I've been playing ED since DK2 Support. Its always been this way and is nothing new.
What VR setting do you have it on High or Low?
High, of course.
Anyway i I found a way to make ED look spectacular, but you guys aren't gonna be happy:
SUPERSAMPLING. It seems the clarity of distant objects is unfortunately tied to Supersampling. Running ED in VR is roughly equivalent to running ED on a monitor at like .5x instead of 1x Supersampling. It looks atrocious. Unfortunately it is also far and away the most demanding graphics setting in the game.
The good news: crank that baby to 1.5x or even better 2x and you'll see the game the way it should look. It will rival Amy other VR game with its crispness. You can turn just about every other visual setting to Low or off because they don't really matter due to how low RES (relatively speaking) VR is. Voila, game looks like what you expected.
The bad news: your rig probably can't handle 1.5x supersampled and almost certainly not 2x @ 90fps. This introduces an ugly jutter when you pan your head around, thus making it unacceptable. Even with most settings off, you'll still run into skipped frames in space stations and on planets in particular. Basically anywhere the game usually has to work harder than usual.
Oh and strangely, my GPU (tracking in Afterburner) never actually reached 100% usage. Maybe drivers need better optimization. Maybe the game needs better optimization. Maybe both.
So until FDev can come up with further optimizations specifically for the VR experience, I'm going to say that VR isn't going to be a good selling point and that ED is not a very good VR showcase product. Sense of scale is really cool, but without at least 1.5x Supersampling, the games just don't look good enough for things like combat and all the pixely blocky stuff is ugly to the point of distraction and disappointment. Again maybe the issue is driver related. Maybe FDev can explain why I'm only seeing 80% GPU usage out of a 980Ti.
I will say: 1.5x Supersampling should be totally reasonable for explorers as long as landing on planets is a thing you plan on skipping most of the time. Otherwise you'll probably need to actively manage your Supersampling setting.
Oh for reference, my rig is a 6700k, 32GB ram, 980Ti with a modest overclock. I can barely clear 1.5x Supersampling with most graphics things low or off. Occasional missed frame. I might only use VR for exploration for the foreseeable future. I did have some fun with combat, but it gets pretty hard to see targets once they get 2km+ away from you. Even with 1.5x. Just a resolution limitation.
But do try it yourself and report back. The more data points the better. This may be something that really needs a software solution like Oculus' implementation of Async Timewarp in the absence of better optimization from FDev.
