VR Discussions, Questions & Feedback

what resolution are you running with a Crystal to be able to use MSAA-Medium?

 

3988px x xxxx px per eye, so close to native res(4315px), it looks better than native with 2xMSAA(which also runs 90fps/hz locked). Heavy tweaked settings with OpenXR toolkit, fixed foveated rendering with the first 1/1 res ring somewhere around 50% streched horizontally to 180% with 16th resolution for the rest (when racing it's invisible; the 16th ring because of the big horizontal strech). Only that custom resolution (1 out of ~20 resolutions) works stably with MSAA and foveated rendering, one pixel higher or lower resolution give stripes/artifacts on the 16th resolution ring(and then it becomes visible while driving, because object disappear/look weird). I only race in daytime/morning/evening, not night and rain and by doing that I have 90fps/hz locked. I have a 4090 oced btw.

 

With Ams2 you have to differentiate between day and night AA.

During the day you can smooth things out with msaa. At night almost nothing helps except msaa on high and very high SS. The only thing that helps is an expensive graphics card.

 

Well, the difference is night and day!

 

It´s a trade off. If you hate aliasing, MSAA does the job. Period.

But AMS2 and his "father" Project Cars 2 in VR loves supersampling for details in lower resolution headsets.

If have horsepower, uses supersampling AND MSAA 2X to get rid of any aliasing and keep details.

But, in Crystal, you already have much better pixel density than Quest 2. Ramp up pixel density is a must with lower resolution headsets in AMS2 and weak GPUs, because you can have much better visuals with same performance with 1.2 supersampling in Quest 2 with MSAA LOW than with MSAA MEDIUM with fake filter sharpening, because MSAA works on edges, and always have a side effect to blur textures a little. If you hate aliasing and blurry textures, combine both and have the best of the two.

 

Hi Ernesto, thanks for your settings, I'm giving it a try today after work. Just so I fully understand, you mean 1.4 supersampling in the in game settings? I currently play with the quest2 at max resolution (so in the quest tool settings) and still distant objects look sort of pixelated while nearby objects look perfectly clear.

 

Same experience with Varjo Aero. As a bonus, the ingame supersampling slider (VR PD) doesn't do anything for me.

 

Ahh ok. OpenXR made my Crystal and Aero's rendering look a little weird so I don't use it. (it shifts my IPD or something, things look very off, almost warped?)
Using SteamVR the highest I could get it was around 3800x4300 with MSAA low and the rest on medium settings.

 

Change pixel density in Oculus Debug Tools. Ingame does nothing.

I can see improvements in clarity in Quest 2 max resolution with pixel density up to 1.4. Anything above looks the same with more performance drops. My benchmark is 90Hz locked in day, shadows HIGH, and Hockenhein night in thunderstorm with GT4 cars not going below 45FPS ASW.

After testing, I can achieve this with up to 1.2 pixel density and MSAA LOW, that looks better than MSAA MEDIUM/HIGH with sharpening in config files.

For my rig, these are the "safer" settings for 3060Ti and Quest 2 Max resolution, any weather and time of day, full grid, any cars:

 

Thanks. VR is something mysterious to me, because I am definitely not having the same experience as you using the same device (Quest2, but with AMD 6950xt). I can either play with the resolution parameter in the config file or with the supersampling parameter in the oculus debug tool, that as long as I can distinguish, they do basically the same (at some point I restart the game so many times that lose the ability to distinguish small differences). What is not even remotely negotiable to me is MSAA: the higher the better, but medium is probably already good enough. If I have it low or off, it is just a pixelated mess. I do not know if there is anything intrinsically different in how different GPU do the same stuff, or if we have different configuration somewhere else, but MSAA considerably increases the image quality for me.

Here are my settings in the debug tool:



As said, I basically see the same and get the same performance setting PixelPerDisplayOverride to 1.4 here or having in the config file:
<prop name="SharpeningStrength" sharpeningstrength="1.400000" />
<prop name="SharpeningClamp" sharpeningclamp="0.090000" />
<prop name="OffsetBias" offsetbias="1.000000" />
while having both or, as you said, increasing it further, does not really give anything extra that I can notice.
In game I have the following (in Spanish MSAA=High, anysotropic filter x16, texture resolution high, reflexes high, shadows low and everything else ultra except for grass and particles which I have in high)


Please let me know if you or somebody else see something obvious here that can be touched to improve the performance. Otherwise I am actually starting to think that the limit of the Quest2 in terms of clarity is somewhat where I am, which is quite decent, but distant objects (specially cars) do not look good, while close ones look fantastic, as well as the road. So I would say that these are good settings for anyone to start playing around, if that might help. With these settings I get stable 90Hz in day conditions (sometimes at start with a lot of cars in the screen, it drops to >75), while at night it drops if a lot of cars are on the screen to a minimum of around 60 Hz

 

The problem with the sharpening in config file is because it creates more aliasing, and distort textures. But it's almost performance free.

Pixel density improves textures quality and lower aliasing, like in 2D.

With AMD, you can try H265 encoding, without sliced encoding, and 200-300 bitrate. If performance is OK, MUCH better imagem quality. My Geforce suffers with this, H265 have crap performance.

 

You don't need to adjust Pixel Denisty in the Oculus Tray Tool. You can also do this directly in the game. Then you only need to change this once and not every time.

 

Here this don't work anymore.

And I forget to change in vídeos bitrate to fixed 700, because without this or more everything looks like soup with any settings.

Compression sucks.

 

You may have to first set PD to default in the debug tool and then reconnect.

Both settings together can cancel/interfere with each other. These settings add up and if it's too much for your GPU it won't run.

I've had something like this before with Q3 and Nvidia...maybe it helps.
Good luck

 

You inspire me to do a full reinstal of AMS2. It's working now. Before, it's stopped to save supersampling setting. Thanks a lot, less effort now.

 

I've had this before, but not with Ams2.

There are so many settings in VR that you first have to understand them all.

The GPUs have a maximum resolution. I think if you exceed this through too much super sampling, your setting will simply not be accepted at all.

At the same time, if you make changes in the oculus debug tool, you should (I think) sometimes reconnect so that the setting is adopted. Sometimes even with a restart
if you switch back and forth too much. A real little search orgy.

 

Yes. If i'm a bilionaire will be nice to get a flight to China and order a batch of headset with limited vertical FOV and 180 deg horizontal FOV display/optics, with DisplayPort connection, direct power suply and good DPI, to give for free to VR users in this forum, to create a happy community, living the dream.

EDIT: to be even better, all this in a helmet, with build in 7.1 sound and air cooling. Maybe a drink connection too.

 

Mostly a restart of the oculus service will do the job .

 

So, thanks to Ernesto, I decided to jump back into this rabbit hole of tinkering with VR settings —with his report about > SS with no AA might just be the holy grail.

I ended up losing a good 1-2 hours testing every possible combination, from SS 1.0 to 2.0, and even cranked up the SS straight in Oculus on top of SS from within the game, which of course tanked my frame rates, but I was trying to see if an extreme render size would finally stop the shadows from flickering.

All other graphics settings were maxed out, and I tested every AA option—MSAA, plus the two post-process AA modes.

I’m 99% sure I've been down this road before, but did not remember, no matter the AA, no matter the SS, those shadows just keep flickering/jittering from a distance, there was no combination to make it stop.

On other flickers—like in trees—can be fixed with MSAA on medium or high, and at least 1.2 SS, based on my tests.

Cheers

 

Those shadow problems is a problem in the mad engine if you ask me. It has always been a disaster. Not only in VR.
I stopped bothering because there where times that I was only tweaking and tweaking instead of racing. VR is awesome but definitely has it’s drawback. Until we have the hardware that can coop with the current 2D looks, it will be immersive but less good performance and GFX. We have to deal with it.