Better Quality in Vive Business Streaming

[thedrone]

8 hours ago, evertec said:

When you say basically a wired Vive Pro 2 is it actually close, like better than Valve Index, Quest 2 sharpness? It's still nowhere near the Reverb G2 sharpness for me, and not even the Quest 2 sharpness. Not sure if I did something wrong or if people are just giving it a benefit of doubt given how bad it was before.

I feel like we're entering subjective audiophile-level territory where frame of reference and individual variation in perception start to matter more than any objective measurement.

My experience with the Vive Pro 2 was that its visuals are better than Index, but I wasn't blown away by the difference. The performance cost for the added clarity wasn't worth it to me, because I was constantly in reprojection (2080Ti) which caused unbearable ghosting. Lowering the graphical settings made it easier to hit 90 or 120 FPS, but also made the difference in quality seem kind of trivial.

There's a high compute cost for native pixel-for-pixel rendering and I feel like I ultimately end up with a higher quality image in the Focus 3, even though it's downsampling, upsampling, compressing, decompressing, adding filters, sharpening, etc -- it tricks me, but I find the trickery really convincing so it works for me. You mentioned before how the grainy, soft nature of the image was really bothersome. I definitely noticed that before this update but no longer do.

The sweet spot on these lenses is very small, so IPD and positioning are very important. I don't think this headset works very well ergonomically for people with sunk eyes; you really need to get your eyeballs close to the lenses. That might account for the difference in experience.

I've been playing Wanderer and I am genuinely blown away by how good it looks.

 

[jefmes]

14 hours ago, Raeldor said:

Awesome.  Thanks for reporting back.  Did you have RS set to 1.4?  That made the biggest quality difference for me; way bigger than the data rate selection.

I think it's a great headset, but my biggest disappointment right now is the optics.  Compared to the Quest 2 there is a lot of distortion away from the center, which for a business oriented headset where you're likely reading a lot of text is very surprising.  I really wish they would offer an upgraded lens solution, but I don't think that will ever happen.  Love that it's AIO and the wider FOV though, obviously.

I actually haven't tried changing the RS settings, I was trying to stick with the app defaults for to avoid reporting back issues I might have caused myself. 🙂  Now that I know the bandwidth shouldn't be a problem I think I'll give some of those other settings a try.

@HackPerception Would there be any way we could get some more info on what/if the higher bitrate options have on some of those other parameters in the .json file? Some are kind of obvious of course, but I'm not sure what the OF, BR, and CP tags are. I'm assuming PS is "preset" and then if Raeldor is correct RS is resolution scaling to some effect?

            "PS": 0,

            "RS": 1.0,

            "OF": 1.0,

            "RX": 2048,

            "RY": 2048,

            "BR": 100000000,

            "CP": 1

 

Edited March 14, 2022 by jefmes

[evertec]

26 minutes ago, thedrone said:

I feel like we're entering subjective audiophile-level territory where frame of reference and individual variation in perception start to matter more than any objective measurement.

My experience with the Vive Pro 2 was that its visuals are better than Index, but I wasn't blown away by the difference. The performance cost for the added clarity wasn't worth it to me, because I was constantly in reprojection (2080Ti) which caused unbearable ghosting. Lowering the graphical settings made it easier to hit 90 or 120 FPS, but also made the difference in quality seem kind of trivial.

The sweet spot on these lenses is very small, so IPD and positioning are very important. I don't think this headset works very well ergonomically for people with sunk eyes; you really need to get your eyeballs close to the lenses. That might account for the difference in experience.
 

 

Hmm, yes, the lens sweet spot could be affected by eye relief, but that's a separate issue to what I'm talking about right now. I'm starting to wonder if there's just something HTC is doing with downscaling on both the Vive pro 2 and the Focus 3 that's hindering its ability to fully utilize its high resolution displays. I've never tried the Pro 2, but for you to say you weren't blown away by the difference between it and the Index makes me wonder since the HP Reverb G2 really did/does blow me away with the difference between the Index. And that's even using a 2080ti (though I have a 3090 now).

My biggest gripe is that even with the improvements in the newest beta, it still looks far worse than the Quest 2 (not even counting the small sweet spot, I'm just talking about clarity). That just shouldn't happen, since the Focus 3 has a 70% higher resolution. Even if you factor the bigger FOV that's still plenty higher of a pixel density. So I just don't understand how it could look so much blurrier, even in the center where I'm getting good focus on the lenses.

[Tausendberg]

Maybe you could try to take some screenshots within a game at a certain angle inside of the Quest 2 and try to get the same angle and take a screenshot within the Focus 3 and then we could compare where the issues are?

[Raeldor]

6 hours ago, evertec said:

Hmm, yes, the lens sweet spot could be affected by eye relief, but that's a separate issue to what I'm talking about right now. I'm starting to wonder if there's just something HTC is doing with downscaling on both the Vive pro 2 and the Focus 3 that's hindering its ability to fully utilize its high resolution displays. I've never tried the Pro 2, but for you to say you weren't blown away by the difference between it and the Index makes me wonder since the HP Reverb G2 really did/does blow me away with the difference between the Index. And that's even using a 2080ti (though I have a 3090 now).

My biggest gripe is that even with the improvements in the newest beta, it still looks far worse than the Quest 2 (not even counting the small sweet spot, I'm just talking about clarity). That just shouldn't happen, since the Focus 3 has a 70% higher resolution. Even if you factor the bigger FOV that's still plenty higher of a pixel density. So I just don't understand how it could look so much blurrier, even in the center where I'm getting good focus on the lenses.

Did you try setting RS = 1.4?  This ups the resolution sent to the headset.  You can see the true resolution at the top of the settings screen in VBS and the difference it makes.  For me that made the biggest difference in clarity.

[Steve76]

Perhaps HTC should think about to involve the guy from Virtual Desktop https://www.vrdesktop.net/ as he showed already Quest/Meta how to handle everything and is probably still better than the AirLink solution (I stopped using AirLink as Virtual Desktop is way better). 

[evertec]

7 hours ago, Raeldor said:

Did you try setting RS = 1.4?  This ups the resolution sent to the headset.  You can see the true resolution at the top of the settings screen in VBS and the difference it makes.  For me that made the biggest difference in clarity.

Yes, I do have that set. It doesn't seem to do any different than setting the steamvr res higher though. It still looks like it's being downscaled at some point through the process instead of running at native res.

[Raeldor]

18 minutes ago, evertec said:

Yes, I do have that set. It doesn't seem to do any different than setting the steamvr res higher though. It still looks like it's being downscaled at some point through the process instead of running at native res.

I think the Steam VR internal render resolution is separate and should be settable in the Steam VR settings.  You can even set for individual game in there.  The RS setting I think it the resolution at which the frames are sent to the headset; hence why you can see it change in the VBS app itself.

[evertec]

So I took some screenshots, and now I'm thinking the clarity difference may be due to the lenses after all. It's hard to get exactly the same distance and angle, but the screenshots look really good on the focus 3. So maybe I just have an eye relief that's not optimal for this. Or maybe the Oculus screenshot tool compresses more, I'm not sure, because after trying both again it really does look like the focus 3 has more aliasing in the background objects, not just a blurring of the lenses.

Edited March 15, 2022 by evertec

[Raeldor]

17 minutes ago, evertec said:

So I took some screenshots, and now I'm thinking the clarity difference may be due to the lenses after all. It's hard to get exactly the same distance and angle, but the screenshots look really good on the focus 3. So maybe I just have an eye relief that's not optimal for this. Or maybe the Oculus screenshot tool compresses more, I'm not sure, because after trying both again it really does look like the focus 3 has more aliasing in the background objects, not just a blurring of the lenses.

Yeah, I was quite disappointed in the lenses after hearing so much hype about them.  The image quickly becomes distorted away from the center making text on the edge unreadable, unlike the Quest 2 lenses that are actually pretty good right up to the edge.  And the god rays are really bad.  It doesn't help that facial interface and foam put your eyes further away from the lenses than is optimal either.  If you take the facial interface off and look through the lens at a closer distance it actually becomes a little better (though still not as good as Quest 2).  If there was a third party facial interface that would get your eyes closer to the lens I think it would help.

Also, I noticed that the positioning in the virtual environment is a little different.  The menu in Half-Life Alyx (and also the Steam VR menu) seems further away than on the Quest 2.  I'm not sure if this is due to a software FOV setting.