Ultra-sharp VR with SteamVR plugin - We finally have it

[FishSeven]

Referring to my post under: https://steamcommunity.com/app/250820/discussions/4/3053986162877883700/

The wait has come to an end, even if not caused by the Steam devs but made by a single developer. Someone did it. The big thanks goes to retroluxfilm and the ReShade Devs.

We finally have a sharpness filter slider for SteamVR.

This is a SteamVR/Reshade plugin and all sharpening filters and settings can be comfortably adjusted directly in SteamVR. Tested and runs flawlessly on my side, with incredible sharpness. Works like the SkyrimVR sharpener, but much better and less shimmering.

The plugin (free) that brings the magic is called: "VRToolkit" --> https://vrtoolkit.retrolux.de

- Sharpening Modes for enhanced clarity while only processing the pixels that are in the sweet spot of your HMD
- Color Correction Modes to be able to adjust your HMD colors & contrast to your liking
- Dithering to reduce banding effects of gradients and sharpening artifacts
- Antialiasing option to reduce aliasing/shimmering effects when the in game AA modes are not enough
- All modules are processed in a single render pass post shader to improve performance instead of having them all separate

Download/install: https://vrtoolkit.retrolux.de

Tested games: American Truck Simulator, Automobilista 2, Asseto Corsa, Asseto Corsa Competizione, Beat Saber, DCS World, Dirt Rally (With Revive), Dirt Rally 2, Elite Dangerous, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Google Earth VR, Half Life Alyx, IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad, Project Cars 2, Race Room Experience 64, Race Room Experience 32 Bit, rFactor 2, Skyrim VR, VTOL VR, The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners, X-Plane 11. Many more will work and require to figure out what settings it needs.

Lalala ... Amazing ... ENJOY!!

[1raks9]

Good

[Bob Loblaw]

"Ultra-sharp VR - We finally have it " Title is clickbait. I expected announcement of new HMD (or review of the Arpara HMD), but got an announcement of a Band-aid for gpu-limited situations... a Band-aid that sounds like AMD's FSR in a new wrapper.

[Ghanth]

Hey ! Thanks for the good news !

[FishSeven]

Escrito originalmente por Bob Loblaw:

"Ultra-sharp VR - We finally have it " Title is clickbait. I expected announcement of new HMD (or review of the Arpara HMD), but got an announcement of a Band-aid for gpu-limited situations... a Band-aid that sounds like AMD's FSR in a new wrapper.

Well we certainly don't want anyone to feel baited here. The title has been changed and it is now clear that this is a SteamVR plugin and not a new HMD.

And no, it is not just a wrapper and works differently than FSR. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution uses an down-/upsampling in addition to a very limited CAS sharpness filter. Increasing "renderScale" in FSR to a value above 1.0 costs a lot of GPU resources, which is how SS works. FSR is more for low performance or older GPUs. By default, FSR has a value of 0.77 in "renderScale" for high quality, then downsampling happens and the lost pixels are improved by the sharpness filter. But image details are lost.

VRToollkit uses CAS, color correction and dithering, which uses very little GPU resources, adds a lot of sharpness and removes shimmering. And finally, the CAS filter can be adjusted very extensively, realtime and ingame to get the best possible result. With FSR you can only set a value between 0 and 1 for "sharpness". The SS (renderScale) in FSR is therefore in my opinion actually total nonsense, we already have SS in SteamVR and you can set it right there to 77% if you want.

I just used FSR openvr_mod in ETS2 and SkyrimVR for example before VRToolkit, it doesn't come close to the sharpness increase that can be achieved with VRToolkit. Also, VRToolkit can eliminate a lot of the shimmering. And even SS with 500% will never be able to bring the sharpness that can currently be achieved with VRToolkit according to my testing. In most games I use 150% to 200% SS, the remaining sharpness is achieved via CAS. Everything above 200% SS only costs GPU resources without really bringing anything.

I find this plugin absolutely indispensable for anyone who doesn't want to play blurry VR games, because it brings an extreme gain. It is very comfortable to use and you can adjust the sharpness values and options ingame with the index controllers within SteamVR via simple sliders.

In my opinion, there are unfortunately still too many VR games that look very blurry in the HMD. I have a Valve Index and you can see on HLAlyx how sharp and wonderful VR games can look. The sharpness and quality of HLAlyx with an RTX3080 is extremely good in Valve Index, I never felt like I needed a new HMD or more pixels.

This sharpness issue is software related and I have long wished that such a small sharpness slider would be standard in SteamVR. And while I don't think FSR works in HLAlyx, VRToolkit works also with HLAlyx.

To me, every game should look like HLAlyx.

And with this plugin this is now possible. Even HLAlyx looks better :-) Once you have SkyrimVR, ACC, PCars2, DR2 or ETS2 or any other supported games played with this plugin then you want nothing else.

And only those who have tried it understand what such a small plugin can do. So, enough written, now I enjoy my old but new ULTRA-SHARP Project Wingman :-) because it works there too, as I just found out :-) ...

PS: Besides the games listed on the VRToolkit website, the following games I tried also work.
Project Cars 3 64 dinput8.dll next to pCARS3.exe
Epic Roller Coaster 64 dxgi.dll next to "Epic Roller Coasters.exe"
NoLimits2 Roller Coaster 64 dxgi.dll next to 64bit/nolimits2core.exe
GTA5 (R.E.A.L. VR Mod) 64 d3d11.dll not working, conflict with R.E.A.L. d3d11.dll
Project Wingman 64 dxgi.dll next to ProjectWingman/Binaries/Win64/ProjectWingman-Win64-Shipping.exe

updated (works also/or not):
iRacing 64 dxgi.dll next to iRacing\iRacingSim64DX11.exe
Everspace 64 dxgi.dll next to EVERSPACE\RSG\Binaries\Win64\RSG-Win64-Shipping.exe
Star Wars Squadrons 64 dxgi.dll not working, untrusted files
Senua's Sacrifice VR 64 dxgi.dll next to HellbladeGame\Binaries\Win64\HellbladeGameVR-Win64-Shipping.exe
Redout 64 dxgi.dll next to Redout\redout\Binaries\Win64\redout-Win64-Shipping.exe

[tennenbaum]

Is there anybody who tried it and can share his experience?

[FishSeven]

Escrito originalmente por tennenbaum:

Is there anybody who tried it and can share his experience?

Try it for yourself and I guarantee you will no longer have blurry VR vision. It will cost you the time to copy 4 files to the game folder and rename the file accordingly --> https://vrtoolkit.retrolux.de/gamelist.html

Unfortunately, you have to do this once for each game because there is no such feature natively in Steam. But, it's worth the few minutes to see sharply in VR.

After doing that and starting the game you will find in SteamVR (left bottom) a small golden icon. Select it and choose the vr+ or vr filmic+ profile and done. Adjust sliders to your needs (untick performance mode in bottom right to do so).

It's a mystery to me how anyone would want to play VR in any other way.

[Bob Loblaw]

Another option: the image scaling and sharpening built into Nvidia control panel:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-is-nvidia-image-scaling/

[tennenbaum]

Escrito originalmente por FishSeven:

Escrito originalmente por tennenbaum:

Is there anybody who tried it and can share his experience?

Try it for yourself and I guarantee you will no longer have blurry VR vision. It will cost you the time to copy 4 files to the game folder and rename the file accordingly --> https://vrtoolkit.retrolux.de/gamelist.html

Unfortunately, you have to do this once for each game because there is no such feature natively in Steam. But, it's worth the few minutes to see sharply in VR.

After doing that and starting the game you will find in SteamVR (left bottom) a small golden icon. Select it and choose the vr+ or vr filmic+ profile and done. Adjust sliders to your needs (untick performance mode in bottom right to do so).

It's a mystery to me how anyone would want to play VR in any other way.

Thanks!! I'll try.

[FishSeven]

Escrito originalmente por Bob Loblaw:

Another option: the image scaling and sharpening built into Nvidia control panel:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-is-nvidia-image-scaling/

As far as I know, this can only be used for non-VR games. Or have you had other experiences?

[Globespy]

FSR/NIS are for very different things other than just adding sharpening/color filters.
There's a big difference between downscaling/supersampling technologies and anti-aliasing, so I don't quite see the relevance when you were talking about 500% SteamVR SS. Aliasing is generally caused by the resolution of the display panel, which is why there's very little aliasing on native 4K panels comapred to 1080p/1440p - more pixels equals much smoother, more defined edges where aliasing can happen.

For example, even with my 5900X/3080ti PC a game like AMS2 cannot be ran with high graphics settings at many tracks, especially with a full grid of cars, or when it's raining - at least not on a much higher resolution HMD than the Index (I run the Reverb G2).
FSR/NIS allows much more eye candy to be running, and when you also have an included sharpening tool, it looks great.
The future of gaming will depend on downscaling technologies like DLSS as it's clear that game developer ambitions always seem to be significantly ahead of current hardware, especially for newer high resolutions VR HMD's.

Also, with much more work being done on anti-cheat technologies, such tools are likely to become more difficult to use unless the game developers are working directly with the toolkit dev to whitelist their product.

Thanks for posting.

[🙈🧬👨‍💻🥽Jerry ✡️ VRcia⛐🏁✈️🏓]

all of the tech is cool, but DLSS especially gives most games a slight "smudge" effect that i just can't stand. for VR specifically, foveated rendering seems to be the future. why waste power on something you're not looking at ;)

the "AI" stuff is cool, but will never be like rendering the real thing. you also then just push the "boundary" further and will still hit bottlenecks.

[TheCreamster]

can i just install this and add it to my skyrim vr profile in vortex? has this been tried with skyrim vr? how well does it work with it if so?

[FishSeven]

Escrito originalmente por TheCreamster:

can i just install this and add it to my skyrim vr profile in vortex? has this been tried with skyrim vr? how well does it work with it if so?

Yes, I already use the CAS sharpener with Skyrim VR and it makes a big difference in sharpness. There is also a CAS Vortex version at: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/38219?tab=description that you can use, but the Vortex version requires "Luminous ENB" to be installed.

VRToolkit is now also a part of ReShade, so you can also use the latest ReShade with SkyrimVR.

Because CAS sharpener makes everything look really sharp, it's also beneficial if you install mods like Perfect Nature and available Hi-Res textures for the environment and characters.

You will be amazed. No blur, even in the distance everything looks sharp. Makes SkyrimVR a whole new experience.

[--ranXerox--]

well Ill try reducing my 500% supersampling down to 100 and use this product see if it's cracked up to be.