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Oculus Rift Display Quality: Horrible

Aroddo
Protege
Ok, my Rift just arrived and it installed without a problem.
This is actually the first time I ever used any modern VR device.

And the highly praised quality of the display is utter shit!

The whole 'screen' you see looks like you see it through fine wire netting.
Small Text is barely readable, because the resolution feels like an old CRT VGA display.

Imagine it like this: The text above fills your ENTIRE viewport. And not only is it pixelated - you also can effortlessly see that the white font is made up out of different colored lines! Think TV before they invented LC-Displays.

Oh, the 3D effect is top notch. But you might as well be using an iPhone 1 and view it from 10 cm away to get a feel for the perceived resolution.

NOTHING you see or read on the internet prepares you for how bad the display quality is.

Cancel your orders, then try it out first if you can, then either buy or wait for the next generation.
Don't be an idiot like me and buy on good faith.

220 REPLIES 220

NickytheHutt
Expert Protege
Aroddo said:
(...)
@NickytheHutt
Thing is, you find out about the screen door effect way way harder than you find out about how awesome the immersion is, or how some people experience nausea. 
And it is quite easy for veteran users to paint someone else as an idiot if he didn't spend a bulk his free time on oculus forums. 
To me this stinks like people wanting it to be better than it really is.

Fact of the matter is: People expect sharp images and what they get is a CRT TV with scanlines. In perfect 3D.

That it is harder to find out that is true, I found out about the pixel degradation by being a regular visitor in the Elite: Dangerous forums and looking for honest feedback. The drawbacks of the tech were definitely not out in the open unless you looked for it, and I presume that "people" are diverse, some got past the pixel degradation or SDE immediately, others didn't, but fact is: those who can't get past it should have gotten the info easily that 2160x1200 is NOT pretty if the screen is sticking right in your face.
What that high resolution really does however is tax the graphics card severely so you can't even supersample/antialias comfortably without frame drops and consequent nausa. I have a 730€ graphics card and I can't do that in every game/app.

They shouldn't boast about the 2160x1200 resolution unless it is higher than the one that would be the perceivable equivalent of say a flat screen's 1920x1080. It's definitely better than DK2, so they might want to boast that the CV1 is better than DK2 but DK2 is a developer tool and shouldn't be taken in account in anything.

In the same fashion I also suspect that many overwhelmingly positive reviews of the CV1 were written by owners of DK1 and DK2, in which case they base their impressions on an already pre-existing tolerance for SDE and degraded definition.

I like the Rift, I know its drawbacks and I think they're a problem but the solution is a very recent overclocked 700€ graphics card solution, a headset display that doesn't yet exist, and multi-card support (SLI/Crossfire). Right now we're buying tech that's as good as it can get in the year 2016.

MorgenKell
Expert Protege
I seriously doubt 2017 CV2 will have a serious resolution upgrade.

GTX 10X0 should barely have the power to render the last AAA 3D engines in CV1 resolution at 90fps so I'm ready to bet the CV2 will be a cheaper CV1.

2018 with 2d Gen Pascal GPU we may considered a CV3 with real upgrade resolution but how many people will have a Pascal GPU at this time ? With Xbox Scorpio probably on par with GTX 1070 (even If i don't believe their 6 teraflop GPU in an under 700$ box) I see the actual resolution stay for 2/3 years 

NickytheHutt
Expert Protege


I seriously doubt 2017 CV2 will have a serious resolution upgrade.

GTX 10X0 should barely have the power to render the last AAA 3D engines in CV1 resolution at 90fps so I'm ready to bet the CV2 will be a cheaper CV1.

2018 with 2d Gen Pascal GPU we may considered a CV3 with real upgrade resolution but how many people will have a Pascal GPU at this time ? With Xbox Scorpio probably on par with GTX 1070 I see the actual resolution stay for 2/3 years


It's somewhat true that upgrading the resolution of the headsets is an economic mistake if the wide market cannot adopt it. 

It could also be a software challenge: optimization and super-sampling. 

If you take Elite: Dangerous for example, its planets expansion recommended a GTX 980 graphics card which is higher than Oculus' requirements, which threw the game "out of scope" for the Oculus store.

By the time Elite made the Oculus Store the developers made drastic changes to the game's 3D engine in order to render planets optimally at higher framerates without loss in visual quality, as well as "VR low/high" presets in the game that allowed viable conditions with a GTX 970 in VR and XBox One. The game made it "in scope", by overcoming a software challenge. 

Optimization can give us the headroom needed to super-sample the render, and play more comfortably with the Rift and current hardware. 

MorgenKell
Expert Protege
GTX 1080: Witcher 3 - probably one of the best 3D engine out there. With last patches he's perfectly optimised: 2560x1440 Highest detail setting: 60 fps.- 3840x2160: 50 fps

I actually think they have everything to gain by keeping the current resolution for 2/3 years and to play with the supersampling

Aroddo
Protege
@dippaau
we'll see.
This post is a first time user impression, after all. It was written under shock.
I'll give it a try when back from work and maybe order some contacts instead of glasses.
Maybe some enjoyment can be found despite the abysmal graphic fidelity.

MorgenKell
Expert Protege
My first step in VR was cardboard with a Nexus 5. CV1 graphic fidelity is incredible - for VR 😉

MorgenKell
Expert Protege
We must just accept that the trade off for 1/1 scale + perfect 3D + perfect headtracking + perfect handtracking (with touch) is to return 10 years back in graphics

Anonymous
Not applicable
I do see the diagonal lines quite prominently especially in some scenes, but most of the time I forget about them since the RIFT IS SO DAMN AWESOME !!

Lemming1970
Rising Star

Aroddo said:


Fact of the matter is: People expect sharp images and what they get is a CRT TV with scanlines. In perfect 3D.



Yep, that's what you get if you put a HD monitor on your eyeballs, Once you come to terms with that life will get a lot easier.

Your image above is actually a fairly good example of how it looks, Although a little exaggerated, and of course on a still image.

Now you have come to terms of what your getting, go play a few games and realize that it doesn't matter.
And if it does matter to you, It's time to sell it on and wait a few years for 6k plus monitors to come out to remove the lines.
Modded Coolermaster RC-1000 Cosmos/1000W Corsair HX Series i7 6700k o/c to 4.7ghz Corsair H100i water cooler. Zotac 1080Ti 16 gb DDR4 o/c to 3000mhz Predator XB271HU 27" 2560x1440 IPS G-Sync 165Hz

Syrellaris
Rising Star


We must just accept that the trade off for 1/1 scale + perfect 3D + perfect headtracking + perfect handtracking (with touch) is to return 10 years back in graphics


10 years would be a bit extreme, its more like 5 years ago.
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Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with the Rift's quality. Obviously for the first installment in 10x better VR then back in the days of say the virtual boy, you can't really expect crystal clear, god ray free, fisheye free 4k graphics or higher.

Maybe in 5-10 years though, we'll reach 4k or higher in VR headsets 🙂