Updated 16/01/18 - Changed setup and performance tips and Glossary
Hello,
I've been meaning to do this for a while and with the recent WMR black friday headset sales and questions I'm seeing now is probably a good time.
I'm intending this to be a living document, with information being added over time particularly around troubleshooting and performace and hopefully being a good resource for those using WMR. Please let me know if I talk out of my rear with anything written below, I'd like this to be factual more than opinion but we'll see how that works
Also, please comment if you think that there is anything worth including that you don't see here.
Information/FAQ:
Installation:
work in progress
- The main things to be aware of are:
Performance tips:
Troubleshooting:
Glossary:
AMOLED - Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diodes. AMOLED displays can appear more vibrant than LCD with deeper blacks
Direct Mode - On means that Windows does NOT see the headset as another monitor. Not using Direct Mode may cause issues and lower performance
FOV - Field of view. The angle the headset shows an image in front of your eyes.
Godrays - an artifact of the fresnel lenses used in front of the display that can produce rings of light
IPD - Interpupillary Distance. The distance between your eyes.
LCD - Liquid Crystal Display. All pixels are lit which means that blacks can appear as grey
Motion reprojection - Using this will half the FPS needing to be generated by the graphics card and therefore lower the demands on the card (although by less than half). Essentially you are still seeing 90fps in the headset with every other frame generated by prediction from the previous frame(s)
SDE - Screen Door Effect. In most displays it is possible to see the gaps between the pixels on the display, like you're looking through an insect stopping screen door
WMR - Windows Mixed Reality
to be continued
Addendum:
The IPD can be changed manually outside of the recommended range via the registry:
Computer\HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-830549709-2298230702-1299955731-1001\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Holographic\
Manually entering a value works, even if the value is >67
Hello,
I've been meaning to do this for a while and with the recent WMR black friday headset sales and questions I'm seeing now is probably a good time.
I'm intending this to be a living document, with information being added over time particularly around troubleshooting and performace and hopefully being a good resource for those using WMR. Please let me know if I talk out of my rear with anything written below, I'd like this to be factual more than opinion but we'll see how that works
Also, please comment if you think that there is anything worth including that you don't see here.
Information/FAQ:
You need to be running Windows 10 for WMR headsets.
Frontier's official minimum spec for running ED in VR are linked below. Obviously this will depend on the resolution of the headset with the Rift and Vive (original) having a lower resolution than the WMR headsets, Vive Pro is equivalent and PIMAX models something else. (See performance for a more detailed discussion) :
https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=253
Microsoft's own FAQ and table showing the WMR specs:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi.../before-you-buy-faqs#technical-specifications
Measuring your IPD, start here:
https://www.wikihow.com/Measure-Your-Interpupillary-Distance
There main points for Windows Mixed Reality headsets are:
Frontier's official minimum spec for running ED in VR are linked below. Obviously this will depend on the resolution of the headset with the Rift and Vive (original) having a lower resolution than the WMR headsets, Vive Pro is equivalent and PIMAX models something else. (See performance for a more detailed discussion) :
https://support.frontier.co.uk/kb/faq.php?id=253
Microsoft's own FAQ and table showing the WMR specs:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi.../before-you-buy-faqs#technical-specifications
Measuring your IPD, start here:
https://www.wikihow.com/Measure-Your-Interpupillary-Distance
There main points for Windows Mixed Reality headsets are:
- There are 5 current WMR Headsets which share the following specs. These are 4 WMR headsets from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and the Lenovo Explorer Headset which appears to have been discontinued (this is a shame as it was widely regarded as the best of this batch of headsets
- LCD screens with 1440*1440 per eye
- 105 degrees FOV, (the Asus is 95 degrees)
- They all use inside out tracking which means that no base stations are required for 6 DoF head movement
- Front hinged display, so you can flip the headset up
- Display refresh rate up to 90 Hz (native)
- Audio out and microphone support through 3.5mm jack
- Software only IPD adjustment between 59 and 67mm. NOTE: beware getting a WMR headset if you IPD is outside this range, it can be manually extended (see setup/performance) or look into the Samsung's below
- and the 2 Samsung headsets, the Odyssey and the Odyssey+ which differ in that they have:
- AMOLED screens with 1600*1440 per eye
- 110 degrees FOV
- inside out tracking
- No hinged display
- Integrated AKG headphones and dual array mics (I've read good things about these headphones, although not been able to try them myself yet)
- Hardware IPD adjustment between 60 and 72
Installation:
- Plug in your WMR headset to an HDMI port on your graphics card and a USB 3.0 or 3.1 port (blue) (see troubleshooting for more info)
- The Mixed Reality Portal will install. When complete close the portal
- Install Steam (Note: this is free although you will need a Steam account. However, it does NOT matter if you own Elite: Dangerous on Steam or from FD directly to be able to use VR in game)
- Within Steam search for and install Steam VR
- Within Steam search for and install Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR
- When complete reboot. See troubleshooting below if there are any problems.
- Run Elite, go to Options, Graphics and change the 3D setting from None to HMD Headphones and enjoy (Note: This is NOT under display options but lower down on the front graphics page. When you do this and start ED, SteamVR and the Mixed Reality Portal will automatically start.)
- I highly recommend Dr Kaii's ED Profiler. Get it at the following link and if you find it useful give him a donation, it's a great piece of work and makes setup so much easier: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...er-Robust-Settings-Profiler-Switcher-Detector!
work in progress
- The main things to be aware of are:
- Your first priority is to get the headset comfortable with your eyes at the correct spot in front of the lenses. Note that (at least on the Lenovo Explorer) the padding on the band can be moved using velcro to help it sit on your head, rather than pinch which I find painful.
- Set software IPD through the mixed reality portal, the 3 dots at the bottom left and Settings, Headset Display and Calibration. This is a good place to start to measure your IPD: https://www.wikihow.com/Measure-Your-Interpupillary-Distance
- Setting the resolution and upscaling. It's best to use SteamVR setting over Elite's HMD setting over Elite's SS setting as per HeaveyGroovez excellent post here. This is done in a combination of 3 places:
- SteamVR, click on the version number to show the menu, click settings and video. 140% is effectively 1.5 Super Sampling
- Changing HMD quality through Elite graphics settings
- Changing SS through Elite graphics settings
- The performance impact of the above 3 settings stack while the quality doesn't. Having been messing around with it a lot I'd personally recommend using SteamVR setting only and fine tuning until you get a nice balance on clarity and FPS
- Enable Direct Mode through Steam VR, settings, developer. This means that Windows doesn't see the headset as an additional monitor/extended display which can have a performance impact and can issues displaying the game
- disable USB power management for the headset. This can be done through Steam VR settings, USB or Windows Device Manager
Performance tips:
- Physical cores matter, >=6 is a noticable improvement on 4, hyperthreading or not. A post from Morbad talked about changing the no. of threads that Elite uses and although it won't affect the heavy render threads it could give a boost to a 4 core processor, worth trying at least. to be updated, PM me till then
- An OC'd Ryzen 1600 doesn't bottleneck a 1080ti
- Make sure renderTargetScale=2 (this is now the default setting for Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR if you've updated after 15/1/19). By default the setting is in the file "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\MixedRealityVRDriver\resources\settings\default.vrsettings". Close SteamVR before amending
- You can turn on motion reprojection (the WMR equivalent of the Oculus Rift Asynchronous Spacewarp by amending the same file above, I think it's a good implementation. See the description here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...enabling-motion-reprojection-for-steamvr-apps
"motionReprojectionMode" : "auto",
"motionReprojectionIndicatorEnabled" : true,
- For Odyssey+ users, try turning off anti-aliasing. With the SDE tech already blurring the image I find it helps sharpen the textTroubleshooting:
- Not all USB's ports are the same. On my new motherboard with built in USB 3.1 gen 1 and gen 2 it wouldn't work on the gen 2 ports. On my previous machine I had to buy a USB 3.0 PCI card as the built in USB 3.0 just didn't work. (note: USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 gen 1 are functionally identical)
- If the headset just goes black after 10-15 minutes in game check the power management settings on the headset and turn them off. As of 3.3 there are 2 bugs which can produce this effect, not fixed on 16/1/19. One can cause the game to freeze with the sound continuing, the other can cause a black screen in the headset and mirror window and no sound. With either there is no way to cleanly close the game
- The sweetspot in WMR headsets is small but it shouldn't be ridiculously so. If it seems that it is then spend time on getting the headset in the right position and IPD set correctly.
- IRQ conflicts can cause stutters. Download MSI Util v.2, run as administrator and change the headset to msi instead of irq.
Glossary:
AMOLED - Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diodes. AMOLED displays can appear more vibrant than LCD with deeper blacks
Direct Mode - On means that Windows does NOT see the headset as another monitor. Not using Direct Mode may cause issues and lower performance
FOV - Field of view. The angle the headset shows an image in front of your eyes.
Godrays - an artifact of the fresnel lenses used in front of the display that can produce rings of light
IPD - Interpupillary Distance. The distance between your eyes.
LCD - Liquid Crystal Display. All pixels are lit which means that blacks can appear as grey
Motion reprojection - Using this will half the FPS needing to be generated by the graphics card and therefore lower the demands on the card (although by less than half). Essentially you are still seeing 90fps in the headset with every other frame generated by prediction from the previous frame(s)
SDE - Screen Door Effect. In most displays it is possible to see the gaps between the pixels on the display, like you're looking through an insect stopping screen door
WMR - Windows Mixed Reality
to be continued
Addendum:
The IPD can be changed manually outside of the recommended range via the registry:
Computer\HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-830549709-2298230702-1299955731-1001\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Holographic\
Manually entering a value works, even if the value is >67
Last edited:
