were all of the DK1 Oculus Rifts 1080p?

Yes in fact I did. I backed the kickstarter before it has started and Palmer sent me 1280x800 devkit. It came with VR version of Doom II, and with that resolution it looked about right. God the kickstarter HD DK1 was so much better with new screen. Shame for those who late, now it's out of stock.

Mine was 4K, I was lucky enough to be a pre kickstarter backer. Oh I have 3 IR cameras for it as well. The DK2 is pale in comparison, I wish there was 20 IR cameras!

"raidho36" wrote:
Yes in fact I did. I backed the kickstarter before it has started and Palmer sent me 1280x800 devkit. It came with VR version of Doom II, and with that resolution it looked about right. God the kickstarter HD DK1 was so much better with new screen. Shame for those who late, now it's out of stock.

given the option would you have skipped the 1280x800 DK and only bought the 1280x1080?

i am trying to skip the single camera DK2 or(rather) the simple camera DK2 immediately instead of waiting for the second batch of DK2 as i did with DK1 (not intentionally.. it was more luck than precision timing)

"densohax" wrote:
Mine was 4K, I was lucky enough to be a pre kickstarter backer. Oh I have 3 IR cameras for it as well. The DK2 is pale in comparison, I wish there was 20 IR cameras!

so you agree that adding additional cameras is a simple fix to the problem of aiming at sitting VR instead of aiming at VR?

"reBoot185" wrote:

so you agree that adding additional cameras is a simple fix to the problem of aiming at sitting VR instead of aiming at VR?

Sorry, are you from the past? That was sarcasm!

"reBoot185" wrote:
i read that the earlier ones were not. if so: anyone use the lower definition versions of the DK1?

Just to be clear, those 60,000 "DK1" development kits were all 1280x800. Only a small amount of "HD" prototypes made it into the hands of select developers, which were 1080p. The DK2, just announced last week, is also 1080p.

Despite being 1280x800, demos in the DK1 often benefit from being run at 1920x1080 / 1920x1200 to take advantage of hardware anti-aliasing.

"drash" wrote:
Despite being 1280x800, demos in the DK1 often benefit from being run at 1920x1080 / 1920x1200 to take advantage of hardware anti-aliasing.

Hardware anti-aliasing built into the display circuitry is anti-aliasing you can't control and shouldn't rely on. I suspect that some of the 'improved' results of such programs would have to do with them failing to use a sufficiently large framebuffer in the render.

A naive approach assumes that if you're rendering to a 640x800 panel your framebuffer should be 640x800, but since the resulting distorted image is scaled up, at the center of the screen you'd lose almost half the angular resolution by doing so. Doing the same naive render to a 960x1080 framebuffer and having the Rift hardware scale it down improves the image quality, but again, with the hope that the devices all have the same behavior on down-scaling.

Also, the 1080 and 720 resolutions are commonly supported by almost all commodity display panels, because it means you can hook them up to an arbitrary video source, as long as that source supports ATSC output (basically every device ever designed to connect to a TV). But since DK2 is already at the 1080 standard that's the top end of that range, this trick isn't likely to continue to work. There's no reason (except maybe for 4k video standards) for display manufacturers to support higher resolutions. So, if developers aren't properly sizing their framebuffers, the output of their applications will go back to looking like shit... or more precisely, will look like the DK1 quality version, but running on DK2.

"drash" wrote:

"reBoot185" wrote:
i read that the earlier ones were not. if so: anyone use the lower definition versions of the DK1?

Just to be clear, those 60,000 "DK1" development kits were all 1280x800. Only a small amount of "HD" prototypes made it into the hands of select developers, which were 1080p. The DK2, just announced last week, is also 1080p.

Despite being 1280x800, demos in the DK1 often benefit from being run at 1920x1080 / 1920x1200 to take advantage of hardware anti-aliasing.

i had a 1080p version and loved it.

"densohax" wrote:

"reBoot185" wrote:

so you agree that adding additional cameras is a simple fix to the problem of aiming at sitting VR instead of aiming at VR?

Sorry, are you from the past? That was sarcasm!

so you disagree that adding an extra camera will remove the problem of loss of coverage by the single camera?

please learn about sarcasm being used to harm instead of help.

Using a larger framebuffer is not a viable option in DirectX 9. You can't mix MSAA with offscreen render targets. To use MSAA you have to render to the hardware backbuffer and copy to a texture, which limits you to the display resolution. And VR with no antialiasing is unacceptably bad.

Most VR games now are using DX9, and ultimately shouldn't. Though I don't think Unity takes advantage of the necessary APIs to make a difference in DX11 anyway.

Until then, in a DX9 game, upping the display resolution beyond 1280x800 is the only way to get half-decent image quality. Otherwise you are effectively rendering a 480p image to the 800p screen.

"owenwp" wrote:
Most VR games now are using DX9, and ultimately shouldn't.

Bad rendering API is bad.