For years I’ve used Reshade (and occasionally ENB when absolutely necessary - but it’s too much of a performance hog most of the time) and driver-level controls to manage game sharpness, AA, and any number of other things, even when gaming in stereo via. TriDef and/or SuperDepth 3D. Unfortunately Reshade will not inject to the HMD (or, if it can, I’ve been unable to figure out how), and Nvidia’s driver-level AA overrides also fail to do anything, at least in the titles I have tried. I’m looking specifically at problem titles like Skyrim VR, where the only AA mode available is “blurry beyond all comprehension” (really, how the heck did they ever think TAA was an acceptable AA, period?) It’s not such a big deal in other titles that give an array of normal AA options. ENBs will, apparently, work, but I’m really trying to avoid that if possible. Does anyone know of a solution?
Hi @mr_spongeworthy , just follow it exactly. I tried this method and it works really good.
https://community.openmr.ai/t/best-quality-settings-for-steamvr-ive-found/22614
See ya. 
Honestly, just use this VR High Fidelity enb. Skyrim VR - High Fidelity ENB By SGS at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community
It is lightweight and has an awesome and advanced sharpening filter. Makes a huge difference. Sorts out the tone mapping as well. It also helps with darks on an LCD panel.
There is that solution above some have found workable. For me at the end of the day ingame AA only makes the VR image a blur.
VR SS is the only way to deal with image quality. You can try using higher SS than SteamVR recommended and for me the easiest way is to use the Per App resolution setting it at 150% or 200% if frames are not too slow ingame.
If your app is stable with it, use 200% App SS in SteamVR coupled with PiTool Fixed Foreated Rendering. That lowers the render res on the edges to lighten the load for your GPU whilst giving nice image in the center.
Though I would like to know the answer for other engines as I consider the ENB above so essential in Skyrim. I really miss not having it in other titles.
Yeah, I’ve considered trying that several times, but it’s not an “install and forget about it” solution (I really dislike multiple-dependencies, it makes installs so fragile - any update can break things on multiple levels, and if any one part of the dependency-chain becomes unsupported then the entire chain breaks). Anyway, it is also based on people that are using TAA, which I don’t do. The TAA performance hit is considerable and I like to push as many pixels as possible to the HMD for decent SS (I run Skyrim VR and 1.0 PiTool Quality and 125% Steam VR SS, with PP ON due to the focal issues Skyrim VR otherwise presents). Ideally I want something with very lightweight AA and Sharpening options. (For example Fallout 3 via. Vorpx is brilliant, as I can use traditional 2xAA, 4xAA or 8xAA at very high resolutions (a bit lower at 8x) and then use the Vorpx sharpening function to add detail. This works so, so well. FO3 that way is among the best looking VR games I’ve ever seen. Incredibly crisp and detailed yet with extremely low aliasing artifacts).
I use it without TAA.
It is incredibly sharp. You can crank the sharpening right up, it understands depth and neutralises haloing on edges.
Although there is a large amount of aliasing on trees etc.
I also crank crank up steam SS to 120-130%. I think above 120% is where the 5k+ comes into its own. Although that ENB really helps reduce the need for it.
You can also run Skyrim without PP on. You just get some mild clipping at the periphery and loading screens are out of focus.
I don’t think you will find an AA option other than the one on the table in the old Skyrim engine. You CAN mess around with the TAA levels using console commands. But that’s it.
I also get slight focal-plane issues with water and shadows. It’s not everywhere, at all angles, but it is quite annoying, and it doesn’t happen with PP on.
A question: I see a lot of suggestions to run the PiTools Quality setting very high. I played a lot with that and all it seems to do to me is the exact same thing you can do with the Steam VR SS quality slider - it is ultimately just another way to change the total number of rendered pixels. Do you have valid reasons for running the PiTools quality slider higher for some reason, rather than using the same function via. Steam VR tools?
Ah yeah, I have noticed that mentioned and did notice it at the distance sometimes. I just decided the huge performance hit wasn’t worth fixing it for. Better to get more immersion from turning everything else up and get used to the small niggles.
I recognise everyone has their own subjective balance they will want to hit though.
RE Pitool Quality setting. SweViver mentioned somewhere there is some benefit. Though I can’t remember exactly sure why myself. As i’ve experimented with it seems to be doing the same thing. I know that someone said you should set it high, then drag down Steam SS. And as Pitool is rendering above 100% you can never go below native. So you would run Steam at something like 20-30% and it would still be high. So a pass on that one. Sorry!
At this point, as far as I can tell, there is no way outside of ENB to currently inject into VR - for the most part whatever you do will effect only the display on the regular monitor (if you have the game view displayed there at all).
In term of Skyrim (so should really be a different thread), I have been able to remove nearly all shimmering without using TAA (I can’t use TAA, period, even with all the sharpening in the world, I find it way too soft, plus it “throbs” - blurring on movement and then sharpening slightly when you stop moving. Simply the worst implementation of AA of any kind that I’ve ever seen and let’s hope Bethesda moves away from it!). A big part of the fix was Better Vanilla Trees: Better Textures - Vanilla Trees at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community which almost completely removes tree shimmer. A couple suggestions here in this Skyrim VR tips guide also helped a lot, allowing me to push higher SS settings (now running at 132% SS with conservative FFR at Normal FOV): The Lightweight Lazy List - An Incremental Modding Guide - Google Docs Specifically take a look at the VR FPS Stabilizer: VR FPS Stabilizer at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community but most importantly this thing: SSE Fixes at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community which really worked well for me.
Thanks for the tips. I’d been using many of them (have installed the fps stabiliser but haven’t tried it yet). And i’ve got a frankenstien modlist that is part Sirvagg, part AerowynX, and loads of others i’ve added until it’s like a massive wobbling jenga tower.
But the tree texture is new to me and the shimmering sure is bad normally! I’ll be sure to check it out later.
The FPS Stabilizer retracts draw distances in low FPS situations - so it is very helpful if you have great performance in all except a few areas and don’t want to reduce your quality everywhere when you need it just for those few places. The last mod on that list requires a custom .dll and reworks something with how the engine handles processing of mods that cause the number of mods you have to reduce performance even if those mods should actually have zero performance impact. It definitely helped for me, and I’m not even running all that many mods compared to many people.
I’ve put a request in for Pimax to implement Reshade or equivalent support to Pitool in this thread:
I know this is something you are keen on @mr_spongeworthy. So if you add your support it’s more likely to make it happen!
Pimax are actually normally pretty good at adding community requested features.
Cheers.
Oh, and in response to this. Mirage has highlighted in other threads that Steam VR adds a blur filter at anything apart from 100% SS. And that is the reason to use Pitool for super sampling.
Hmmm, interesting. I had indeed thought about making a feature request myself, but figured it would fall on deaf ears. I’ll hop over to that thread. Being able to use the PiTool to force ReShade to Inject would be brilliant and could actually be a big advantage for Pimax. (For example, my “no TAA ever” solution to FO4 in TriDef (and SuperDepth3d for a while as well) was BOTH FXAA and SMAA in ReShade plus a sharpening tool (can’t remember which one) and filmgrain with a bit of reduced saturation. Almost zero performance loss, basically zero aliasing, extremely sharp, wonderfully gritty, and none of the downsides of TAA. If I could do this in Skyrim VR it would look downright glorious).
As for SteamVR adding a bit of Blur with SS, you may be correct. I turned SteamVR SS to 100% and set PiTool to 125% as well, and things did seem to look a bit sharper, but also had a bit more aliasing (remember, I’m not using TAA). However, my performance was noticeably worse in that configuration, which makes essentially zero sense as my SteamVR SS setting is 136%. Only thing I can think is that 1.25 in PiTool does not mean “125%”. Problem is, anyway, that without a through-the-lens camera setup I don’t know how much of my perceived difference is real and how much is just the placebo effect when talking about relatively small variations in the settings. (I can sure see a heck of a difference though if I go to insane SS values and wander around for a minute or two at like 30fps. Things really do get quite crisp way up at like 180%SS+, but aliasing never really goes away).
Finally, if anyone’s paying attention to the off-topic Skyrim VR portion of this thread, take a look at my posts on the FPS Stabilizer nexus page. You can alter a lot more variables that the mod alters by default. I’ve actually removed all the default variables and am using it to modify object, actor and item draw distances in real-time, which seems to pretty well for me (and why go through all the bother of getting DynDOLOD all setup and working properly only to turn off distant land LODs?).
Yeah. It would be really awesome if they implemented it.
Thanks for the info on the extra customisation possibilities with the FPS stabiliser. I will definitely check that out!
One think people forget is that increased SS increases sharpness no different than VSR and DSR does on flat displays.
I was able to get an ENB setup working SVR, but as always it has quite the performance cost compared to ReShade. It’s also much more difficult to control what filters you want to use etc. But it works where ReShade does not, so I guess that’s what we are stuck with for now. I was able to use FXAA plus sharpening in ENB profile and SVR looks much better this way; very little aliasing and nearly as sharp.
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.