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Colour banding in Elite Dangerous (again)

hitchhiker54
Honored Guest
While I hate to redo this sort of thread, or necro one that went before, this is an ongoing issue and all the more annoying for its randomness. I'm 99% that this is a driver issue between my 980ti and the Oculus drivers. Repeatedly restarting the oculus service clears the colour banding, but not reliably on X restarts. To see smooth colour gradients on the intro screens, stars + space dust/nebula I need to restart the service + restart the game over and over until chance makes it work correctly.

Does anyone know of a workaround for this or whether the oculus team are aware it's still an issue whether due to their drivers or a quirk in nvidias?

Quick system spec :
6700k with XMP profile only overclock
980ti graphics with MSI factory oc only

Windows 10 fully updated
Latest drivers for all components + bios
Nvidia driver 385.41
Tested with stable and beta oculus software, AWS on and off; no apparent affect.
3 REPLIES 3

Floatharr
Explorer
Accidental double post.

Floatharr
Explorer
I'm frustrated and a bit obsessed lately by the same issue. Every game with dark colors in it has insane banding, and every app and game is affected by this, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was universal across every Rift CV1 on the latest runtime currently. I believe it's not a hardware defect or a problem with a specific game, not related to the mura/red tint/spud issue because enabling/disabling spud affects color accuracy but not the banding (fwiw, my rift is nearly unusable without the UseSpud registry tweak), and it's not related to limited/full color range because I can see perfect black in the headset, just that the next step up is a dark gray when it should be almost indistinguishable from pure black.

The easiest way to test this is to hop into http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php in Bigscreen, On your rift the shades of gray starting from 1 should all be clearly visible, and on your monitor all the shades of gray should be significantly darker. Rift's #1 should resemble one of the shades of gray between maybe 6 and 15 depending on your monitor. Other times when this has been an issue for me are movies in Bigscreen, Space scenes e.g. Elite Dangerous, Arizona Sunshine caves, and most of Alien: Isolation.

If I had to throw a guess it's probably a color space conflict within the Oculus drivers where it tries to render things in linear gamma when it should be rendering in sRGB which results in the dark end of the color spectrum receiving far fewer shades of gray than it should. If this is the issue there's nothing to be done except keep bringing this issue up until they push out a bug fix. Another possibility is that this is an intentional change to try to fix the black smear issue, but in my case I would gladly deal with that instead of every game with darkness in it being way too well lit. I've also seen people talk about fixing this with dithering in individual games or even on driver level, and if this is a color space issue that is a bandaid fix at best. At the very least I would at least like to have some control over the headset display color calibration on a user level maybe in Oculus Home with a gamma slider or something.

I really hope this is a known issue, or gets read by somebody that knows what I'm talking about and can push a bug report or something so there can be a fix in a future Oculus Runtime update, if I'm correct about this.

flexy123
Superstar
Yes I know what you're talking about and the banding is one (quite long-known) issue. I am ALSO pondering over this darned mura/"galaxies noise"/black levels issue currently and this is also where at some point the banding will come up...where I don't exactly know how these things are related.

It's all great to look at black level charts etc....and you are correct mentioning the VERY awkward gamma curve the Rift has, basically with everything above black lvl 2 "much too bright", as compared to a monitor. The problem: I don't know whether this is supposed to be like that, as you say is this intentional or the result of some messed up color space?

Looking at this very weird gamma curve (which basically ignores "very dark shades" and jumps from black straight to "mouse grays")....no wonder there is banding in SOME apps. Here too I am not sure whether this app-related, and a dev is merely supposed to "code for the the weird gamma the Rift has"....or whether this is indeed a flaw that is not supposed to be there. (For example, how does such a black level chart look in the Vive?). Drives me nuts really.