The aliasing problem with Elite comes down to the combination of two things: 1) The graphics rely on relatively detailed geometry, and on reflective, highly specular, materials on objects made smoother using normal maps, even when things are seen at great distance – there are LODs, but they do not necessarily simplify to the degree/in the manner, that makes them look “smooth” at low resolutions (a simplification that does not come free, in more than one way); And 2) The engine uses deferred rendering, and MSAA does not work with that, so we’re left relying either on post-processing AA, which blurs the image, or full-screen supersampling, which increases the work load considerably. The same issue can be seen in just about every VR title that runs on UE4. There have been suggestions of using e.g. a Temporal AA implementation, for a result not quite as bad as FXAA/SMAAA, but I have not been impressed by what I have seen of such – It does fill in detail, using material from previous frames, but you get a degree of nauseating motion blur, on top of the spatial one (depending on how you dial it in).
I skim FDev’s ED forum daily, but can not recall any word at all from them about the matter, ever.
And in there first statement they say “We’re implementing a fix shortly which will improve the quality of focus on the UI”
and you no how they fixed it?, they just moved the UI closer to the user.
I guess I can see how what I wrote can be misread as a suggestion ED uses UE4, rather than UE4 just being used as an example of how all deferred rendering suffers from aliasing issues…
I know perfectly well that they worked around legibility by pulling in UI panels.You know what the fundamental problem is? -The low resolution of current HMDs; In particular the Vive suffers, due to having 20% lower resolution than the Rift (but has 20% better FOV, in trade). I am disappointed that they didn’t make it a proper fix, by doing something like applying a texture filtering method more tuned for quality than performance with small output bitmaps, for text panels, but what can you do… overall, supersampling helps with that issue and makes everything else look better, too; Just too bad about the increased work load.
As for the actual matter: I would not take a statement that they keep looking for a good antialiasing algorithm, and hope to find one soon, as any sort of promise.
The problem with the blurry text, I meant right at that point; Not the aliasing. These are two (mostly) separate issues, and of course the same things manifests in the mirror window as in the headset - it is the same image (right eye, I believe), just cropped and without lens distortion.
That is the nature of the scale of the game and its content. You are watching a lot of hard and shiny, and sometimes “skinny” geometry from really far away, whereas most experiences that are built for VR tends to keep your attention at a fairly close range . The crawling ants along the edges become much less annoying, when not everything is edges (e.g. mail slot toaster rack, seen from far off, versus close up). :7
The worst of the aliasing in Elite is not polygon edges, though, but specular aliasing on highly reflective surfaces. I try to cling to a desperate hope that maybe somebody will take some time to address that issue (with whatever shader/envmap/normalmap tweaking that might entail), when they update the lighting model for the Q4 update of the game…
(EDIT: I don’t think I’d want them to rebuild the entire game for forward rendering (which does allow MSAA), though. There is a reason everybody went through hard times getting deferred working, and switched over to it. In particular, this game benefits from what it does for dynamic lighting - there are a lot of light sources in Elite :7.)
(EDIT2: By the way: If you have a 1080Ti, you owe it to yourself to max out both “HMD Quality”, and “Supersampling” (which should never be touched, before the former is already at max) just once, just to see what it does for the image quality. The game will switch over to really low detail mipmaps (despite having plenty of VRAM to spare), and framerates will drop through the floor, but man - if only the game could otherwise look like that all the time. :7 )
Gre[quote=“mp4x, post:48, topic:5587, full:true”]Would the person recording the next Video of Elite, please press CTRL-F (display FPS) before recording?[/quote]
Great idea. Too bad it’s useless. Due to the way the lens distorts the image, the FPS (and anything in any corner) is cut off.
Apparently, there’s no good solution to get the FPS on screen. There’s a Rift-only debug tool which will do it, but unfortunately, that won’t us. Maybe, if enough of us ask for it, Pimax will add a FPS display to Piplay.
The gentleman is pointing a camera inside the HMD. During this process, he can simply pull the camera away and point it at the mirror windows on the desktop, so that we can consolidate what we are seeing. It’s not rocket surgery.
I’ve read that it’s not that simple. The FPS on the monitor is the framerate of the monitor display, which apparently is NOT the same as the framerate of the headset. I’m not sure if that is the case for the Pimax, but I’ve seen complaints about the Rift (and I think, the Vive too).
I have both Vive and Rift, I’ll try it when I get home. It’ll be fine, though. Additionally, he could just use OBS to capture a box around the FPS counter part of the mirror window, and overlay that onto the HMD cam capture so we can see both at the same time…
The FPS counter on screen is the same as the headset,its not the same as the desktop screen.
Apparently It is that simple. My desktop screens are all 60mhz - They’re not capable of displaying 90FPS, the number you see is my HMD FPS. I’ve never actually seen the accuracy of that number (FPS counter in Elite) questioned before, and I’ve been active on the Elite forums and had VR since September 2016…
I didn’t bother filming the lenses themselves as this is just proof of concept. So, in contrast to what you said; it’s not useless, and it is a simple solution that WILL help us(anyone wanting to know what FPS he’s getting.)
Do you know at which point of the rendering pipeline is the FPS measured? I imagine if it is built into Cobra engine it may measure FPS at engine output (i.e. supersampled image), instead of at the output of VR compositor (pre-lens transformed image).
Could you do the test in some intensive scene where ASW kicks in and check what the FPS on the monitor displays?
EDIT: Apparently if you are running NVidia card you should be able to do quite thorough benchmark using NVidia FCAT VR
I always limit the fps when that happens, no point having the system render more frames than the monitor can display as that just burns electricity and shortens the life span of your components
