My CV1 looks terrible, and my attempts to research the issue get lost in techno-babble

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Depth of field it's an artificial effect needed on 2D monitors to give the feeling of.. Well, depth of field, by blurring far away or out of focus objects. In 3D and VR is useless, your eyes will naturally create the effect. Ditch it.

This - I turn Depth of Field off as it doesn't really help in VR. It'll give a little more power back for HMDQuality.
Ambient Occlusion is also ok on Low... this uses quite a lot of GPU power too.

SRV - give me the full effect I get a bit queasy on planes in real life but in VR I'm tough as nails, no horizon mods for me lol. But for VR-sickness sensitive folks its a must have.

Personally I'm amazed the SRV doesn't have a small sick bag somewhere in the cockpit - this would have been a good easter egg! (then again, you'd have to pop your helmet to use it, perhaps not a great idea!)

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Very nice write up. I'll be trying similar settings as soon as I upgrade my graphics card.

Once again, I'm probably just too ignorant about the tech to know exactly what I should be seeing.

No, that's fine. Sometimes we see something odd and your eyes always try to pick it out again.
We are very good at spotting things that don't look right (I guess because they could be a predator/something dangerous etc).

In the Fer de Lance - is it the shadows? Sometimes the sunlight hits the cockpit struts at odd angles, and if shadows are set to Off/Low/Medium, they render a bit blocky and some of the strut can still be lit. Is it that that's making the stepping you're seeing?
I know it happens in the Python a bit on one of my runs where the sun is low off to the right.

Try setting shadows to Ultra and see if the effect goes away.

 

[xondk]

I'm new to PC gaming, and slowly figuring it out. I downloaded the game through steam and launch it in VR (not steam VR, I'm having problems getting that to work too). Everything looks..... awful. Distant stars look like like faint blobs. Any ship I see at a distance of more than about 1.5 kilometers is unrecognisable. The resolution just simply bad. I've also noted that changing between VR ultra and VR low has little, if any effect. Tracking and FPS are PERFECT. It's incredibly smooth, just ugly.

Ugly is a rather vague word, maybe you could be more clear? but it seems you are referring to resolution.

the current VR devices are generation one, their resolution is not really that great when you look at it, its 'good enough' sure, but if you are used to high resolution monitors and such then you will be a bit disappointed, but that's the way it is with first generation hardware.

Supersampling does increase the perceived resolution, though last I checked this was mostly a vive problem, not rift. So not having VR I don't know, but a general word of advise, if "techno-babble" isn't your thing, don't be a first generation device tester, you are essentially a beta tester with such devices.

 

[fez]

I recently spent a lot of time going through each individual setting for the graphics options, reading about and understanding each. What they add to the visual experience and what the performance impact of that is. I've got a i7 4770k, 32GB Ram and GTX 1080 so not exactly low end but not extreme either. After several hours of testing I'm getting a near solid 90fps with a few dips into the upper 70s every now and then. In my Rift it looks fantastic, only slightly do I see any blur or issues and when I do they are very minor. Below are the custom settings I'm using - as there has been a lot of discussion around anti aliasing I run MLAXX2 with Supersampling at 1.0 and HMD Image Quality at 1.5

I'm not sure if it's been explained but Supersampling is done by Elite where HMD Image Quality is handled by the Rift (or Vive) driver/API. As such it is far more efficient than Elite's Supersampling so IMHO things work far better with this config. Sure there is still some aliasing where you see the "shimmer" effect but it's far better than the stock settings.

One of the more important things for me is turning down the HUD brightness to lowest or near lowest. If you try that you'll see that the brighter settings create a lot of bloom around text/etc. making it far harder to see. I also use a crystal blue color for my HUD which again I feel makes things far easier to read than the orange/red.

Here are my settings, for me they are a great balance of quality to performance

Model Draw Distance = (1 tick to the left of middle)
Texture Quality = High
Shadow Quality = Medium
Bloom = Off
Blur = Off
Anti Aliasing = MLAXX2
Supersampling = 1.0
Ambient Occulsion = Medium
Environment Quality = High
FX Quality = High
Depth of Field = High
Reflections Quality = Low
Material Quality = High
Galaxy Map Quality = High
Terrain Quality = High
Terrain Work = Maximum
Terrain Material Quality = High
Jet Cone Quality = High
Field of View = Maximum
Gamma = (1 tick above middle)

Dashboard Brightness = Lowest (I find that if this is too high there is a lot of bloom around the in-cockpit text maxing it hard to read)
Disable GUI Effects = On (this turns off the little effect you see when the nav/sys panels left/right open, it's cool at first but having them pop instantly is much better)
Reduce Camera Shake = On (keeps the barf-mobile at bay)
Vehicle Motion Blackout = Off
Vehicle Maintain Horizon Camera = On (this is very important IMHO, it will keep you view level when driving the SRV so it moves around you rather than your head moving with it. Off it can make you VERY dizzy quickly and nothing makes me dizzy)

i have registered my account just to reply to this post. it works. however i do like to know if your are getting stutter in Resource Extraction Sites, especially when bounty hunting with few other ships. it is not unplayable however it is effecting my gameplay.

my current system is

i5 6600k
16g ddr4
gtx 1080 oc (2000+ mhz)
ssd

 

[Exigeous]

i have registered my account just to reply to this post. it works. however i do like to know if your are getting stutter in Resource Extraction Sites, especially when bounty hunting with few other ships. it is not unplayable however it is effecting my gameplay.

I feel honored that you would register just to reply to my drivel. I'm usually so damn long winded I get in my own way helping people ;-)

As for hunting in RES no, not really. I'll definitely get a few dropped frames here and there and probably run in the upper 70s to low 80s most of the time but it doesn't affect my gameplay in any way. In fact combat is my favorite endeavor in Elite and as such I engage in it often. If I had any issues there I'd have to do something about it as it would be unacceptable. While I have more ram and a slightly better processor I can't imagine those are making a material difference in performance.

What settings are you running that are different from mine? What framerate are you getting? Rift or Vive? BTW you can press Ctrl+F and turn on a FPS counter, it'll show at the bottom left of the Elite window on your desktop (not in your headset). It's not convenient to look since you have to lift up your headset but it's useful none the less, especially if you're using something like OBS or ShadowPlay to record gameplay.

 

[Alec Turner]

I recently spent a lot of time going through each individual setting for the graphics options, reading about and understanding each. What they add to the visual experience and what the performance impact of that is. I've got a i7 4770k, 32GB Ram and GTX 1080 so not exactly low end but not extreme either. After several hours of testing I'm getting a near solid 90fps with a few dips into the upper 70s every now and then. In my Rift it looks fantastic, only slightly do I see any blur or issues and when I do they are very minor. Below are the custom settings I'm using - as there has been a lot of discussion around anti aliasing I run MLAXX2 with Supersampling at 1.0 and HMD Image Quality at 1.5

I'm not sure if it's been explained but Supersampling is done by Elite where HMD Image Quality is handled by the Rift (or Vive) driver/API. As such it is far more efficient than Elite's Supersampling so IMHO things work far better with this config. Sure there is still some aliasing where you see the "shimmer" effect but it's far better than the stock settings.

One of the more important things for me is turning down the HUD brightness to lowest or near lowest. If you try that you'll see that the brighter settings create a lot of bloom around text/etc. making it far harder to see. I also use a crystal blue color for my HUD which again I feel makes things far easier to read than the orange/red.

Here are my settings, for me they are a great balance of quality to performance

Model Draw Distance = (1 tick to the left of middle)
Texture Quality = High
Shadow Quality = Medium
Bloom = Off
Blur = Off
Anti Aliasing = MLAXX2
Supersampling = 1.0
Ambient Occulsion = Medium
Environment Quality = High
FX Quality = High
Depth of Field = High
Reflections Quality = Low
Material Quality = High
Galaxy Map Quality = High
Terrain Quality = High
Terrain Work = Maximum
Terrain Material Quality = High
Jet Cone Quality = High
Field of View = Maximum
Gamma = (1 tick above middle)

Dashboard Brightness = Lowest (I find that if this is too high there is a lot of bloom around the in-cockpit text maxing it hard to read)
Disable GUI Effects = On (this turns off the little effect you see when the nav/sys panels left/right open, it's cool at first but having them pop instantly is much better)
Reduce Camera Shake = On (keeps the barf-mobile at bay)
Vehicle Motion Blackout = Off
Vehicle Maintain Horizon Camera = On (this is very important IMHO, it will keep you view level when driving the SRV so it moves around you rather than your head moving with it. Off it can make you VERY dizzy quickly and nothing makes me dizzy)

I went through a similar process when I got my 1080, decided to just sit down and work out the most perfect settings for my ring once and for all so I could forget about them and get on with playing the game. I described what I came up with over here ...

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...STAL-CLEAR-D?p=4777257&viewfull=1#post4777257

I actually went with in-game SS at 0.75 and pushed the HMD quality up to 1.75. I also didn't bother with any anti-aliasing. Oh, and I turned ambient occlusion off because it's a computationally expensive function which doesn't actually make that much perceptable difference.

Anyway, here's my settings (via an EDProfiler screendump) ...

 

[Smecca is BMFE]

For reference, here's a thread showing what I'm talking about. I don't think this CMDR is in VR but it's pretty spot on with what I'm trying to get rid of. See the staircase on all the diagonal lines?

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/316354-Graphics-Can-someone-explain-what-this-is

 

[jojon]

Believe me - we'd all love to get rid of it.

Headset resolution is just not high enough, and the game does not have the antialiasing to ameliorate it. If you do 4x, or more, supersampling, the "crawling dashed line" effect will be reduced, and replaced with transitions through blocks of intermediate colour values, which looks a lot better, but costs "a bit" of hardware work. :7

One thing you can do, but it's not worth the sacrifice, to reduce the specular part of it, is to kill the environment map, which is what shows up on reflective surfaces. The envmap has a "NumMips" parameter, which one could expect to tell the engine how many mipmaps (progressively smaller copies of a full texture, for use when you see it from far away) should be created, but rather seems to act as some sort of divider for the "strength" of reflections; Reduce it, and everything becomes extremely shiny; Increase it, and reflections are pretty much gone. You'll wind up with environments that look dark and lifeless, and glass canopies that might as well be empty window frames, but many twinkly pixels will be gone with them...

 

[Exigeous]

Believe me - we'd all love to get rid of it.

Headset resolution is just not high enough, and the game does not have the antialiasing to ameliorate it. If you do 4x, or more, supersampling, the "crawling dashed line" effect will be reduced, and replaced with transitions through blocks of intermediate colour values, which looks a lot better, but costs "a bit" of hardware work. :7

One thing you can do, but it's not worth the sacrifice, to reduce the specular part of it, is to kill the environment map, which is what shows up on reflective surfaces. The envmap has a "NumMips" parameter, which one could expect to tell the engine how many mipmaps (progressively smaller copies of a full texture, for use when you see it from far away) should be created, but rather seems to act as some sort of divider for the "strength" of reflections; Reduce it, and everything becomes extremely shiny; Increase it, and reflections are pretty much gone. You'll wind up with environments that look dark and lifeless, and glass canopies that might as well be empty window frames, but many twinkly pixels will be gone with them...

+1 - this is exactly correct as this is the main issue with all current generation VR. In addition to this the anti aliasing and HMD image quality settings are primarily what effect this. Try the following settings just to see:

Test 1 - This should look awful, worse than your example
Anti Aliasing = Off
Supersampling = .75
HMD Image Quality = .75

And then look around. Then try:

Anti Aliasing = SMAA
Supersampling = 2.0
HMD Image Quality = 2.0

And you should see a huge improvement. Frame rates will be so awful it won't be playable but it should look far softer and smoother. Then try:

Anti Aliasing = MLAAX2
Supersampling = 1.0
HMD Image Quality = 1.25

Then try setting HMD Image Quality up another notch until performance is unplayable. It's very likely you can't even run the above with an acceptable frame rate. While you have the 1060 which is obviously newer than the previous 970/980 it's really not that much more powerful than the 970 and that's the lowest supported card. Realize that you're essentially driving 2 1080p displays and need to hit 90 fps - that's not insignificant unfortunately.

I went through a similar process when I got my 1080

Thanks for sharing that link, I'll give your settings a try myself to see which I prefer as I've not tried .75/1.75 before. I did last night bump HMD to 1.75 with SS and 1.0 and while it did fall to the upper 70s-low 80s it was still very playable