that was once a fix, as was pointed out by andysonofabob^, and doesn't work with direct mode :/

Interesting to know that it doesn't occur in other games? I'll have to give them a look. I know it occurs in space engine, which is the only other one I've really tried.

Yeah turning in-game gamma all the way up reduces it slightly, and you never really notice it on planets, but doing that makes space look like a bright disco, not a dark blackness...

Here's hoping for a fix! (or waiting for the CV1)

 

[VR Dextrovix]

Same here, although I don't really find anything on the Gamma slide helps really.

The thing is, this was a lot less of a problem on the DK2 with older runtimes or using OR 0.8 with SteamVR. It says to me there must be a software fix at some point for this, as ED didn't do this to me before changing to the consumer runtime.

Now we have Direct Mode, whatever you could have done with changes from within the NVidia control panel no longer apply.

I can put up with it, as I suppose if as above CV1 looks nearly okay then eventually it won't be a worry, but this isn't noticeable to me on any other titles (although I appreciate the effect caused by ED is due to probably using lots of "nearly black" colours!).

 

[xondk]

How do you toggle that? Never seen that option in all my months of Frontier Forums tech blogging

I don't think it's an amoled issue, it's a latency thing that can be fixed by changing the gamma of the rift itself, and that was once a fix, as was pointed out by andysonofabob^, and doesn't work with direct mode :/

Interesting to know that it doesn't occur in other games? I'll have to give them a look. I know it occurs in space engine, which is the only other one I've really tried.

Yeah turning in-game gamma all the way up reduces it slightly, and you never really notice it on planets, but doing that makes space look like a bright disco, not a dark blackness...

Here's hoping for a fix! (or waiting for the CV1)

Hrm, well not having an oculus and as mentioned direct mode, it seems nvidia control panel will have no real effect on it, so yeah, I am unsure, gather people need to do some tweaking to fix it.

 

[rich_hard1]

I'm still bemused why Frontier changed the HDMI color gamut settings, reminds me a bit like HDMI 1.0 back in the day which made films appear to have halo graining around people and objects. I really hope they change it, perhaps oculus told Frontier to dumb down the GFX initially, then they'll patch it back later on down the road.

 

[Viajero]

I can confirm the smearing in the DK2 but it does not seem to be (at least in my case) too dramatic (Windows 7).

 

[RAJA]

I actually went full Gamma and I'm happy with it. It slightly yellows the displays (From orange) but otherwise it nearly eliminates the smear and has a surprisingly small effect on gamut on my DK2.

Would be interested in seeing the colorimeter charts showing effects on gamut. Care to post them up?


Once ReShade works with direct mode, injecting a corrective 3D LUT will cure some of the oversaturation and RGB tracking.

The smear is a result of pixel response really. Dialling it out does have a measurable and visual negative impact on clipping.

 

[drkaii]

I'm still bemused why Frontier changed the HDMI color gamut settings, reminds me a bit like HDMI 1.0 back in the day which made films appear to have halo graining around people and objects. I really hope they change it, perhaps oculus told Frontier to dumb down the GFX initially, then they'll patch it back later on down the road.

I had a feeling it was colour space related. How do you know? You in the industry?

 

[xondk]

I'm still bemused why Frontier changed the HDMI color gamut settings, reminds me a bit like HDMI 1.0 back in the day which made films appear to have halo graining around people and objects. I really hope they change it, perhaps oculus told Frontier to dumb down the GFX initially, then they'll patch it back later on down the road.

Frontier changed anything? I seriously doubt they have that, I'm running full range HDMI 12 bit colours on my television and if I return it to limited/8bit there's a noticable drop in quality, so yeah, not sure frontier changed anything, it might be entirely the way oculus rift is set up, should be fixable.

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I had a feeling it was colour space related. How do you know? You in the industry?

I don't think anything has been changed at least on frontier's side.

 

[catanonia]

Ok, now I notice it. Very apparent in SC with the dark parts of the galaxy.

Hopefully they will resolve this with a patch soon.

 

[Smack332]

The smearing seems to be an Oculus issue. It is present in everything else I have tested from the Oculus store. Hopefully they will present a fix soon.

Running a DK2 on Windows 10.

 

[Spam]

Yup, everything so fa I've tried has low-medium black smearing. Not too bad but not ideal.
DK2, Win 10, 1.3 Run Time, nvidia 364.72

 

[Captain Sharky]

The smearing seems to be an Oculus issue. It is present in everything else I have tested from the Oculus store. Hopefully they will present a fix soon.

Running a DK2 on Windows 10.

Try Henry or Lost. No hint of smearing. However, blacks there are not so deep and kinda grayish, so maybe it's exactly the issue mentioned before - OLED latency, which is curable by substituting black with dark grey, so pixels wont turn off.

 

[drkaii]

Everyone talks about turning the gamma down but that makes it much worse for me. The only solution is to turn it to max. It feels like I'm in a disco rather than the blackness of space, but at least the smearing is mostly gone

 

[xondk]

Everyone talks about turning the gamma down but that makes it much worse for me. The only solution is to turn it to max. It feels like I'm in a disco rather than the blackness of space, but at least the smearing is mostly gone

Yeah wondered about that one, I think a lot don't know how gamma works, and up is the solution, however in my book, if you could add a custom pallet to it and basically up all colour values by 1-5 enough to hit the minimum level, it would be more effective then hammering up the gamma.