Meant to be Seen

Hi There,

I tried to look around, here and elsewhere, but couldn't find anything about this...
As per subject, I'd like someone to chip in on what I'm seeing on my system. I'm running an Eyefinity setup (5x1 Portrait) on a Radeon 6990 (running driver version 13.4) and when the rift is plugged in, I have 3 independent monitors and one cloning the Rift (unfortunately I have "only" 5 monitor inputs . Now, the clone is running at 1080p (like the other 3) and so is the Rift! The OSD on the rift shows 1920x1080@60HZ when turning on, and when I remove the lenses I can see that it's effectively mirroring the entire screen. As per screenshot, my Catalyst picks it up as to up 1920x1200@60HZ, and same if for Windows, go figure!
I'm running the demos full screen or in a window at 1080p as well. I can DEFINITELY tell there is a difference when running them at the "supposed" max resolution of 1280x800@60HZ. So, what's going on?? Is this the norm for everyone?

Thanks!

Yeah that makes sense, its just upscaling from the native resolution. I noticed the options for the Tuscany demo ran pretty high with resolution options so I figured that's what they were available for, aside from additional displays mirroring what the Rift was seeing. Good to hear there's a noticeable difference in image quality once you bump up the res, I'll def be trying this with mine once it arrives.

Yes. Windows shows you the max. accepted resolution from the device, which is 1920x1200.

You can run it at that resolution (eats more performance, adds a bit of lag through the rescaling, but it also is a bit "poor mans anti aliasing") or you can run it in the native resolution (the opposite).

GeraldT wrote:Yes. Windows shows you the max. accepted resolution from the device, which is 1920x1200.

You can run it at that resolution (eats more performance, adds a bit of lag through the rescaling, but it also is a bit "poor mans anti aliasing") or you can run it in the native resolution (the opposite).

I'm not really understanding...I don't perceive any added lag, in fact I find the increased resolution to give a smoother and sharper experience. As I'm running a 5 1080p monitors setup, my GPU and subsystem is not impacted at all by rendering on a single screen, even when I'm (obviously) running the demos at "Fantastic" detail level (I always get waaay more than 100FPS).

If the system can hold it, why would anyone run at the "native resolution"?? I'm clearly, literally, not seeing the catch!

there is no catch - if you don't perceive the added lag and your system can handle it, perfect. the added anti aliasing is what you see as "smoother"

But as the same time, understand that its not actually 1080p, its being scaled down.

The Rift DK has internal hardware that does image rescaling (up or down) as needed, so that the LCD panel COULD be used while in the BIOS or fullscreen DOS apps where you do not have full control over your screen resolution. However, it does not do a very good job at rescaling, compared to how well a CPU can do that.

When your LCD panel (in the Rift -or- on your desktop PC) is NOT at its native resolution (1280x800 for the Rift DK), programs that do any subpixel processing (such as Windows ClearType), or GPU subpixel rendering, will fail resulting in an uglier image when enabled instead of a better image as expected.

It is always better to use the native display resolution unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, due to the reduced image quality.

However, there are good uses for letting the Rift DK downscale, such as when duplicating your desktop to the Rift DK during development, where you spend more time looking at your main display that into the Rift, and you need all the desktop resolution you can get for your development tools.

But for media consumption and game playing, stick with 1280x800...

My Rift doesn't work at 1080p, I just get a blue rectangle saying the mode isn't supported or something. Also when I run it at 1280x800 it claims to be running at 72 Hz, eventhough windows says it's running at 60 Hz, really odd...

I can make 1080p work by setting the nvidia drivers to do the scaling on the GPU, but it only seems to work sometimes, also very odd...


EDIT: Interesting, added a mode at 61 Hz, and then it claims to be running at 73Hz on the rift itself, so it seems always off by 12 Hz...

Yes mine runs at 1080p resolution.

Is looks better than normal resolution!

Does this make replacing the current panel with a 1080p panel possible?

The refresh speed looks ok.

I am using a GeForce GTX 560M graphics chip, 16 m memory and a core i5.

Cool!

I have a triple 1080p monitor setup, and I intend to run my rift off a splitter paired with my middle monitor

seems it will be fine to run it at 1080p

I suppose it could help with image quality especially if the game doesn't render above 640x800 when you set the output to the Rift's native resolution.

Seems to signifacntly improve image quality/jaggies. Textures look sharper, almost no jaggies at all. Of course, the screendor effect is there, but looks even less notiable now.

Just tried:

Doom 3 at 1920x1080 after setting rift res to 1920x1080 (detected it fine, at 60hz).... image quality greatly increased, sharper textures, no jaggies, tracking seems about normal --- though looking around seems more "fished eyed" than I remember at 1280x800

Helicopter demo - signifactnly improved image quality, shaper textures, no jaggies... head tracking seems unaffected.

Modern ruins demo - signifactly improved image quality, sharper textures, no jaggies... head tracking seems like there's a slight blur affect when looking around, possible lag, but possible it was always there and just more noticeable now that everything is sharper and more defined.

my only question.... in no way/shape/form will this harm a rift, will it? Since its only technically scaling...


Some of the demo's seem unaffected by any extra lag in tracking, some seem like you can notice more "blur" when looking around (but I think that's the same blur as the native res from the pixels moving on the screen, just more noticeable in 1920x1080 scaling). Tuscany image quality is improved, as well as planet.

beavermatic wrote:Seems to signifacntly improve image quality/jaggies. Textures look sharper, almost no jaggies at all. Of course, the screendor effect is there, but looks even less notiable now.
...

Letting the GPU do the supersampling and downscaling would give better quality graphics than letting the Rift DK LCD controller do the downsampling. But if you cannot control supersampling (or if it is too much load on the CPU) it is okay for the Rift to do it. No harm can be caused from that.

It does not make sense to use and subpixel processing though, when the screen is not in its native 1280x800 mode.

I'm not exactly sure by what you mean having the GPU do it... if you could explain this and how it differs from what I've done, would be helpful to me

If it's any help, my system specs below:

(2) EVGA GTX TITANS in SLI with latest beta
i7 3770k oc'd to 4.5ghz
32GB corsair vengenance ddr3 ram
Win8 Pro 64-bit
HPzr30w 2560x1600 monitor

Here's what I've done:

Changed my desktop resolution to 1920x1080, and since it's mirrored, the rift detects that (at 60hz) when I turn it on. I then change the game resolution/demo res to 1920x1080

Now, I do notice more "blur" when looking around.. guess that's lag? Is there another way to do it to reduce the blur occurring in some demos?

Currently you are letting the Rift hardware do the scaling, but its also possible to let your GPU do the scaling instead, that would probably give slightly better result and also slightly less lag as its a lot faster than the rift hardware.

virror wrote:Currently you are letting the Rift hardware do the scaling, but its also possible to let your GPU do the scaling instead, that would probably give slightly better result and also slightly less lag as its a lot faster than the rift hardware.

Any idea how that is done?

urban wrote:

virror wrote:Currently you are letting the Rift hardware do the scaling, but its also possible to let your GPU do the scaling instead, that would probably give slightly better result and also slightly less lag as its a lot faster than the rift hardware.

Any idea how that is done?

If done right, software shaders running in the GPU should do a much better job of downscaling (AFTER pre-warp) than the Rift DK hardware. If not done right (game software incorrectly does Rift pre-warp AFTER downsampling), then it is a software problem that is making image worse just letting the Rift DK LCD controller do the (poor job of) downscaling. The tiny low-power controller in the Rift actually discards scanlines and pixel columns while downsampling (i.e. "nearest neighbor sampling"), which you can see as missing thin horizontal borders on windows controls.

Because the host PC can do a much better job than the Rift (or a much worse job with WRONG software methods), it is best to do it in the PC (GPU) but only when incorrect software is not seriously degrading image quality. Beware that doing pre-warp on a large image before (correctly) downscaling requires more CPU/GPU power than the poorer method of doing pre-warp after downscaling...

The settings to control downscaling SHOULD be in the game itself, or in the video card driver settings. There is no standard configuration method for all games, or for all video card drivers. Each uses a different method (or may not even ALLOW such an adjustment). Realistically, a game should have user configuration to determine whether pre-warp is performed on the super-sampled image (for quality), or the downsampled 1280x800 image (for speed), or not at all (for underpowered hardware).

Until such options are provided (and configured correctly), letting the Rift DK do crappy nearest-neighbor downsampling may be your best option in some cases.