Bad aliasing even at 200% SS, previously not happening

[agro1986]

I play with 200% SS on my Vive Pro. It looked great in the past, but on recent SteamVR versions there is ugly aliasing on some games. It is especially pronounced on:

• Text. Unless you get really close it's not readable
  
• Trees. The foliage shimmers so bad.
  
• Edges of objects, the specular highlights is aliased.

This doesn't happen on all games. For me it happens in h3vr (Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades) and Half-Life Alyx. Also, it doesn't happen in SteamVR Home. Sadly I don't know which version broke it because I play VR on and off. The developer of the game thinks it's a SteamVR issue.

Here's what the aliasing looks like:

h3vr with bad aliasing[drive.google.com] (download and view it on 100% size please)

You can see that text is aliased, and tree foliage on the right side is pixel crisp so when you move the tiny spaces between leaves and sky shimmer.

Please also see this in 4k full screen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKHPOp0bJ-A

Take note that on the bottom side of the black panel you can see aliased white specular reflection.

Here's the phenomenon in Alyx opening level:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAocQywJp0w

It seems that the game renders at a high resolution (200% SS) but then downsamples it to match the device resolution using the worst possible sampling method. Kinda like this youtube video which is downsampled badly so the text is not legible:

https://i.imgur.com/UuKWw1s.png

Here's my specs.

Ryzen 5950X
RTX 3090
32 GB RAM
2 TB NVMe SSD
MSI x570 Gaming Pro Carbon Motherboard
Nvidia driver 466.63 (Happens in all recent versions anyway)
Windows 10 Version 21H1
SteamVR 1.17.12 (Happens in all recent beta/non-beta anyway)
HTC Vive Pro
SteamVR Supersampling 200%
8x MSAA set in h3vr, forced 4x MSAA in Alyx
Other graphics options set to max in h3vr
SteamVR report: here[drive.google.com]

I played around with many options in game and also on Nvidia drivers. The only thing that fixes the aliasing is if I force VRSS to always on for h3vr (but I don't want to use VRSS, and also Alyx doesn't support VRSS).

Other users with different NVIDIA card encountering the problem: here

The aliasing makes VR unplayable, so please fix it. I would help with additional info if needed.

[chrisjoh18]

I THOUGHT I WAS GOING CRAZY