VRodeo: Oculus Rift Launch Lineup - Part 02

Don't lose your head.

cool

Awesome that Jeff wore his Tron Legacy Adidas hoodie!

I'm sad I missed the Project Cars segment live, glad I get to see it now!

Also, what would be nice in the future, for long videos with different segments, is to have the time stamps of each game in the video notes (I don't recall if the Extra Life streams had that or not).

GB has never done timestamps for anything, ever. Video or podcast. Your best bet for timestamp is qlcrew.com, where the community can timestamp videos.

-HIGHEST-

@amyggen: Woah, that's awesome. Thanks for the link.

Just skip to 42 minutes that's the best part.

FYI to @jeff and the rest of the crew, the shimmering is due to aliasing on transparent textures. The blur on at least some of the titles is because you were using FXAA to try to minimize the shimmering but FXAA works poorly in lower resolutions and manages to blur the imagine without resolving the shimmering. Since framerate is key I would suggest switching to SMAA in any game that supports it as the framerate hit should be very minor for a major image quality boost.

And for those at home with more powerful PCs, the best way to solve the problem would be to either super sample the image through Nvidia Inspector or the Radeon equivalent, or even try downsampling the image from a higher resolution if the game allows for you to switch resolution in VR. The Resolution scaler that was in Ethan Carter was a downsampling option, but you also had FXAA on which was likely causing the blur. Nvidia's control panel also has an option for using AA on transparent textures. All I can say is that using that, downsampling, or supersampling requires extreme amounts of PC power, likely something in the realm of a Titan or even an SLI Titan setup, but the issue with the visuals here was aliasing caused by low resolutions and the use of a poor FXAA implementation to try and resolve the aliasing. Nothing that could be done in this case, but with a 6 GB graphics card you should be able to power past at least some of the problems. Even switching to MSAA would eliminate the blurring problem, although it wouldn't solve the shimmering in most cases.

subnautica for president.

Man populus or black and white in VR....how awesome would that be? Talk about having the real God experience...!

Oh god, Imagine mercilessly beating the giant creature in vr. I don't think I could do it.

@devil240z: backhands in dungeon keeper would be delicious...

@drewbert Pan's Labyrinth is actually more about the Spanish Civil War... or just after it. Awesome film though!

...and a new crime fighting team was born

@raven10: Thanks for pointing this FXAA thing out. I've been wondering about the "old ways" we're used to and how they sometimes seem to make VR go awry. The game devs really need to get this stuff!

@redjimi: FXAA always causes blurring in lower resolutions, and even a bit at higher resolutions. That's because FXAA is essentially an intelligent blur filter that attempts to find the edges of objects and blur them so that aliasing is not visible. The higher resolution the image, the more detail the algorithm has to work with and so the more accurate the results. SMAA is simply a more complex algorithm. It requires a small bit more processing power but provides better results and many implementations also include a temporal component that helps with sub-pixel breakup. I always recommend SMAA over FXAA when it is an option.

I think part of the issue with VR is that because the image is right in front of your face those types of image quality issues become more noticeable. But because games have to run at 90 fps, sometimes even the performance hit you get from SMAA would be enough to cause minor framerate fluctuations. In fact, after I wrote that post Digital Foundry posted their review of the Rift and specifically mentioned the blurring and shimmering in some games running below the native resolution with FXAA in place. They have a ton of dedicated hardware for measuring framerate and it does sound like switching to SMAA and boosting the resolution to 100% does cause framerate problems in games like Ethan Carter and Project Cars.

Watching the screen shake is making me feel dizzy. I understand the "see it like it is". If possible, it would be nice if the system had a "stabilize" option for video sharing.

Doesn't help I'm getting over a cold.

@ripelivejam: oh my god, possessing imps in VR Dungeon Keeper and just sitting there picking at purple gold veins...that's probably on track to be my fetish.

Headless drivers are the future.

Man Grease.... : ^)

Whoa. Dan said something awesome in this episode - never thought about VR being used to help overcome anxiety issues like public speaking.

VR could probably be used to help a lot of phobia stuff actually.

Someone needs to make a gif of Jeff's reaction to Subnautica when it first starts glitching out. He goes from confused to having his mind blown to completely psyched in less than a second.

Not possible...

whoa drew smoked a cigar

damn subnautica was hella vaporwave when it got all messed up.

"Im trying to decide if it's the Occulus making my stomach queasy or the fact Easter candy was on sale and I ate a bunch" ~ New Dan, Mar. 28th

Watching these while hungover may have been a mistake.
Love Dan's shirt.

I found 22:12 to be kind of sweet, rather than funny. ^_^