Decided to login in to SWTOR today. Did the guild get disbanded?

Also, what's up?

After a period of inactivity leadership gets transferred to any active member left. I guess when there are no active members left it gets disbanded. I think last time I checked Nocry had ownership? I'm trying to remember what the situation was last time I logged in and caught up on the story expansions, but it's been awhile.

I made some additional slight changes. It was discovered that changing the encode resolution width to anything other than the render resolution width can create shimmering, so keeping it the same is better. I also updated my PC with a new CPU, RAM, etc. so tweaking some settings to reflect that.

I'm using the default 1.0x resolution at 90hz (3712x1872) and changed the encode resolution width to match (3712). I'm also experimenting with upping the refresh rate to 120hz (mostly for Pop One), but I haven't had enough testing to see if I'm keeping that setting).

My stability started to nosedive, so I bit the bullet and got a new CPU and motherboard. Intel 13600k paired with MSI Pro z690-a DDR4 motherboard. No power issues! No crashes! And runs like a dream! https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/57068072

I slapped a cheap liquid cooler on it (ID-Cooling Frostflow x240) and it keeps it nice and cool! The only tweak I had to do was changing MSI's CPU Lite Load setting from 12 to 5 as MSI is giving the wrong voltages for 13th gen, making them too hot.

I'm pretty sure my original issue was just a faulty board (or CPU).

Meta has officially announced their newest headset, the Quest Pro. Perhaps you're here because you're curious about this new headset. It's a $1500 device that adds pancake lenses, face/eye tracking, and better screens with QLED and local dimming tech. Most of the upgrades, however, have gone into the passthrough feature. It's 4x the resolution of Quest 2's passthrough and adds color and depth. All of this is an attempt to add augmented reality to the device.

For VR gaming the general consensus is that this headset is a hard pass. The upgrades for VR are minimal. The screen resolution remains the same. There is better clarity via the pancake lenses, which offer a much larger sweet spot. The panels also provide mechanical ipd adjustment and better contrast. The headset is more comfortable due to the thinner optics.

The sides of the headset, however, are left open to help with AR. As a result there is extreme light leak. There are magnetic attachments that fix this on the sides, but you'll still get the light leak from the bottom. To fix this, you'll need to buy a $50 add on gasket, an insult after spending $1500. Even if you think the new features like face and eye tracking would improve your VR experience, they are locked to standalone only and don't work in PCVR. What about foveated rendering? Apparently a dead end since the processing to perform it costs about as much as you'd save by using it.

There's no direct PC connection still (and probably never will be). It does use wifi 6e, so theoretically you might get better Airlink from the device, though using a cable will still be a better experience.

Even if you are super excited about AR, first impressions say it's still not there yet. And even if you did find something compelling to do with the headset, it only has a 1-2 hour battery life if using all its features. This isn't even long enough to last half a work day of meetings or work sessions, which is the main purpose of the device.

The Quest 3 is rumored to be coming next year and should have a lot of the VR improvements that the Quest Pro has (pancake lenses and an even better chip) while cutting some of the useless new features (face tracking) to keep the price down. That device should be between $300-$500.

Wait for the Quest 3.

It's been a long while for me!

Updated current settings:

Bitrate > Resolution > Supersampling > Refresh Rate

My settings for Nvidia 3080



OCULUS DEBUG TOOL

Distortion Curvature: Low

Encode Resolution Width: 3712

Encode Dynamic Bitrate: Disabled

Dynamic Bitrate Max: 0

Encode Bitrate (Mbps): 480

Dynamic Bitrate Offset (Mbps): 0

Link Sharpening: Enabled

Mobile ASW: Disabled



OCULUS DEVICE SETTINGS

Refresh Rate (90Hz) or (120hz)

Render Resolution: (3712x1872) 1.0x at 90hz or 1.2x at 120hz



OCULUS TRAY TOOLS

Super Sampling: 1.45 (I start there and adjust depending on intensity of the game using the Profiles). If you use Steam regularly instead, you can also super sample within Steam settings per game. I like to use Oculus Tray Tool's Visual HUD - Pixel Density and Performance to see how close I am to the Quest 2's actual resolution and how my performance is being affected.



VRPERFKIT

Google it. You need to manually put two files in the directory of each game you want to use this on. If you have a video card that supports it, you can get fixed foveated rendering and some sharpening. Currently my settings are:

upscaling

enabled: true

method: cas

renderScale: 0.95

sharpness: 0.9

radius: 0.6

fixedFoveated

enabled: true

innerRadius: 0.6

midRadius: 0.8

outerRadius: 1.0



Note that you don't have to do ALL of these things, but if you leave something out, you'll want to adjust elsewhere. For instance, if you aren't going to super sample and apply sharpening, then just crank the resolution scale up instead. You'll notice my resolution is at .9x scale, but that's simply to give me more room to super sample and save a little performance at the same time. Obviously if I cranked my resolution up to 1.7x then my super sampling would need to be completely different or be left out completely.

I'm in the process of revisiting these settings again. The question is whether 3970 encode resolution width and 550 encode bitrate is wasted performance. Some seem to think the Quest 2's decoding is locked into around 300, so increasing the encoding past that won't help. I seemed to notice a difference between even 400 and 550 when I made this post, however, so I'll have to look at it again. Quest 2's native apps render at 3660, so the theory is going above that isn't worth it for the width, though I've also seen that, due to the native resolution of the actual panel, going to 3970 can have benefits.

Either way a more safe baseline where you won't hit too much in the way of diminishing returns would be bitrate to 350 and encode resolution width to 3664.

Here’s some randomness for you:  I proposed Saturday; she said yes!

Wow, congrats!