Quick fix for black smearing

[Jabbah]

Just go into your graphics driver control panel and change the brightness for the Rift DK2 display. I increased it from 0 -> 7 and that eliminated all black smearing in any of the demos. Here's a couple of screen shots from the boiler room demo:

Without:


With brightness increase:


I think it looks a bit better, more shadow detail rather than a hard transition to full black.

You do get a green tinge though and if it's not high enough you get green sparkles:

Full black:


Not bright enough - green sparkles:


Green tinge:


You only really notice the green tinge if there is no contrast in the scene though. If there are other brighter objects adding detail then it's ok.

[sc4r]

Good job

[nicorose]

Nice find and soo simple.. :mrgreen:

[ccp001]

with this brightened up would that lessen the pure blacks?

[TWhite]

It eliminates pure blacks completely.

This method solves one problem but creates another almost equally as bad as the problem it solves. I would easily prefer black smear over green tint any day of the week. And I seriously hope this isn't the proposed method of fixing black smear that Oculus has planned up their sleeves.

[Gizmotweak]

if you can fine tune this to get a green smear with a black tint you might be on to something.

[Jabbah]

"TWhite" wrote:
This method solves one problem but creates another almost equally as bad as the problem it solves. I would easily prefer black smear over green tint any day of the week. And I seriously hope this isn't the proposed method of fixing black smear that Oculus has planned up their sleeves.

It isn't as simple as that. Currently it appears that any sub pixel with a brightness less than 6 or 7 results in the sub pixel shutting off. That means that a lot of dark shadow detail disappears. You can see this in the first two screenshots; the first shows the pure black areas covering parts of the image that should have detail that can be seen in the second image.

There is also the problem that if the pixel brightness drops below a certain threshold it turns off. With this screen you cannot get a smooth transition to pure black, you get grey, dark grey, darker grey with a green tinge and then a sudden cliff to pure black. That is not a good situation, not only are you loosing a lot of shadow detail but you are getting steep transitions in brightness which is very obvious. You are essentially getting a mapping like this:

Buffer  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 ...
Display 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  7  8  9  10 ...

Any information with a value less than 7 will be lost. When you are developing something, loss of information in the display like this is not a good thing. But sure if you value pure blacks over a slightly brighter image with more detail, by all means don't up the brightness.

You also still get the green tint if you keep the pure blacks. The green tint is an artefact of the display at low brightness levels, so all regions that are dark but not pure black will still have a green tint. You can see this in the first screenshot. The areas around the pure black areas have a noticeable green tint. In fact the first image has an overall greener tint than the second brightened image. This is because if you brighten the image you will have less areas in the "green tint" range in a dark scene. The extra detail will also make the darkest areas with the green tint less noticeable.