Won’t be recommending VorpX anymore due to low resolution bug :(

[Cless_Aurion]

Sadly, I’ve noticed that VorpX seems to be somehow locked on to low resolutions arbitrarily, as in, the image it will send the HMD won’t go over XY max fixed resolution (even if the engine of the game is perfectly capable of rendering at like, let’s say 4000×4000 per eye, and the HMD of displaying it).

Reading the forums, for months people have been complaining of this issue, and so have I, and I haven’t gotten a reply from @Ralf yet, sadly.

It seems to affect any high resolution HMD, like some Pimax or all the new crop of 4K per eye mOLED HMDs like the Meganex8K.
When using any high resolution HMD, VorpX seems to force the image to be arbitrarily cut down resolution to around 2.6k (which is less than half the number of pixels some of those HMDs move), making picture quality infuriatingly low for no really good reason. Games that look gorgeous in UEVR for example, will look like shit in VorpX (even when the engine IS rendering the games at the same resolution as UEVR).

Due to this, I can’t really recommend VorpX to any newcommer or person upgrading their VR anymore, and will stop doing so until at least this issue is solved. Which is sad for me, since I’ve been gushing to people about VorpX for like almost a decade now.

It really hampers the experience severely (basically, it feels like buying a 4K monitor, but your OS forces games into upscaled 1080p on them for no good reason). At this point, honestly, is almost better to flatout play the games on a flat 2D cinema sized screen instead, and get double the amount of resolution so aliasing doesn’t cut your eyes out of your face, or when possible, just use other software like UEVR.

With all that in mind, I just can’t recommend with a clear conscience to people getting into VR to use a program that forces them arbitrarily to half the resolution of their HMDs.

Hopefully we can get a fix soon :(

[Ralf]

Huh? The max height of the image vorpX sends to the headset is twice the game resolution’s height, more would be a fairly stupid waste of GPU memory. You (obviously) have to raise the resolution in the game options if you want a sharper image in your headset.

If you e.g. run a game at 1080p, vorpX caps the iamge sent to the headset at 2160p, which is already more than what makes sense given the 1080p input regardless of your headset’s screen res. The important resolution image quality wise for vorpX is the game resolution. When you raise it in the game options, vorpX will automatically raise the final res sent to the headset accordingly.

TLDR:

Raise the game resolution to get a sharper image. If you are limited by your monitor in that respect, check the ‘Custom Resolutions’ section in the vorpX help or alternatively use the vorpX virtual monitor in 24.1.0.

[Cless_Aurion]

Hello Ralf, thank you so much for taking the time to reply from your busy schedule! I really appreciate it.

So, it seems there might be an issue detecting what is the the max height of the image VorpX sends to the headset, since its DEFINITELY short from double the game resolution.

It falls so short, that I see clearly LOTS of aliasing everywhere (even the window border). I will go so far to say, that the image quality is not THAT FAR off my VivePro’s when supersampling… while having literally 6 times more pixels, and rendering about 4 times more pixels.
When I lean into the floating window, I can see all the extra detail I was missing that the game was actually rendering, which suggests the image the game is rendering is way higher resolution than the image the HMD is receiving.

(Again, for clarity’s sake, the sweetspot of my HMD should be able to catch around 5500p worth of resolution (45PPD).
Rendering at 4860p, although a high resolution, when on a big screen spanning most of my view, it should still NOT be supersampling, since it fails to get to 1:1)
(As a note, the resolution of the HMD is 3552×3880 per eye)

Could it be that Custom Resolutions on vorpX virtual monitor, are not working as they are intended and sending a lower resolution due to the huge numbers?

I’ve gone as far as to literally unplug both my monitors and exclusively use VorpX’s virtual monitor set at the game’s resolution, 4860p, to no avail. (I’ve tried multiple games that use different engines, all have the same exact issue).

For extra info, I’m also using a SteamVR native HMD, so I’m guessing there should be no compositor shenanigans going on… (and just in case tried with the inhouse compositor the HMD also has, which changes nothing).

I’m not even trying to mess with 3D or VR modes yet to remove variables (although I’ve tried with the same issues, in fact, aliasing usually becomes even more glaring and worse when activating them).

I have also tried launching from VorpX Desktop (which also isn’t really usable due to low resolution of the HMD (not the desktop)) with no luck whatsoever.

I did also test older VorpX versions, just in case. No luck either.

I hope this info-dump helps you in some way to figure out the issue. If you need anything else, I will gladly try to help to get this resolved! I really hope the issue isn’t on my side, but with so many HMDs and so many variables… you never know.
I tried with 2 different (similarly spec PCs), since I did upgrade the whole system, but both had this same issue.

TLDR:
I tried all that and sadly it doesn’t work :(

Maybe there is an issue with detecting what is the the max height of the image VorpX sends to the headset when resolutions per eye are so ridiculously high?

[Ralf]

The res is not always twice the game res. That’s a max value to avoid excessive upsampling.

To be extra sure I didn’t misremember anything I just did a little test, mimicking your not exactly common use case: with a game running at 5500p, vorpX under normal circumstances creates a 5500p headset render target, even if the headset (through SteamVR) requests less than that. vorpX is a lot smarter in that respect than you assumed, you don’t have to (and actually shouldn’t) tinker with SteamVR supersampling at all for vorpX.

I can’t really tell what’s wrong with your setup, but you have to look elsewhere to pinpoint the source of your problem. Might be the game not actually running at the desired res, might be your headset’s software doing weird stuff or whatever.

—

Please first check what res your headset actually requests from SteamVR without any supersampling tweaks. Try that or something close to it as your game res.

Then double check whether the game actually runs at that res, ideally without excessive DLSS or similar upscaling tricks. That’s paramount. Nothing else matters if the game itself doesn’t run at the desired res.

Only if things work as intended that way, start with your uber-hi-res experiments.

[Cless_Aurion]

Sorry for the late reply, crazy busy weeks! I’ve been testing thoroughly to give you as much information as possible.

Thanks for taking the time to check on this issue, I really appreciate it!
Damn, it working on your side almost makes it more infuriating.
I’m very hopeful we will be able to figure it out though, it would make my year!

For this, I hope FPSVR’s “detect resolution” will work good enough.
Its results seem to match my visual experience accurately (visual and performance wise).

>> Might be the game not actually running at the desired res,
Definitely not, made exhaustively sure this isn’t the case.

>> might be your headset’s software doing weird stuff or whatever.
This might be a cause for it, its an obscure HMD, but it would be an issue exclusive to VorpX then, since no other game, or even UEVR are affected by it at all.
This HMD has 2 different drivers for the HMD. The official one by the makers of the HMD, which is their custom non-SteamVR non-OpenXR drivers. And another one (the one I use most), that is a written from the ground up custom driver that turns the HMD into a native SteamVR HMD. Testing by alternating both drivers shows no difference in VorpX behavior.

I followed your instructions the best I could. Starting slow and steady.

Ridiculously low resolutions (like 720p), seem to make it worse since the HMD will run at that, double 720p. The problems start always when I try to go over 2160p. It just won’t happen.

All games running with no upscaler shenanigans, or AI enhancement of any sort, or supersampling like you asked.
Using only as a monitor, the virtual one VorpX creates running at 8640×4860. (I tested also with my regular 4K monitor, resolutions there won’t go over 2160p, so not much point to it).

After playing around, this is the info I can give you:

HMD’s panel resolution per eye: 3552×3840
SteamVR Settings resolution:
3572×3816 (100%) — (Also tried other %, 50% and 200%, with 0 changes to VorpX behavior)
Advanced Supersample Filtering (OFF) (Also tried ON, nothing will change)

Not running anything, compositor resolution: 5356×5724 (looks nice and clean)
Running games:
-Baldurs gate 3:

1080p = 1809×2000
Aliasing is horrible. If I play the game flat in BigScreen (which keeps the 5356×5724 resolution for the HMD) the game becomes WAY more playable, its just like playing on a low resolution 1080p display, especially most aliasing on text disappears. (No awesome VorpX 3D effects there, of course :( )

1440p = 2344×2592
Improvement, but far from ideal

2160p = 2781×3072
This seems to be the limit I keep hitting.

Every resolution over 2160p (4860p included) = 2781×3072

Worst part about this is, like I said, the game is ACTUALLY rendering at those resolutions, I can easily tell by eye by getting closer to the floating screen and new detail will show up, but also, because the framerates match the performance expected and, in BG3’s case, putting the mouse over the window on the taskbar, will clearly state the resolution to the right of the title of the game.

This applies to all games I tested. Just for the sake of testing, I tried resolutions in windowed, fullscreen with no luck whatsoever.

—

TLDR: no matter what resolution the game runs at, the HMD always runs against the 2160p wall. I wish VorpX could just… render at SteamVR’s resolution always or, just not mess around with the HMD’s resolution at all, I’d gladly pay the performance cost. Would that be a possibility?

—

Extra data that might be useful:
-For a render resolution 1:1 sample per panel pixel, resolution should be around 5081×5612 (209%), so definitely we aren’t failing on that side of things, in fact, when I open SteamVR’s menu it is perfectly sharp, since it IS running at the 5356×5724 even when VorpX is running at lower resolutions underneath it (usually 2781×3072)

-Also, SteamVR wants to default the HMD to 150% (4372×4672).

[Ralf]

I’ll take another look at this on occasion.

BTW: Even if for whatever reason your headset target “only” is 3072p, rendering the game at soemtihng higher than that would still give you better image quality since vorpX would take the higher res input and downsample it to the headset target res. Provided vorpX actually gets 5500p in the first place that is.

[Cless_Aurion]

Thanks again for your time replying. I really appreciate you taking this issue seriously.

Simply sending the res to the headset that you dial in in SteamVR no matter what the actual game res is doesn’t make sense.

Yes, I know. I’m just saying it so I could try and force the resolution manually, instead of having an arbitrarily “double the vertical resolution” setting.
I do that with BigsScreen for example. Even when watching a 1080p movie, or playing some old flat game, I will run native resolution (5500p), even if it is to get the dark environment or the screen borders to have 0 aliasing.

Like said above, you have to look elsewhere to pinpoint your issue. There is no such thing as a “2160p wall” in vorpX.

I am aware, that is the tragic part. Unless its something driver or hardware/HMD specific, I can’t pinpoint anywhere else since there are 0 issues elsewhere, its only VorpX failing me (which to be honest, its the magic software that made me go and spend $2k on a new HMD at all) :S
If I had another high resolution HMD over 3000p around, I would test it there, but I only have my VP1 that is 1600p, which won’t do.

The issues other people with higher than 3000×3000 per eye HMDs (mostly Pimax users) seem to match closely my experience as well, so I suspect everyone with high resolution HMDs has this issue. As more and more high resolution HMDs come in, this issue seems like it will become more and more prevalent.

A game rendered at 1080p doesn’t look better just because you copy it to a 5500p texture before sending it to the headset obviously.

We agree in that of course. As long as the image is wrapped around your head or, the resolution of your HMD has a higher PPD than the screen in front you with the game, it should make barely any difference.

The problem here is… we are DEFINITELY copying a 4860p game image into a 3000p texture before sending it to the headset.
Not only that, but because I am watching that using the floating VorpX display, now we are rendering what is visible in my FOV of a downscaled 4860p game image at 3000p.
So, we are squishing that 4860p image into around 2000p in front of my eyes. That’s why aliasing is so aggravating.

That is also why when I lean in, I can see way more detail that I couldn’t see before
Also, just in case, yes VRAM bumps up as it should as I scale up resolution over 2160p (in fact, BG3 at 4860p is almost maxing out my 24GB of VRAM, which is about double what it consumes at 2160p).

Your “2160p wall” sounds suspiciously as if the game actually runs at your monitor’s res although you think it doesn’t.

Indeed, I thought that too, and it might be the root cause of this issue. If I had a lower(or higher) resolution monitor I would try that theory by plugging only that other monitor in, but I sadly can’t.

The best way I could control for that on the tests I already did was:
1. Start VorpX (virtual display gets enabled)
2. Set Virtual display resolution to 4860p.
3. Start SteamVR and disconnect all my 2160p displays so only VorpX’s Virtual display is enabled.
4. Start the game making sure that the only display windows (and the game) detects is VorpX’s 4860p monitor.
5. Change the resolution of the game to 4860p and restart (or make sure the resolution is already at 4860p or any other higher number than 2160p).

To deal with such potential issues, either run games windowed or (assuming you already have set up a high enough custom resolution), try setting your desktop res to it before launching the game.

I already did that, of course. In fact, all the tests I ran I did try in windowed mode first. Then after it didn’t work, I started to experiment and tried fullscreen and borderless modes without any success (which kind of makes sense).

If a game actually runs at 5500p, vorpX creates a 5500p headset render target. You wouldn’t even be able to let it create something smaller than that even if you wanted when the image vorpX receives is actally a 5500p image.

I’m 100% sure that is not happening in my computer though. The games and the image VorpX is receiving, are higher than 3000p. This is the core of the issue, which you in your own tests proved that VorpX IS able to pull off (that’s why I said it infuriated me!). Because again, the game window inside VorpX HAS 4860p of detail in it.
-VRAM reading matches 4860p
-Performance matches 4860p
-Visually checking the image by leaning in confirms its 4860p.
And yet… the actual HMD is only rendering at that fixed maxed 2781×3072 resolution, so its absolutely ignoring that headset render target if its being sent. :S

Maybe this is a Virtual Display/Windows issue?
I’m going to try to create a virtual display through other means, and use that instead of the VorpX one, I’ll report back once I do so, but I don’t have much faith in it either.

In any case, I’m almost convinced that if we don’t solve this here… as the next wave of HMDs come in and we start getting over 3000p resolution, people will start complaining, since right now its only affecting high tier HMDs.

[Cless_Aurion]

I just read your extra message!

BTW: Even if for whatever reason your headset target “only” is 3072p, rendering the game at soemtihng higher than that would still give you better image quality since vorpX would take the higher res input and downsample it to the headset target res. Provided vorpX actually gets 5500p in the first place that is.

Somehow… that doesn’t apply either!
BG3 looks better at 2160p, than any higher resolution! Aliasing becomes REALLY intense for some reason.

Things like hair for example will become especially intense and oversharpened.
(I checked this with and without any FSR settings, of course)

[Ralf]

Like I said: I’ll take another look at this on occasion. How downsampling a higher res doesn’t improve quality for you compared to a lower res is somewhat beyond me though. Just makes it more likely that vorpX doesn’t get the desired res in the first place. But, again, I’ll take another look.

On a sidenote:

I’ll probably regret saying that, but this whole thing somewhat reminds me of me being an absolute sucker for super high quality antialising in the 3D gaming early days, which of course is highly desirable. The funny twist here being that while actually focusing on games instead doing pixel peeping, I more than once played happily for hours before I even noticed AA was turned off completely. :)

[Cless_Aurion]

Thank you so much, like always.
I know you don’t like talking about this, but if you had a Patreon or something like that, I would definitely support you there. I mean, I bought VorpX now what… like… 8 or 9 years ago? I can’t even remember lol
I tried supporting you by good word of mouth online everywhere I talk about VR basically though, and forcing all my friends to buy it hahah!

And nah man, I totally get you, no worries. I’ve been there too, had a very bad graphics whore phase hahaha
But after all, that’s why I am a 3D game artist living in Japan at all nowadays!

Its more of a, like we say in Spanish “Comparisons are odious” kind of deal?

As in… I can use VorpX’s virtual display to run games at 4860p… in BigScreen!
And it will look FABULOUSLY clear (not 3D or awesome VR enabled though).
But trying to get it to run on actual VorpX will kneecap half the resolution out of it… x_x

[Ralf]

All the cringeworthy emotional manipulation that tends to come with Patreon etc. campaigns aside, Patreon is just the wrong tool for software. How do you provide updates in a sensible manner for example?

Who knows, maybe at some point in the future I’ll eat my words. But here and now that’s my stance on the matter. The whole ‘support me, I’m such a nice guy’ framing while actually selling something most of the time sounds like bullshit to me. Always has. Want to support a software developer? Buy their app. Feel like 8 years of free stuff is an insanely long time (which it is for sure)? Buy another license.

Patreon is the right thing for podcasters, content creators, basically anyone even remotely resembling an artist of some kind. But for software with its natural need for at least a certain period of fixes and updates? Just doesn’t feel right at all to me.

[Cless_Aurion]

I see! That is fair, the monthly rhythm thing doesn’t suit all software developers or softwares, especially if you are selling something on the side!

I think Praydog (the UEVR guy) had the same feeling and has a patreon, but just with no updates there ever? But his software is also free, so it does make sense like you said.
Plus, surely doing so would bring more money to your hands… together with more headaches (there is no escaping that! hahah)

Maybe something more like Ko-Fi would be more your jam, its like 5% per donation, and its a one time thing last time I heard, so its a bit more no strings attached.

In any case, that’s exactly what I was thinking, a decade of software updates for a couple bucks is insane. I mean, many people on sites like patreon and such spend that much on a project every 4 months or 8months ($10 and $5 pledges).

Some devs would just release “VorpX V2 electric boogaloo”, but that is a whole can of worms in itself.
Buying a second license sounds fair after almost a decade to be honest, especially with the ridiculous amount of hours I’ve used it.

In any case, hopefully we can get to the bottom of this!

[Ralf]

Just to clarify: giving away stuff for free and actually, truly asking for voluntary support on Patreon is perfectly fine, of course. But enough of that.

As said above, I’ll do a few more tests and see whether I can replicate your issue. So far I couldn’t. Don’t expect that to happen tomorrow, 5500p gaming at this point still makes you a member of a fairly exclusive club. But if I can replicate your issue in further tests, it will of course be addressed.

[Cless_Aurion]

Exactly, we are on the same page!

No problem, these things take time if they get ever fixed at all. I’m just happy to know you’re giving it another go.
And yeah, top tier specked PC due to work is a privilege not many have. Although as resolutions on HMDs climb, people playing older games should definitely get to those quite easily.

I suspect it won’t go much further than ~5.5k though, since that PPD density equals the current average 4K size monitor, so… from then on its only heavy diminishing returns. I play some simpler games super sampled at around 7 or 7.5k, and literally can’t see aliasing at all.

[Author]

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