I noticed this pre-vacation and sort of forgot about it, but dug it up and there might be something in it. Here’s the trick that was going around, with some people claiming it does nothing than serve up a delicious bowl of placebo, while others claiming it changes everything and solves world hunger. The truth is probably in the middle, but it is easy to try. Steps:
Step 1. Change your WMR Steam Driver default.vrsettings file to have a renderTargetScale value of 2.0. Here’s the location of my file, and using notepad is fine:
E:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\MixedRealityVRDriver\resources\settings\default.vrsettings
Here’s the line:
{
"driver_Holographic" : {
"renderTargetScale" : 2.0
},
"driver_Holographic_Experimental" : {
// Motion reprojection doubles framerate through motion vector extrapolation
// motionvector = force application to always run at half framerate with motion vector reprojection
// auto = automatically use motion reprojection when the application can not maintain native framerate
So by default the ‘renderTargetScale’ is “1.0”, so make sure WMR is all shutdown (as is SteamVR) and edit the file to read ‘2.0’, save the file and on you go.
Step 2: Change your default SteamVR Video override to a fixed ‘200%’. You can use the SteamVR desktop widget menu for this, i.e. make it ‘200%’. It will look like this:
The important thing is not to let it vary, but fix it in the Video tab. Leave all Application values at 100% now.
So in things like DCS, just set your Pixel Density to 1.0. In things like Elite Dangerous leave the super sampling to 1.0. PCars 2 works well with these settings too. X-Plane seems to be much clearer. Essentially let WMR and SteamVR do the upscaling rather than the game I guess.
So does it work, and if so, how?
I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem to hurt at least. While intuitively it would seem that this would kill your GPU, it is likely something else is going on here, in that the ‘renderTargetScale’ value is used before the SteamVR render pipeline does it thing (before the distortion for the 3D view happens) so it’s not just a case of 2 x 200% native resolution. The SteamVR to 200% is more of a mystery, but might be to do with how the scaling math works, in that supersampling, native panel resolution and floating point numbers can get weird, so perhaps this just works for WMR and the Odyssey Plus as pure luck. Dunno.
Anyway, it is easy to try, and easy to reset back. I personally like the look of it, and everything does seem clearer.
So updating first, then I’ll test it out…
