Crank up the sharpness in the Oculus Rift!

[Zangashtu]

Hi all, 

So a nifty little trick was made aware to me the other day and I never knew it existed but it has made the world of difference to how things look within the Oculus Rift (IMO). Using the now included Oculus Debug Tool you can "override" how sharp the image is within the headset and crank it the f up.

Give it a try, honestly, it works (at least in my opinion, edges, text and general images look much sharper than they do if I turn it back down)

THIS DOES NOT BREAK ANYTHING AND IS NOT A PERMANENT CHANGE, IF YOUR CARD CAN HANDLE IT, DO IT.

So to start off, browse to wherever your Oculus folder is within Program Files (So for example mine was C:\ > Program Files > Oculus) within their go to Support > Oculus-Diagnostics. and within their you should see the OculusDebugTool.exe.

Right click and run this as administrator or right click > properties > compatibility and tick at the bottom "Always run this program as administrator"

This will open the wonderful tool, now this may look like a lot of scary settings but it's fine, you only need three.

Firstly, I would suggest disabling "Asynchronous spacewarp" It sounds super technical but all it means is that by default if your rift is experiencing frame drops or is struggling it will slow down to 45 fps instead of the optimal 90 (or 95 I forget) fps. If you disable this it will never do this and just run as best as it can and I find this is a better experience.
EDIT: Asynchronous spacewarp, in a nutshell,  your player's movement and any camera movement are taken into consideration and, if the game drops below a suitable frame rate, ASW kicks in to produce 'fake' frames that fill in. The result is an all-around smoother experience. This essentially means if your PC is not up to the task of smashing VR, it gives it a fighting chance. If your PC is already beast you might not notice this at all. So I would suggest turning this on and off in testing and see what difference this makes!

Now, at the top you will see "Pixels Per Display Pixel Override" this is the bad boy, anything above 1 will be an increase (so 1.1 > 1.2 > 1.3 etc.) I run mine at 1.5 because anything over that my 1070 will not be able to push 95 fps solid, it will hover around 75-80. So I keep it there.

A good tip if your really bothered about the frame rate. In the tool you will see the option "Visible HUD" if you turn it onto "Performance" it will bring up a little box in your headset and this will show you the current FPS and the performance headroom. (For me the performance headroom doesn't make sense, even when I've read up and had it explained to me, what I see on the graph just doesn't match what i'm, actually seeing....if that makes sense)
So I put this on after every increase to the sharpness and run my most graphically demanding VR games (For me it was Robo Recall and The Climb) and see what kinda frame rates I'm getting, if it was stable and solid or stable 90-95, I turned it up, when it started to struggle with that I turned it back down.

And that's it! Job done! I hope this helps anyone at all because for me I now never play VR without doing this.

NOTES: YOU NEED TO OPEN THIS TOOL AND MAKE THE SHARPNESS CHANGE BEFORE OPENING UP THE RIFT SOFTWARE OR ANY GAMES.
YOU DON'T NEED TO DO THE ENTIRE PROCESS EVERY TIME (I now have a shortcut to it, open it, put 1.5 in the sharpness, minimize it and then open the Rift software and start playing)

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

11 minutes ago, Zangashtu said:

Firstly, I would suggest disabling "Asynchronous spacewarp" It sounds super technical but all it means is that by default if your rift is experiencing frame drops or is struggling it will slow down to 45 fps instead of the optimal 90 (or 95 I forget) fps. If you disable this it will never do this and just run as best as it can and I find this is a better experience.
 

yeah no it's alot different then that the game puts out 45 or more fps but the rift still runs at 90 fps the extra 45 frames are made by exploiting the frame data and altering the frame based on your movement same pretty much the same thing as the ps4 vr

[A Silver]

I would defiantly try this IF I HAD ONE

[Zangashtu]

5 minutes ago, Alaradia said:

yeah no it's alot different then that the game puts out 45 fps but the rift still runs at 90 fps the extra 45 frames are made by exploiting the frame data and altering the frame based on your movement same pretty much the same thing as the ps4 vr

(taken from the Oculus website)
 

Let's Do the Timewarp Again
Early DK2 prototypes first demonstrated basic Timewarp (TW). This was an orientation-only, head-rotation limited reprojection of frames to the lowest possible latency. It was synchronous with rendering but demonstrated the effectiveness of reducing latency by using head movement to predict where images would visibly land.

Asynchronous Timewarp was introduced at Rift launch and provided an automatic, asynchronous version of time warp. It works by intervening every frame to time warp the last submitted eye buffers, even if the application is taking too long rendering the next frame. 

Do we mean the same thing?

[Zangashtu]

10 minutes ago, Alaradia said:

yeah no it's alot different then that the game puts out 45 fps but the rift still runs at 90 fps the extra 45 frames are made by exploiting the frame data and altering the frame based on your movement same pretty much the same thing as the ps4 vr

Doing some reading you are correct indeed! I just thought it was what I thought because this is how it was explained to me at first and by experimenting it made sense, so thankyou! I shall adjust my post

[Bananasplit_00]

neato but i wouldent buy a Rift, especially with gen two around the corner with 1440x1440 per eye. unless those turn out to have abysmal tracking they are going to be the thing tio buy over both the rift and the vive

[Zangashtu]

1 minute ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

neato but i wouldent buy a Rift, especially with gen two around the corner with 1440x1440 per eye. unless those turn out to have abysmal tracking they are going to be the thing tio buy over both the rift and the vive

True but I've owned the current Rift since it was on sale at £400, so i'm reaching out to people here who already own it or have for a while.
But 1440x1440 per eye? That sounds awesome!

[Bananasplit_00]

22 minutes ago, Zangashtu said:

True but I've owned the current Rift since it was on sale at £400, so i'm reaching out to people here who already own it or have for a while.
But 1440x1440 per eye? That sounds awesome!

yah thats what the new Windows mixed reality headsets or whatever they call them are all speced at, starting at $350 when they drop, around $400 with controllers