Valve Index Resolution Question

[_bryan]

Is there a way to make the Valve Index use the native resolution of the device? It seems to be less, causing a blurry effect.

Would the resolution appear less than a 2560x1440 display?

What I notice is the funny effect like in the old days of Nintendo or Sega Genesis. It feels like just a little lower resolution than I'm used to.

For example when I look at a very close object everything looks okay. But then when I look at a space station that I'm a few km from, I see the "staircase effect" and the effect of the pixels "bouncing around." I can't describe that one, it's like all the pixels are just jumping back and forth or something.

Is there a way to force the Index to use the native resolution?

The computer is AMD Threadripper 1950x with RX 5700 GPU. The CPU is not really for games but it typically works okay.

PS - I tried playing with the resolution settings before game-launch but the numbers were all very weird so I left it alone. Nothing like what the specs say it's supposed to be (1440x1600).

Thanks for any ideas or help.

Bryan

 

[jojon]

There is no 1:1 correlation, because the way the lens magnifies differently in different parts of your field of view.

When you have the SteamVR render resolution set to 100% (by default it will be auto-set to a value that is estimated to perform well, based on what hardware you have; This can be overridden with any value of your own choosing, by switching from "auto" to "custom". 200% is twice as many pixels, not twice the size, which will take 400%. There is one global such multiplier, and one that stacks on top, that can be set for each title individually), the game should render about one output picture pixel for each screen pixel, right in the centre of the view; Unfortunately this can not (without some trickery) be done without wasting performance on doing the same for the periphery, where it is less useful. The size of the bitmap rendered at 100% is about 1.4 times larger than the native resolution of the HMD display panels.

On top of this resolution, which is something that SteamVR recommends to the game (...the game is free to ignore it, which many Unreal Engine 4 titles do, infamously), Elite can increase the render resolution further using one of its own two built-in multipliers, which can be found in graphics settings: "HMD Quality", and: "Supersampling" -- the former makes the game render a larger image for more detail information going into the average that shows up in each pixel, just as if you had increased SteamVR's render resolution, and the latter does the same, but scales the result down to "normal" size, before it hands it over to SteamVR. Note that unlike the SteamVR values, 2.0 here IS twice as wide and twice as tall, for four times the pixel count.

Telling the game to render larger images will not magically make the device gain higher resolution (and VR headsets are yet far lower seen-with-your-eye resolution than your average monitor), but the pictures will be higher fidelity, and as part of that less aliased.

You'll want to stick with "HMD Quality" (EDIT: ...over Elite's "supersampling"), up until the product of it and your corresponding SteamVR values reach not far over 400% (...or 2.0), so that SteamVR has the full rendered resolution to work with, when doing the final downsampling, which compensates for how the lens distorts the view, and fits the image to the HMD screens.

(If you want to use SteamVR's Render Resolution sliders to "supersample" past 334% (EDIT: ...for the Index - other headsets will top out at other points), you'll need to edit a textfile, in order to increase a default resolution limit (which applies, even though it's effect is not reflected by the numbers under the settings sliders), but we'll cross that bridge if we get there... :7)

 

[_bryan]

Oh man this sounds way too complicated for me to understand. So I think I have no choice but to leave it alone for now.

Does it boil down to moving that slider to the right? Will moving the slider to the right make the staircase effect go away?

 

[jojon]

Will moving the slider to the right make the staircase effect go away?

Yes, but it will increase the work load!
Since games tend to lean on pixel shaders so much these days, expect your computer to have to work roughly twice as hard when the silder is at 200%.

(Just for diminishing the staircase effect, one can also use a slight blurring effect on the image (look for "FXAA" and "SMAA" antialiasing options in the game graphics settings), which is a much lighter load than "full screen super sampling" (which is effectively what one is doing when moving the slider up), but depending your sensibilities you may find that blur even less desireable than the aliasing it tries to smooth over...

There are other antialiasing methods, such as "MSAA", that save performance by doing something much like supersampling, but only along polygon edges, where it is the most prominent, but they do unfortunately usually not work with the form of work pipeline many modern graphics engines use today (so called "deferred rendering", which e.g. allows you to have many dynamic lightsources in use simultaneously, at relatively low rendering cost).)

 

[_bryan]

Alright thanks.

So far what i have done is set the game itself to "Ultra VR" for the game settings. That didn't help at all from what I could tell.

But for some reason, when I set the FPS in SteamVR to 80 that seems to help a lot. I don't understand that but it helps.

I have not messed with that slider for fear that I don't know what I'm doing on that one.

After playing at 80 FPS for a while I thought there was a small choppiness. So then I set it to 90.

I'll keep experimenting but 90 seems okay for now.

Thanks for your help.

 

[[VR] Orodruin]

Would the resolution appear less than a 2560x1440 display?

These are just numbers telling you how many pixels are on a screen. If you place that screen such that it fills your FoV completely then each pixel is naturally going to appear bigger than if it takes up a smaller part of the FoV.