Steam vr resolution settings

[camera]

is it possible to edit the steam vr resolution settings to exactly match hmd screen resolution to minimise wasted gpu processing.?

i can set 2560 for the horizontal res but the vertical res is way above what the pimax needs 2150ish if this can match the pimax surely it would be better all round??

s

[Thall]

What FOV setting are you using? You’re only going to be close to 16:9 on each screen at large FOV. Vertical FOV is never clipped regardless of the setting. Parallel projections will also throw this number off.

Even then, I’m pretty sure its never exactly 16:9 aspect ratio. It’s a complicated topic too, because the amount of ‘extra’ sampling required for a good image is entirely dependent on the HMD.

Take the Oculus quest for example. Gen 1 steamvr headsets, the vive and rift, required a 1.4x SS applied to the warped VR image to look okay, so even though the res per eye was 1200x1080, you were rendering much higher (1512x1680 per eye. Notice this is clearly not a dilation, but a geometric transform of the image that does not maintain the aspect ratio). The quest on the other hand has screens with a resolution of 1660x1440 and yet the default render res is a measly 1280x1280 (again, this is not the same aspect ratio as the panel), and yet it looks far better than gen 1 headsets with a lower render res!

What I’m trying to say is we do not entirely understand the graphics pipeline for pimax headsets. Their distortion curvature cannot be compared to anything on the market, and so the pixels rendered won’t make sense when reading the panel resolution. Other users can however validate what settings look good to them. I can say for sure that going below 80% in steamVR starts to look noticably worse on my 5k, and that the 5k definitely does need a decent chunk of sampling above native panel res.

[camera]

fov normal for me, arent the pixels in the display the pixels that need rendering? i cant wrap my head around why the image needs rendering bigger then messed with to fit it to the hmd.

are you saying as pimax know the lens parameters and display properties/and position relative to lens and users eyeballs they apply another level of image messing on top of what either steam/oculus would do? is there a way of taking both oculus and steam out of the equation so Pimax can apply only one (its own) image manipulation to fit their hmd.?

for a while i was using oculus thru pimax to run my game but found the experience variable too much making me constantly chase a better set up and never quite getting there ive recently moved back to steam ( i think is a resource hog) which i hate with a passion as its buggy and constantly requires resetting.

with the hardware i have i should be in vr heaven but im mostly in vr hell

s

[Willyfisch]

VR rendering does not work the same way, as you know it from game rendering on a 2D display.

In VR, the pixels of the rendered game frame do not get matched to the display panel pixels. First, several other things happen, distortion correction being one of them and you’ll end up with a very different mapping from game resolution pixels to pixels of the actual VR display panels.

The higher the resolution of the rendered frame from the game, the more precise the mapping to the final display panel will be and the clearer and better the final image in the VR headset will look.

As a side note, for regular 2D display gaming, although the mapping of rendered frame to display pixels is 1 to 1, that doesn’t mean rendering at higher resolutions than native is “wasted” there either. Although there are diminishing returns, the frame will look better if you render at higher resolutions, because it will allow the final pixel color values to be sampled from several points within a pixel, instead of the center of the pixel. Rendering at higher than native resolution will give you the visually best possible anti-aliasing, best possible texture filtering, etc. although at a high cost.
If you have GPU power to spare, rendering at higher resolution will always yield the visually best results.

[eight.one]

I asked myself this question a lot lately. I settled for around 3200x3500 per eye in SteamVR. As going above does not improve the clarity anymore for me.
Also SteamVR Home/the SteamUI will not look sharper if you up the render resolution. Because it has something like dynamic resolution scaling. This will rescale the image depending on what it thinks is best for your system. You can change the steamvr .txt file to 8000 for the max recommended resolution, here must be a tutorial in the forum.