Vive image is horrible compared to rift! What's going on?

moonlandermike · May 6, 2017

Hello all,

Long time lurker, just joined the forum!

I'm a vive owner and recently got to try the game out on a friend's oculus. Dear god the Vive picture quality is terrible in comparison!

1. Shimmering, particularly bad in stations. It looks like the whole game is just running in a lower resolution or something, really horrible shimmering pixel mess over everything!
2. God rays... now obviously both headsets have this as they both use fresnel lenses (my dear old DK2 had none). But they are much worse on the Vive.
3. Psychedelic light show at edge of vision. Right at the edge of your FoV there is a horrible, pink flickering mess.

Now on the whole I've actually found my Vive to be a little better visually than my friend's Oculus... what gives? ED seems to have real problems with it!

kiario · May 6, 2017

Tried a Vive with all the optimum settings HMD 2 etc..
Tried a Oculus CV1 with optimal settings and its miles better.

Mainly in the sharpness of the image. Vive is incredible fuzzy and text almost unreadable.

Its Oculus all the way. Its supperior in image quality dpt.

Franc Kaos · May 7, 2017

I think it's because most VR titles, you're looking at the big picture, but with Elite, you're staring into infinity, a pixel becomes a planet - it's the sole reason I got the Rift, it seems slightly better at the pixel definition (whereas Vive wins at Room Standing stuff and slightly better company (HTC / Steam vs Facebook / Oculus).

Gen 2 (not talking about the headsets coming out from MS & pals this summer), won't have this issue - foveated rendering and 4K optics (fingers crossed) will bring crystal clarity.

Red River · May 7, 2017

right now the highest resolution VR is Pimax 4k if you are after a sharper and no god rays or door effect experience...

Skyjack · May 7, 2017

In my experience Vive is not so much blurrier as its settings are counterintuitive, complex and finicky, and and are extremely sensitive to a three-way equilibrium, between steam SS, Elite SS and HMDQ.

with a 1080 i have absolutely no problems reading anything, no artifacts at edges and not much of the shimmer. Forgot settings, they are definitely 1.2 steam, and 1.25 HMDQ and i don't remember whether Elite SS was 1.0 or 1.25, i think 1.0 - image is miles better than stock VR Ultra, and because of system overclocks i also put back most software options, except occlusion.

moonlandermike · May 7, 2017

Skyjack said:
In my experience Vive is not so much blurrier as its settings are counterintuitive, complex and finicky, and and are extremely sensitive to a three-way equilibrium, between steam SS, Elite SS and HMDQ.

with a 1080 i have absolutely no problems reading anything, no artifacts at edges and not much of the shimmer. Forgot settings, they are definitely 1.2 steam, and 1.25 HMDQ and i don't remember whether Elite SS was 1.0 or 1.25, i think 1.0 - image is miles better than stock VR Ultra, and because of system overclocks i also put back most software options, except occlusion.

Is this based on a direct comparison? (I.e you have both headsets) or just based on your Vive experience? I didn't use any SS on either headset (nvidia or ED) and the difference in quality between the 2 was extreme to the point of me suspecting there is a bug with ED and vive. It is bar far the most noticable in stations which "twinkle" all over in the vive. Nice and non-shimmery in the oculus. Same resolution, same settings across the board. Vive seems crystal sharp on other titles.

[VR] Mad Mike · May 8, 2017

Red River said:
right now the highest resolution VR is Pimax 4k if you are after a sharper and no god rays or door effect experience...

but you lose the 6DOF, and have blurring.

there is naff all between the vive and the rift screenwise, therefore i can only conclude this has to be software. Fingers crossed for a fix one day. i feel sorry for the vive users.

FrostByghte · May 9, 2017

kiario said:
Tried a Vive with all the optimum settings HMD 2 etc..
Tried a Oculus CV1 with optimal settings and its miles better.

Mainly in the sharpness of the image. Vive is incredible fuzzy and text almost unreadable.

Its Oculus all the way. Its supperior in image quality dpt.

I had to jump in here because I have used both with the game as well. There isn't a lot of difference imho so I would wager any improvement might be more tuning and TLC of the setup than anything else. The main difference I notice between the units is how asynchronous reprojection and ASW are implemented. With the Vive I could maintain 90 fps constant with no queasy feeling in game, with the rift 45fps and I had to disable several settings to get it to bump up to 90...that ASW killed it. In quality though, I really saw no difference in either one. Text is sharp is both, so to the OP I would say keep mucking about. I enjoy fiddling with settings and getting things right. I spent a solid 5 days just messing with ED Profiler and all the settings. I think I tried about every permutation I could find and I finally settled on ingame SS of 1 with HMD set to 1.5 with most settings maxed cept for AA/Shadows. This gave me the most balance of frames per second and image quality.

Some things to try, toss out the AA or go with FXAA, drop bloom/blur, make sure your lenses are clean (yes...you might think they are but I thought mine were too until I picked up some Zeiss Pre-Moistened Lens Cleaning Wipes big difference), check the fit of the unit and go through all the checks again, try steam VR SS vs ingame SS/HMD settings. You probably did most of this but I'm just tossing it out there for informational purposes.

Aio · May 9, 2017

moonlandermike said:
Hello all,

Long time lurker, just joined the forum!

I'm a vive owner and recently got to try the game out on a friend's oculus. Dear god the Vive picture quality is terrible in comparison!

1. Shimmering, particularly bad in stations. It looks like the whole game is just running in a lower resolution or something, really horrible shimmering pixel mess over everything!
2. God rays... now obviously both headsets have this as they both use fresnel lenses (my dear old DK2 had none). But they are much worse on the Vive.
3. Psychedelic light show at edge of vision. Right at the edge of your FoV there is a horrible, pink flickering mess.

Now on the whole I've actually found my Vive to be a little better visually than my friend's Oculus... what gives? ED seems to have real problems with it!

No, the god rays are worse on the rift and there is no light show going on at the edge in the vive. Shimmering is also almost gone with correct settings but is also present in rift and when playing on a monitor. There is obviously something wrong with the vive setup.

Commander_VR · May 9, 2017

moonlandermike said:
3. Psychedelic light show at edge of vision. Right at the edge of your FoV there is a horrible, pink flickering mess.

Just to pick up on your point 3, that was an issue last year but the later Nvidia drivers fixed the issue I believe? Either way, I don't see that issue now and haven't done since the latter months of last year.

It does read like your Vive set up is massively out of date software-wise. Have you updated to the latest Nvidia drivers and Steam software? Then again, you haven't told us your PC spec?

Dalien · May 9, 2017

moonlandermike said:
Hello all,
1. Shimmering, particularly bad in stations. It looks like the whole game is just running in a lower resolution or something, really horrible shimmering pixel mess over everything!

Setting the in-game resolution to 1920x1080 with 2.0 supersampling makes it a LOT less shimmery (holo-menu text is nicely readable too), but you need a bit of a beast to run it like that. I only have an i5 and a GTX960 so it runs poorly for me with those settings

Tepescovir · May 10, 2017

I used to play on the rift and later swapped to a vive and found that the vive image is rubbish compared to the rift. However, it is more a config issue than a hardware issue.

Once i used the ed profiler to disable AA and force supersampling to 1.5 etc, then the vive image is now as good as the rift was for me

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...er-Robust-Settings-Profiler-Switcher-Detector!

Dweezil_Moon · May 10, 2017

Dalien said:
Setting the in-game resolution to 1920x1080 with 2.0 supersampling makes it a LOT less shimmery (holo-menu text is nicely readable too), but you need a bit of a beast to run it like that. I only have an i5 and a GTX960 so it runs poorly for me with those settings

set the SteamVR supersampling to 2.0 and drop the in-game SS to 0.65. Performance should be much better. If it's still too laggy, go down with the SteamVR SS and slightly up with the in-game.

BostromNZ · May 11, 2017

Biggest issue for me is the difference in scale between the two. Everything looks smaller on the Vive. I appreciate that some people don't get this but I also think some people don't realise it. I've tried everything and nothing fixes it so I use my DK2 which TBH with supersampling (which you can push higher thanks to 1080p at 75hz) and no fresnel lenses looks great. The only major issue is the SDE.