what's DK2's "real" resolution? How much pixels discarded?

The resolution is 960x1080 per eye. The actual rendered area of the screen will be slightly smaller, and depends on various factors. For example, the lenses used, the distance to the screen, your personal eye relief, etc, all effect how large the screen area will be.

Technically speaking it is easy to find this out by running a (custom made) Rift application and querying OpenGL for the number pixels actually rendered. However, the resolution doesn't really tell you much. The more important metric is pixels per degree, which is a continuously variable value over the surface.

Here is a post where hellary tried to figure it out by masking out the unused blacked out area of screen captures and looking at the pixel count.

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=7514&start=60#p119941

I don't know if that is even accurate. VorpX usually seems to have even more blacked out area and people say they still don't see the blacked out area in their view.

Edit:
If hellary's method is good and the DK2 uses approx. 85% of it's screen, the resolution per eye is probably closer to 888x999 pixels per eye if you keep the same 8:9 ratio as 960x1080. It would depend on which lenses you use to if the number would be higher or lower. Surely someone knows the maximum and minimum visible pixels depending on the cups used. It's also hard to compare rectangular resolution numbers on round displays. It might be better to just say how many visible pixels per eye and the ver, hor, & diag fov of VR HMD displays for comparison purposes when there are more out there to compare.

People think the DK1 is blurry with 640x800 (512,000 pixels) per eye, when it is actually only 350,720 pixels per eye, if it is really only using 68.5% of the display, making it closer to the resolution of a 640x480 monitor than a 800x600 monitor.

"KydDynoMyte" wrote:
Here is a post where hellary tried to figure it out by masking out the unused blacked out area of screen captures and looking at the pixel count.

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=7514&start=60#p119941

I don't know if that is even accurate. VorpX usually seems to have even more blacked out area and people say they still don't see the blacked out area in their view.

Edit:
If hellary's method is good and the DK2 uses approx. 85% of it's screen, the resolution per eye is probably closer to 888x999 pixels per eye if you keep the same 8:9 ratio as 960x1080. It would depend on which lenses you use to if the number would be higher or lower. Surely someone knows the maximum and minimum visible pixels depending on the cups used. It's also hard to compare rectangular resolution numbers on round displays. It might be better to just say how many visible pixels per eye and the ver, hor, & diag fov of VR HMD displays for comparison purposes when there are more out there to compare.

People think the DK1 is blurry with 640x800 (512,000 pixels) per eye, when it is actually only 350,720 pixels per eye, if it is really only using 68.5% of the display, making it closer to the resolution of a 640x480 monitor than a 800x600 monitor.

very cool! thank you so much

"tg022011" wrote:
I read an article that calculated for DK1, 73% of the actual screen space is used, and all other pixels are wasted.

I don't think you can extrapolate a single value valid for everyone from the experience of a single user. The size of the viewable zone on the screen is dependent on the eye relief and the IPD which are quite variable among individuals.

Here are some examples, not with the exact lens surface profile used by the DK1 but it's enough to illustrate the variation :

63.5mm IPD, 2mm eye relief :

63.5mm IPD, 4mm eye relief :

63.5mm IPD, 10mm eye relief :


70mm IPD, 2mm eye relief :

75mm IPD, 2mm eye relief :

On that note Cyber, are able to tell us the maximum resolution DK2 will support in Windows and be able to downscale from? For example the DK1 supports 1980x1200 as the maximum res in Windows. Thanks!

DK2 max resolution is 1920x1080 @ 75Hz.

However, you can (and probably should) render to a higher res buffer in your engine for increased quality.

"jherico" wrote:
The more important metric is pixels per degree, which is a continuously variable value over the surface.

The Rift's pixels per degree as a function of the viewing angle is almost a constant (very near to equidistant projection).

"cybereality" wrote:
DK2 max resolution is 1920x1080 @ 75Hz.

However, you can (and probably should) render to a higher res buffer in your engine for increased quality.

Thanks Cyber. I already do this; my render target is calculated with a pixelsPerDisplayPixel of 2 with the default FOV. This results in a render target size of 4486 x 3107 with the DK1. But if I set the resolution to 1920x1200 (instead of 1280x800) I get even better anti-aliasing and image quality with the same render target size. It seems like the hardware scaler of the DK1 does a really good job at downscaling for some reason. I was hoping the DK2 would support a "higher max resolution" and have the same kind of hardware downscaling.

If you render to the resolution of the display and the display isn't using the full display, is it downscaling to begin with? Or is the center 1:1 pixel mapping and downscale increases the closer you get to the edges?