HTC Vive resolution and  focus

Javert

Volunteer Moderator

I am aware of this thread, and it points us back to "page 63" of this thread. Unfortunately each person will have different browser settings so for me, page 63 of this thread doesn't contain any official source for this. I am pretty sure that no official FD source has commented on the forums about this recently. There was a post on this thread about it from someone a few days ago (I believe further back on this thread), which stated that FD had told the audience last Saturday that resolving Vive issues was low priority. What I am saying is that this post came from one member of the audience and we don't know if he/she was using the exact words used by Frontier, or maybe using a different phrasing - personally I don't remember them saying that and it's the type of thing that would've stood out if it had been said in that way.
 
I am aware of this thread, and it points us back to "page 63" of this thread. Unfortunately each person will have different browser settings so for me, page 63 of this thread doesn't contain any official source for this. I am pretty sure that no official FD source has commented on the forums about this recently. There was a post on this thread about it from someone a few days ago (I believe further back on this thread), which stated that FD had told the audience last Saturday that resolving Vive issues was low priority. What I am saying is that this post came from one member of the audience and we don't know if he/she was using the exact words used by Frontier, or maybe using a different phrasing - personally I don't remember them saying that and it's the type of thing that would've stood out if it had been said in that way.

Wouldn't it be nice if FD actually updated their own thread... That was the point of the letter ;) Anyway I'm off. Hunting devs isn't in day job description and surely isn't my past time or hobby. I've said enough on the matter. Sorry if I've upset any Mods or Devs, not the intention, but being ignored generally has an effect of slight impatience ;)
I'm off and I just hope to see that something shifts in this matter one way or another.
 
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Posted insulting misssives towards the developers is not the way to go when trying to bring something to their attention.

Perhaps the developers should maybe think about why people feel inclined to do this. Speaking personally, I'm getting pretty decent visuals and performance in the Vive, if I use the supersampling hack, but everything I'm reading and seeing indicates that the Rift is better for Elite by a fairly major margin (I haven't seen or tested a Rift myself, so I can't speak from personal experience). FDEV are on record as saying there is no exclusivity and they want to support VR in all its forms, yet here we are with what seems to be a fairly major issue with the Vive, and, just scanning back through this thread, the last communication (apart from yours, which is basically 'stop being too insulting'), is the OPENING POST, posted almost FIVE MONTHS AGO. Going by the beta of 2.2, we will fairly shortly have a major game update that, at best, gives a minor improvement on this issue, and that's it. That makes it seem that FDEV, for the most part, are simply quietly ignoring this issue and simply hoping all the Vive owners affected will stop complaining.

Communicate with us.

If you have plans to sort it in a minor post 2.2 patch, tell us that.

If you're not planning to sort it until further down the line - 2.3, 2.4, 3.0, whatever - tell us that.

If the issue isn't yours, and needs to be sorted somewhere else (SteamVR, for example), tell us that.

If the issue simply can't or won't be sorted at all, tell us that.
 
It was Obsidian Ant, who I would think has earned enough capital over time to be considered reliable.

However, considering this thread is six months old and that there has been no formal reply, it is a low priority. That would appear to be self-evident. It doesn't mean it will never get fixed, but, and this is my suspicion, until a unified rendering pipeline with the Rift is possible, no explicit time will go into addressing this. I think it's probably just too complicated to deal with the problems caused by the different pixel distributions of the devices to sink the time on the Vive that could otherwise be spent on general Elite features or improving the Rift, which has both a higher customer uptake and already works. Their approach is pragmatic rather than malicious. If people can brute force and use 3rd party apps to get something they're content with, great, otherwise nothing is doing.
 
One other thing I will add.

I was at the Elite meeting in Birmingham last weekend listening to the Dev Q&A, and I do not remember anyone saying that fixing Vive issues were "Low priority" or "way down the list" in the way that's been portrayed in this thread. If anything, a polite request that you've heard this was said and can we get some clarification might be a better way to go.

(it's possible I missed that bit, but I certainly don't remember hearing that).
With respect, I'm going to take Obsidian Ant's word for it. I see no reason to believe his account was anything less than exact and accurate.

You want people to not become vitriolic? Tell your people to be more communicative. Count the number of official posts in this thread regarding the resolution and focus issues since it was created in April. Go ahead and count them. People aren't frustrated because this is some new issue. People aren't to the point of anger because they're hard to please brats. We've been waiting patiently for going on 7 months for some of us. I think that is a rare degree of patience.

Maybe be that's the problem. Maybe we've been too patient. Maybe we need to become more vocal. Maybe it will get moved up "the list" then. At this pace, I see no reason to believe it will make it this season. It's conceivable that these issues will be here next April. How can we be expected to know or believe differently? There is always something more important. There can always be something to put ahead of this.
 
One other thing I will add.

I was at the Elite meeting in Birmingham last weekend listening to the Dev Q&A, and I do not remember anyone saying that fixing Vive issues were "Low priority" or "way down the list" in the way that's been portrayed in this thread. If anything, a polite request that you've heard this was said and can we get some clarification might be a better way to go.

(it's possible I missed that bit, but I certainly don't remember hearing that).

I asked the question. There were comments from multiple panel members about this issue being "on the list, but it is a big list". While I don't think the term "low priority" was spoken, it is a reasonable summary. I asked the FD panel about Vive support at Lavecon and again at Elite Meet, and if this isn't done by the next event I can get to then I'll ask again.
 
Hello CMDRs, Just signed up to the forum to comment in this thread. I recently bought a Vive solely for playing Elite. Like most others here I was initially blown away by the immersion that wearing the Vive gives. It is amazing. However, after a short time the blurry text, Aliasing issue and low rez really hampered my experience. Ive twiddled all the settings following the advice of others on this forum so I can play and I am enjoying it but I can only really go for about an hour or so before the blurry text etc start to make the experience un-enjoyable. I have a high end system - 4970k and 980ti and so wasn't expecting this amount of compromise to get it to run smoothly. Ive now bought a Titan X in the hope of brute forcing it but I know that's not an option for most. Shame that there doesn't seem to be any comment or update from Frontier. I, like others, really like this game and I was a backer from the start. Ive now invested lot of money on Elite and would appreciate a word on Vive development progress. Many thanks.
 

Javert

Volunteer Moderator
I asked the question. There were comments from multiple panel members about this issue being "on the list, but it is a big list". While I don't think the term "low priority" was spoken, it is a reasonable summary. I asked the FD panel about Vive support at Lavecon and again at Elite Meet, and if this isn't done by the next event I can get to then I'll ask again.

Fair enough I must have missed that bit.

Can someone please summarize exactly what the remaining issues are right now, and whether there is any improvement in the current beta version. I remember seeing a comment that there were some Vive improvements coming in 2.2 a while back, but does this mean that those are not happening now?

When I scroll back a few pages, there are several posts from some users suggesting that they have no issues and their Vive works fine, whereas others say that they are just putting up with the issues?

Also, has anyone done side by side comparison of Vive vs Rift in ED? It sounds like some of the posters here see the issue as very critical, whereas maybe FD believe that the Vive setup is working "adequately" but could be improved. That may be why it's not at the top of the list because it's playable but not perfect? I know there was a room with both in it at Lavecon - were these issues seen there because went in and asked and I didn't hear people saying that the Vive had big issues at that time.

I do remember that when the original ED Alpha started supporting the Rift DK1, i took about 2 years before they support the proper direct mode interface, and for a while you could not upgrade your rift SDK as ED only support a very old SDK - they didn't fix that problem until the official release, and I think it also caused a lot of issues for people trying to upgrade to Windows 10. When there were issues that actually flat out prevented DK2 being used, FD did fix them, but they didn't do the work on the direct mode until the v1 drivers were finalized.

Vive didn't have a publicly available development kit I don't believe (?) , so maybe their drivers and systems are still being worked on and FD don't want to shoot at a moving target. I'm not an expert here and just speculating, but there may be more to it than just ignoring the issue.

It's also possible that they are planning to rework the whole Vive integration for the next paid expansion if it involves any kind of first person activity so maybe they are delaying for that - again just speculation ;)
 
My apologies for the late reply. Real Life has decided to eat up what little time I have during breaks and lunch at work to read/post to the forums. Needless to say, what little time I have at home is dedicated to playing the game. :)

Your desktop resolution is lower than most but I don't think that would give you too much of a boost. My guess is that what you think is good is different to most. You clearly don't mind poor picture quality and/or low FPS due to reprojection.

Only in a thread like this is 1440p lower than most. ;p

Why not instead of people giving their opinion of how it runs for them, they show the logs from Afterburner or PrecisionX that show the FPS. Then if someone does have a solid 90fps then we can look at what settings and then what hardware they are using and it should be easy to recreate the same performance.

Right now all we have are people saying it runs great on their system or runs bad on their system with no proof or quantifiable data. It does not matter if someone thinks it runs great on their system we need logs to show it is indeed running great on their system. Their hardware specs and settings don’t matter until it is confirmed how it is actually running and that can be proven by the logs.

A lot of people don’t notice re-projection when it is on and think everything is running fine when in fact they are running at 45fps. The judder they are seeing is when their fps drops below 45fps.

Now here's a reasonable suggestion. I'll check that when I get home and can play the game.

Question: where in settings is reprojection found? It sounds like I'll want to turn it off if it isn't already.

Fair enough I must have missed that bit.

Can someone please summarize exactly what the remaining issues are right now, and whether there is any improvement in the current beta version. I remember seeing a comment that there were some Vive improvements coming in 2.2 a while back, but does this mean that those are not happening now?

When I scroll back a few pages, there are several posts from some users suggesting that they have no issues and their Vive works fine, whereas others say that they are just putting up with the issues?

Also, has anyone done side by side comparison of Vive vs Rift in ED? It sounds like some of the posters here see the issue as very critical, whereas maybe FD believe that the Vive setup is working "adequately" but could be improved. That may be why it's not at the top of the list because it's playable but not perfect? I know there was a room with both in it at Lavecon - were these issues seen there because went in and asked and I didn't hear people saying that the Vive had big issues at that time.

I do remember that when the original ED Alpha started supporting the Rift DK1, i took about 2 years before they support the proper direct mode interface, and for a while you could not upgrade your rift SDK as ED only support a very old SDK - they didn't fix that problem until the official release, and I think it also caused a lot of issues for people trying to upgrade to Windows 10. When there were issues that actually flat out prevented DK2 being used, FD did fix them, but they didn't do the work on the direct mode until the v1 drivers were finalized.

Vive didn't have a publicly available development kit I don't believe (?) , so maybe their drivers and systems are still being worked on and FD don't want to shoot at a moving target. I'm not an expert here and just speculating, but there may be more to it than just ignoring the issue.

It's also possible that they are planning to rework the whole Vive integration for the next paid expansion if it involves any kind of first person activity so maybe they are delaying for that - again just speculation ;)

Briefly, since I'm almost out of time, here are my top issues, since I'm one of the people who are having "good" experiences in the Vive.

1) When the full SteamVR suite is running, everything seems small, especially my avatar. This isn't the case when I run the bare minimum processes necessary to run Elite in VR.

2) The God Rays coming from bright light sources in the cockpit.

3) The Comms panel (the upper left one) is barely readable. Sometimes, I have to lean forward to really read it.

4) Juddering in stations and on the planets in VR Ultra

5) Aliasing issues on any setting lower than VR Ultra. This is particularly noticeable where there is high contrast (example, around the mail slot entering a station), and when light sources are far away, such as approaching stations and planetary settlements, and the night side of inhabited earth-like and terraformed worlds.
 
Here is the tl;dr version of the thread:

Frontier acknowledge that there is a difference between the Rift and Vive in aliasing and scaling caused by different pixel distributions.
With 3rd Party applications and some judicious trial and error it is possible to get decent IQ with high end hardware (YMMV - it's VR after all).
Yes, there are numerous people in the thread who've used both; the Rift is better per equal hardware.
The 2.2 enhancements are for the Rift not the Vive.

See my earlier post; my speculation is that they want a unified rendering pipeline rather than spending time and effort exclusively on the Vive.
 
1) When the full SteamVR suite is running, everything seems small, especially my avatar. This isn't the case when I run the bare minimum processes necessary to run Elite in VR.
Can you explain what you mean by this? AFAIK SteamVR needs to be running. If it's not running before ED is started, ED starts it automatically. Is there another way?
 
Can you explain what you mean by this? AFAIK SteamVR needs to be running. If it's not running before ED is started, ED starts it automatically. Is there another way?

That's my understanding as well.

Darkfyre has been pretty adamant that it works throughout the thread, but I've been unable to reproduce it (and I've tried a number of things).

We also must remember that a lot of this is perception.
 
There is a checkbox in steamVR about launch on application or something, I can't remember.

Perhaps that prevents Elite using the steam backend and falls back to an internal one instead ?

Not tried it but I have my doubts as I was under the impression it always hooked to steamVR processes.
 
Can you explain what you mean by this? AFAIK SteamVR needs to be running. If it's not running before ED is started, ED starts it automatically. Is there another way?

That's my understanding as well.

Darkfyre has been pretty adamant that it works throughout the thread, but I've been unable to reproduce it (and I've tried a number of things).

We also must remember that a lot of this is perception.

Okay, I'm at work right now, so this is from memory.

When I run Elite, It only loads two of the six(?) processes that are loaded when you select SteamVR former the Steam app. I'll post the exact processes when I get home.

I have noticed a definite improvement in appearance and performance between the way I usually run Elite (off a fresh reboot, not running Steam VR) and with Steam VR running. Now that RL has settled down again, I'll sit down and record my exact settings in both SteamVR and Elite. It may be more noticeable on my end because I'm running a lowly 980 graphics card, not a 980TI or 1080. ;)

There is a checkbox in steamVR about launch on application or something, I can't remember.

Perhaps that prevents Elite using the steam backend and falls back to an internal one instead ?

Not tried it but I have my doubts as I was under the impression it always hooked to steamVR processes.

That was the first thing I disabled when I discovered the last SteamVR update enabled it

.
 
Fair enough I must have missed that bit.

Can someone please summarize exactly what the remaining issues are right now, and whether there is any improvement in the current beta version. I remember seeing a comment that there were some Vive improvements coming in 2.2 a while back, but does this mean that those are not happening now?

When I scroll back a few pages, there are several posts from some users suggesting that they have no issues and their Vive works fine, whereas others say that they are just putting up with the issues?

Also, has anyone done side by side comparison of Vive vs Rift in ED? It sounds like some of the posters here see the issue as very critical, whereas maybe FD believe that the Vive setup is working "adequately" but could be improved. That may be why it's not at the top of the list because it's playable but not perfect? I know there was a room with both in it at Lavecon - were these issues seen there because went in and asked and I didn't hear people saying that the Vive had big issues at that time.

I do remember that when the original ED Alpha started supporting the Rift DK1, i took about 2 years before they support the proper direct mode interface, and for a while you could not upgrade your rift SDK as ED only support a very old SDK - they didn't fix that problem until the official release, and I think it also caused a lot of issues for people trying to upgrade to Windows 10. When there were issues that actually flat out prevented DK2 being used, FD did fix them, but they didn't do the work on the direct mode until the v1 drivers were finalized.

Vive didn't have a publicly available development kit I don't believe (?) , so maybe their drivers and systems are still being worked on and FD don't want to shoot at a moving target. I'm not an expert here and just speculating, but there may be more to it than just ignoring the issue.

It's also possible that they are planning to rework the whole Vive integration for the next paid expansion if it involves any kind of first person activity so maybe they are delaying for that - again just speculation ;)

Hello!

The main issue is the lack of proper support for Vive rendering.
Playing Elite on Vive without using the SteamVR file editing trick is like playing a very low pixel density game in VR or like playing a flat creen game in a 800*600 res on a 1440p monitor....

The real problem lies in the rendering target they choose: it's too low resolution. Vive and Oculus aren't that different and i often saw in the forum the wider FOV of the VIVE is the reason why the game is so blurry on the vive, for me it isn't, you simply have to play other VR games to see that visual quality should be the same on both HMD if done right: asseto corsa, cdf starfighter, house of the dying sun these game have near zero visual difference between oculus and Vive. Let's take dirt rally as another exemple: it doesn't officially support the Vive, only oculus, but one dev guy with his software named Revive has been able to make it run on the Vive and the visual quality is on par.
Most of the time the real difference between the 2 HMD come to the performance: oculus got ATW and vive rely on reprojection. But visuals should be the same.

The 2.2 beta brings nothing on the table for the Vive, and performance wise it's worse... Still hope it's tied to the beta environment and on live it will perform like now....

So that brings the real questions: why the rendering target hasn't been changed yet? Why no official comment (on this thread created by Frontier comm) on the problem and possible solution or lack of solution?
Let's be real, all it take from FD VR dev is to launch the game on oculus cv1, then launch it on Vive. That's all, only that will be enough to understand all the fustration here....

Edit: i run the game with a 4690k, 1080gtx config with most options @low in order to greatly upscale the rendering target (the mighty steamvr x2 x0.65 trick) to be able to read something on most mission screen without eye strain
 
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Now here's a reasonable suggestion. I'll check that when I get home and can play the game.

Question: where in settings is reprojection found? It sounds like I'll want to turn it off if it isn't already.

It is located in the SteamVR settings but I would not turn it off. If anything for testing it will make it easier to see on the fps graph if it is dropping below 90fps because it will half the frame rate down to 45fps and re-project every other frame so it will appear to still be running at 90fps to your eye but the graph will show the true FPS.
 
It is located in the SteamVR settings but I would not turn it off. If anything for testing it will make it easier to see on the fps graph if it is dropping below 90fps because it will half the frame rate down to 45fps and re-project every other frame so it will appear to still be running at 90fps to your eye but the graph will show the true FPS.

Thanks for the advice. I've got a lot to do when I get home in three hours or so.

This is truly the golden age of information. I still remember a time when if I wanted to participate in a game's forums, I had to wait till I got home and lose game time. Now I can do this while on break at work. :)
 
...
The real problem lies in the rendering target they choose: it's too low resolution. Vive and Oculus aren't that different and i often saw in the forum the wider FOV of the VIVE is the reason why the game is so blurry on the vive, for me it isn't, you simply have to play other VR games to see that visual quality should be the same on both HMD if done right: asseto corsa, cdf starfighter, house of the dying sun these game have near zero visual difference between oculus and Vive.
...

I'm afraid that is just not correct. This is not subjective - it is a physical matter and can be measured.
The Rift's field-of-view sacrifice gives it about 20% higher pixel density. In Elite Dangerous terms, this very, very roughly translates to you in average having five by five display screen pixels to render a text character, instead of just four with the Vive -- If you have ever drawn small pixel fonts, you'll know the significance of this - just count how many horisontal lines, plus spaces between those lines, there are in the letter "E".

The renderer should be able to produce good results, with sharp definition and little aliasing, for most things without having to resort to supersampling, or otherwise brute-forcing, which is what we do when we increase the render buffer size significantly above that of the physical screen it ultimately ends up adorning. (SteamVR's "render target multiplier" is on top on an already "hard coded" 1.4, which accounts for the stretching in the centre of the image, caused by compensating for lens distortion).

That said; For all I know, maybe ED does render a smaller bitmap than 2 times 1512x1680 (1080x1200 multiplied by the aforementioned 1.4) when targetting the Vive, but I have a very hard time believing it, even though the text certainly has that exact scaled-up-from-a-smaller-bitmap look to it.


There is also the matter that because of the Vive's slightly higher FOV, more "stuff" is rendered to a Vive frame than a Rift one, directly implying "more work", but that should not matter quite so much, because although the difference in FOV is significant per eye, both eyes together does not cover quite as much less than the Vive, and one would assume there might be a single, common, frustum culling pass for both cameras... (Whereas the Vive renders your field of view almost as far out in both eyes, so that you can see something to the far side with both your left and right eye; The Rift mitigates its lower per-eye FOV, by making a secondary sacrifice of a bit of stereo overlap, so that thing out to your far left can be seen by your left eye, but to the right one the view ends in blackness 5-10 degrees before; This pillarboxing-like effect drives me crazy, whenever I use the Rift, but nobody else appears to even notice.)

By the way: Although 2.2 brings nothing specifically to the Vive, the increased opacity to the black background fill behind UI panels should help it somewhat, just as much as it does the Rift.


So... A shortlist of some of the issues... I am probably missing some, after all this overly verbose typing, but:


  • Scale is off - things look too small. Are the cameras set to the right field of view and positioned correctly, adhering to the user's IPD?
  • Everything is blurry and suffers from terrible aliasing. Other than the whole first bit discussed, concerning render target sizes and such, ED's heavy leaning on deferred rendering presumably plays a part in the second aspect, seeing as that supposedly does not go very well with adaptive forms of antialiasing. Aliasing is twice the problem in VR, that it is on monitors.
  • Performance suffers. I am fairly certain frame rate actually drops just as much for Rift users -- It's just that Asynchronous Timewarp handles such cases so much more gracefully than SteamVR's reprojection, that many Rift users never notice. Valve, meanwhile, rather aggressively pushes the directive that a developer should never allow their product to drop below 90fps in the first place, and offer quite a few suggestions on how to avoid this - some of which could, indeed, strike a shovel rather deep into one's render pipeline.
  • The Vive's displays may not adhere to sRGB, so gamma adjustment may not be sufficient to get pleasing brightness levels, contrasts, and colour balances. In a Rift CV1, the game looks much like it does on a monitor. In a Vive, a huge amount of detail is lost to stampeding dark- and brightness. Trying to use the gamma slider to find a nice contrast ratio, just exacerbates the crunching/blowout at either end. (Speculatively, some degree of HDR, might be able to take advantage of the comparatively high peak brightness of the Vive screens.)
  • This is more of a VR-as-a-whole issue, than just a Vive one, but there are all these little things that have binds to screen space, such as the mouse pointer, which makes it just about impossble to use the mouse in the galaxy map whilst in VR. Also in the galaxy map, the little "speech bubble" menu does not visually attach to the selected system, but will race off in the opposite to any direction you turn your head. Many many billboard sprites appear to rotate in the world, parented as they are to the Z rotation of the screen, faithfully following your head around; This makes plasma and smoke effects, such as star protuberances, look rather silly, and breaks any verisimilitude. Similarly, all CRT raster effects are glued to your head; You can nod your head to "scan" them over things such as the spaceship holos in the shipyard and other GUI elements.


Phew... just a few off the top of my head. :p
 
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The thing that still mystifies me is the effect of the ingame x0.65 supersampling. I mean... its working but where is the logic in enabling supersampling in the steamvr config and then setting the ingame settings exactly the other way round.
 
The thing that still mystifies me is the effect of the ingame x0.65 supersampling. I mean... its working but where is the logic in enabling supersampling in the steamvr config and then setting the ingame settings exactly the other way round.

It's for performance - not quality. Fewer pixels to render.

OpenVR does not only scale the image down; It distorts it too: A barrel distortion to counter the pin cushion distortion made by the lenses in the headset. The more detail you have at this stage, the better -- if you have the horsepower to keep Elite at 1.0 - do it. :) (EDIT: This also cuts the number of generations of modifying the image, to a single one)

To sidetrack somewhat: When ED undersamples at 0.65, the rendered image is scaled up to 1.0 (not a very resource-heavy operation) before handed over to OpenVR. This introduces an amount of softening, that can be perceived as simultaneousy hideous, and glossing over some cases of aliasing. It may also affect LOD/Mipmap balances, so that some things that would use a very detailed version of an object at a certain distance, at 1.0, may instead use a less detailed one, that may also have had some tailoring done to it, specifically to look decent at a distance.
(EDIT2: Oh, and one more thing... It is possible that different parts of what winds up in the final screen is rendered in separate passes. A text panel, could, e.g, be rendered on its own, using certain methods that best suits its type of content, and composited into the scene.)
 
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