I notice that the GeForce Experience dealio has a seperate listing for Elite VR and a setting for "HMD Image Quality" and anything less that <1.0 is downscaling. Is that an Elite internal setting for for Steam VR? I wonder if that plays into the current Vive "Elite looks like low rez jank" talk that is going on?
Sort of. What you're looking at is the listing for Supersampling. Anything lower than 1x is rendering at a lower resolution than 1:1 based on the resolution setting.
This is the core of the issue right now: the only setting that has a discernable and significant effect on the resolution IS the Supersampling. But it has to be set to 1.5x or 2x to look reasonably clean. The problem, of course, is that setting Supersampling to 1.5x or 2x takes an incredible amount of system resources as the system is in effect rendering the game at a much higher resolution and downsampling it to fit your monitor's resolution. For the HMD, things are far smoother and become far less blocky and jagged when looking at distant objects. But the power required to push ED at 1.5x or 2x is a level that causes even 980Ti's to drop frames regularly. The Rift has no such issues because FDev set it up to render the game in the HMD through a different process, with 3rd party software like SweetFX being available to users. Such things are not usable for the Vive right now. Until FDev steps up and fixes the VR implementation to bring it in line with the Rift, it will look bad.
Also, stop using Geforce Experience. It's a garbage application.
