What is the actual Resolution?

[thedevilsjester]

The specs for the (normal) Vive say it has a resolution of 1080×1200 per eye.  When I look in SteamVR for the Resolution Adjustment, with the slider at 100% it says 1512x1680 per eye but if the screen resolution is what we are going off of, this is actually 140%.  Is SteamVR just pretending that 140% is 100% or am I missing something?

 

There are some titles that I am getting terrible performance for with the Vive, that I get decent performance for with the Rift (like Obduction), so I was wondering if this increase in resolution might be a contributing factor.  Does the Rift also have a baked in 1.4 SS?

 

[HackPerception]

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The resolution of the panels are 1080x1200 per eye. 

 

This is one of those cases where you're getting confusing by the front facing UI which only tells a fraction of the story. SteamVR includes the "eye buffer" in these calculations - that's where the extra 40% is. I can't really do it justice in text but what's displayed on the panels is warped out of the compositor and the lenses un-warp them into the final image you precieve. The hardware and software work in tandem to make pixels on the panel appear to be even in size and location despite the pixel elements being various distances from the lenses. That's a reason why VR lenses are variations of Fresnels and why non-Fresneled lenses have barrel distortion. 

 

In short, the application needs to render out the scene that will be displayed to the panel at a minimum resolution, plus an extra block of pixels to be used to generate the eye buffer which then gets warped and distorted to fit the panels. In the case of Vive and Oculus, 1.4 is that Value (now that SteamVR uses a liner relationship to describe it's sampling).

It's important to remember that this is only the application resolution setting we're talking about - there's several places you can apply a multiplier. That setting specifically address the application target render multiplier which essentially is the sampling size from OpenVR into Unity/Unreal.

 

Some games may have bad perf because they're not optimized well and they're relying on Oculus AWS to make up for lapses in their perf optimization. Are you using Motion smoothing? Have a decent GPU? In some cases, it could be that some apps are using things like Nvidia VR works when others aren't. Things like lens match shading are simply not used across the board and things like AWS and motion smoothing step in to try and fill the gap on the compositor level. 

[thedevilsjester]

I am just trying to find the reason that certain games on the Rift will perform significantly better, and look quite a bit better, than those same games, with the same settings on the Vive.  Some of this can be attributed to ASW, since I am using AMD which OVR does not currently support with its Motion Smoothing , but others are more dramatic.

 

The 1.4 mutiplier looked like a smoking gun, but is it a red herring?  What I mean is that, does the Rift also internally multiply the resolution like this if set to 1.0/100%?

 

My GPU is not amazing, its barely capable of having an enjoyable VR experiance (most games it maintains 90 FPS with little to no room for error), but it seems that my GPU struggles even more with the Vive.

 

One of the worst offenders is Robo Recall, which with the Rift, runs flawlessly.  No performance issues what so ever and it looks great.  With the Vive it looks terrible and stutters constantly.  I don't know how much of this is the fault of ReVive, and how much of it would be alievated with Motion Smoothing; but there are many others that take a hit (that are SteamVR games).

 

Does the Vive just require considerable more Oomph than the Rift to get the same games to run with the same visual quality and performance or could it be something else? 

[HackPerception]

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I don't really use Oculus gear very often - I'm not keen on the idea of installing Facebook runtimes/programs to any device so I'm not super keen on commenting on their approach to eye masks. I know they did reduce the resolution of the masks in 2015 but that's where my knowledge drops off. It sounds like you'd still be on Async on SteamVR titles and using AWS when using Oculus - that'd definitely make a huge perf difference and is almost undoubtedly what you're bumping against. 

 

Using something like ReVive will definitely have perf loss. You're comparing a nativeSDK runtime which lacks OpenVR/SteamVR to a compatibility layer hack that tries to approimxate SDK support. It's certainly going to be alot more resource dependent because it has to do a bunch of extra calculations and shuttle data around.

 

The GTX2060 may be something to look at in your case - it's more powerful than a 1070Ti and cheaper than the launch price for that card. That said, Valve has stated that they're working on bringing smoothing to AMD - no guesses as to if it will cover your specific chipset though. Motion smoothing is like night and day for low spec systems which is why communities made such a big deal over it - it's pretty dope. 

[thedevilsjester]

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 wrote:

 

I don't really use Oculus gear very often - I'm not keen on the idea of installing Facebook runtimes/programs to any device

 

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Oculus is (now) owned by Facebook, but it does not install or run any Facebook applications of any kind.  So if this is a worry (it definitly was one of mine) it shoudn't be.  (I won't ever buy anything on the Oculus store, but because I bought a Rift, I have some, quite enjoyable, free titles)

 

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 wrote:

It sounds like you'd still be on Async on SteamVR titles and using AWS when using Oculus - that'd definitely make a huge perf difference and is almost undoubtedly what you're bumping against. 

 

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I am not hitting ASW on Oculus very often.  While this might have some impact, its negligable.

 

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 wrote:

 

 

Using something like ReVive will definitely have perf loss. You're comparing a nativeSDK runtime which lacks OpenVR/SteamVR to a compatibility layer hack that tries to approimxate SDK support. It's certainly going to be alot more resource dependent because it has to do a bunch of extra calculations and shuttle data around.

I know that ReVive would have a performance impact, but from what I know of how it works (which, admittedly is not much) I was under the impression that most of the processing for ReVive is done at the CPU level.  My CPU is practically idle when playing VR games (there should be plenty of overhead for a translation layer)

 

It also looks really bad.  The graphics take a big hit.  Is this something that happens with ReVive?

 

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 wrote:

 

The GTX2060 may be something to look at in your case - it's more powerful than a 1070Ti and cheaper

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I cannot upgrade the graphics in this computer and it will be probably another 2-3 years at least before its successor is released.  I understand that I am not going to have the most optimal experience, I am just trying to get roughly the same performance (and quality) with my Vive as I got with my Rift.  If the Vive is just inherently slower, then I will deal with that, but if its just a configuration issue, I would like to get it working better.