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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.
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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.
![Faster than Jesus [VR]](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/58/58075.jpg?1553527111){kind=avatar}
