New to VR.. Anti-Aliasing frustration

[odourboy 1,288]

Got my Pico 4 last week and I've been having a blast, but having come from a sharp, clear 4K flat screen, the image quality in VR hasn't blown me away. I've been tweaking settings to get the most out of my Pico 4 but I've hit a wall with aliasing (I hate aliasing! 😆) 

My software lineup is somewhat standard for wireless streaming VR: MSFS - OpenXR - StreamVR - Virtual Desktop - WiFi - Pico 4.

I'm using TAA in MSFS VR and I've been trying various over sampling rendering resolutions, encoding bitrates but none of these seem to eliminate the shimmering. Also running VD in Godlike. Any suggestions as to where I can squeeze more anti-aliasing out of my system? Nvidia profile settings maybe? Is there a magic rendering resolution? System  is a 13900K and 4090.

[senya016 34]

It seems to me that the problem of pico 4 is not in the settings, but in the fact that it does not have a display port interface.  The program receives a high-quality image from the video card, encodes it to compress it to the level of the codec's bandwidth, and then decodes it on the device itself.  As a result, you have a loss of quality in double conversion, which does not work in the best quality to keep within the limits of the bitrate.  My friend has several vr headsets including pico4.  He is very pleased with the quality of the optics and offline screens, but hates the clipped picture due to encoding.  It's like watching a Blu-ray movie on a good modern TV, but transmitting the image through an additional ADC / DAC with a low bit rate

[Lange_666 167]

All standalone headsets will suffer from the same encoding/decoding problem (but my guess is that standalone will be the future + all new headsets that come out and have a display port are expensive).
My previous headset was a Rift-S (cable died) which compared to my current Pico 4 had a much lower resolution and also a lot more aliasing. Even with every aliasing setting set to the max it was still visible and that headset had a display port.
My Pico 4 with it's higher resolution is a lot better when it comes to aliasing, you can crank your aliasing settings up to the max but still...

[JacquesBrel 639]

There isn't any magic bullet. Aliasing is much more noticable in VR due to there being a lot fewer pixels per degree of vision compared to a monitor, especially a 4K monitor... The aliasing you wouldn't notice on a 4K monitor you suddenly notice in VR.

Apart from just cranking up the rendering resolution, I've seen a few reports where people have preferred DLSS + high rendering resolution, as the DLSS upsampling does OK anti-aliasing, and high rendering resolution mitigates the DLSS blurriness. 

[Daube 352]

6 hours ago, odourboy said:

Got my Pico 4 last week and I've been having a blast, but having come from a sharp, clear 4K flat screen, the image quality in VR hasn't blown me away. I've been tweaking settings to get the most out of my Pico 4 but I've hit a wall with aliasing (I hate aliasing! 😆) 

My software lineup is somewhat standard for wireless streaming VR: MSFS - OpenXR - StreamVR - Virtual Desktop - WiFi - Pico 4.

I'm using TAA in MSFS VR and I've been trying various over sampling rendering resolutions, encoding bitrates but none of these seem to eliminate the shimmering. Also running VD in Godlike. Any suggestions as to where I can squeeze more anti-aliasing out of my system? Nvidia profile settings maybe? Is there a magic rendering resolution? System  is a 13900K and 4090.

Check if some sharpening setting somewhere (in MSFS, Virtual Desktop or SteamVR) isn't interferring. I don't remember exactly right now, but I think it's the sharpening slider in the MSFS graphics settings. Setting it to zero gave me a smooth picture.

Also, Streaming Assistant, the default tool of the Pico, works quite well in it's latest version. I found out I had to trigger the search for new versions (both for the headset and the streaming app inside) manually, the headset didn't give me any notifications that new versions were available. SA let's you easilly connect by USB instead of using Wifi.

[odourboy 1,288]

5 hours ago, Daube said:

Also, Streaming Assistant, the default tool of the Pico, works quite well in it's latest version. I found out I had to trigger the search for new versions (both for the headset and the streaming app inside) manually, the headset didn't give me any notifications that new versions were available. SA let's you easilly connect by USB instead of using Wifi.

I'm pretty sure I have the latest Streaming Assistant as I just downloaded it. I set SA aside because I have a separate issue with it... horrible stuttering with head tracking. Motion in the sim is smooth, but if I move my view around it stutters like crazy. Disabling OpenXR seems to resolve it, but then, no OpenXR.

I'll look into the Sharpening conflict. I noticed Sharpening settings all over the place and I'm not that enthusiastic about Sharpening algorithms anyway.

[odourboy 1,288]

11 hours ago, senya016 said:

It seems to me that the problem of pico 4 is not in the settings, but in the fact that it does not have a display port interface.

While I appreciate the sentiment, many youtu.be reviewers don't seem to agree with this. It certainly means a significant chunk of GPU cycles get eaten up, but sufficient render resolution and bitrates should make the encode/decode artifacts pretty much imperceptible. But hey, this is my first HMD so I could be delusional!  🤪 

[senya016 34]

12 minutes ago, odourboy said:

While I appreciate the sentiment, many youtu.be reviewers don't seem to agree with this. It certainly means a significant chunk of GPU cycles get eaten up, but sufficient render resolution and bitrates should make the encode/decode artifacts pretty much imperceptible. But hey, this is my first HMD so I could be delusional!  🤪 

I have a lot of vr headsets.  Right now I'm using varjo aero and I'm not entirely happy with it.  Colors and blacks are far from perfect, although clarity is very good.  My friend about whom I wrote says that he likes the picture quality in pico 4 more than varjo aero.  And he has enough clarity.  The only thing that did not suit him was the problem with coding and transmission.  He did tests about two months ago.  Maybe things are better now.  The ball is in Pico's side.  If they solve this problem or have already solved it , Pico for 400 usd will beat Aero for 2000 .  I myself am still waiting for a vr headset that I like.  pico has great potential to become a leader.  Be sure to write if you achieve a good result.

[odourboy 1,288]

13 hours ago, Daube said:

Check if some sharpening setting somewhere (in MSFS, Virtual Desktop or SteamVR) isn't interferring. I don't remember exactly right now, but I think it's the sharpening slider in the MSFS graphics settings. Setting it to zero gave me a smooth picture.

This suggestion has paid dividends! I made three changes:

1) I matched my rendering resolution in both StreamVR and OpenXR to the resolution used in Victual Desktop Godlike (which for Pico 4 is 3120X3120) and was actually a reduction in what I was using.

2) I turned off SSW in Virtual Desktop (for now - I felt it was just complicating things)

3) I turned off Sharpening in OpenXR and set it to taste in Virtual Desktop. This one I believe really improved the aliasing.

Still lots of messing around to be done, but with these settings, I'm getting very good quality now (within the limited capabilities of Pico 4).

[FlyIce 354]

For G2 I had experimented with TAA and DLSS, and DLSS wins hands done. Regardless how high I go TAA always has some aliasing/shimmering (mostly autogen area?), while DLSS is virtually aliasing-free. 

[odourboy 1,288]

DLSS doesn't cut it for glass panels. It lacks the clarity of TAA. But I'm curious. I will try DLSS and see how the AA holds up otherwise. What quality setting do you prefer?

57 minutes ago, FlyIce said:

For G2 I had experimented with TAA and DLSS, and DLSS wins hands done. Regardless how high I go TAA always has some aliasing/shimmering (mostly autogen area?), while DLSS is virtually aliasing-free. 

 

[Reset XPDR 1,271]

1 hour ago, odourboy said:

DLSS doesn't cut it for glass panels.

You need to crank up OXR scaling to compensate for this, like 150 - 200 DLSS Quality or 175 - 225 for DLSS Balanced with a 4090. Yes, this will eat up the performance gains that DLSS would otherwise achieve, but compared to TAA it gives you superior AA, equivalent instrument clarity and slightly higher performance level.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Reset XPDR

[odourboy 1,288]

17 hours ago, Reset XPDR said:

You need to crank up OXR scaling to compensate for this, like 150 - 200 DLSS Quality or 175 - 225 for DLSS Balanced with a 4090. Yes, this will eat up the performance gains that DLSS would otherwise achieve, but compared to TAA it gives you superior AA, equivalent instrument clarity and slightly higher performance level.

You're using a G2 correct? So your signature setting of "200%" is based on the native resolution of the G2 2160x2160. Is that correct?

Just looking for clarification because with Pico 4, there's a couple more abstraction layers between OpenXR and the headset, namely Virtual Desktop, which also has a render resolution setting, not necessarily at the HMD native rate, plus a video encode/decode layer with selectable encoder (h.264 or HVEC) and a bitrate. The % that shows up in OXR is based on the Virtual Desktop rendering resolution, not the native Pico 4 native (which also happens to be 2160x2160). So if Virtual Desktop is upscaled already, it's not so obvious where OXR should be.

[Reset XPDR 1,271]

1 hour ago, odourboy said:

You're using a G2 correct? So your signature setting of "200%" is based on the native resolution of the G2 2160x2160. Is that correct?

Yes I am. 200% OXR is based on the G2's native resolution but 100% is actually 3152x3152 and 200% is actually the square root of the increase as a ratio multiplied by 3152. eg.  sqrt (200 / 100) * 3152 = 4458x4458. DLSS Balanced, which is what I am currently using renders at 58% of that, so 2585x2585.

 

1 hour ago, odourboy said:

So if Virtual Desktop is upscaled already, it's not so obvious where OXR should be.

My apologies as I replied to your response where the G2 was being talking about and I had assumed that's what you had, but it is quite obvious in your signature and original post that you have the Pico 4. Nonetheless, the principle should be similar with whatever software sets the initial render scaling in that to clear up instrumentation with DLSS, you need as high a starting render scale as your GPU can tolerate while retaining acceptable performance to offset the blurring DLSS natively introduces. This works for both VR and 2D and for the latter you can achieve it by setting secondary scaling in UserCfg.opt in the MSFS root directory to higher than 1 (I use 1.5).

Edited May 10, 2023 by Reset XPDR

[odourboy 1,288]

1 hour ago, Reset XPDR said:

but 100% is actually 3152x3152

You lost me on this one. Where does 3152 come from? 🤔