Allow users to actually set overlay quality vs gpuSpeed forcing it.

[Curtis-VL]

Hi,

Would it be possible to separate overlay quality from the 'gpuSpeedRenderTargetScale'? Similar to how resolution can be 'Auto' (based on that value), or, manually set by the user. It seems a bit crazy that even with an 'overlay quality' setting for low and high, SteamVR just decides this for you anyway with no real way to override it.

I'm the dev of OVR Toolkit and regularly get users questioning why overlays are poor quality, or have to reply to negative reviews complaining that overlays are blurry for them, etc. - Currently, if they really want to and accept the lower performance, I have users editing the 'gpuSpeedRenderTargetScale' value and making the file read only. It's such a hacky workaround (I'm aware it affects 'Auto' resolution too) but unless I'm missing something, there's no other way around it I believe. (Other overlay app devs are following this same process)

If there's any possible solution to this issue please let me know! Would save me and SteamVR users a lot of pain, maybe even with the possibility to scale overlays above 150% (1.5 in that config) for increased clarity on high-end systems.

Proposed idea: Add an 'Auto'/'Manual' toggle with a slider for overlay quality, the same as is used for headset resolution.

Thanks! 👍

[Xiexe]

XSO dev here. I agree.

This used to be a feature, there used to be a config for Compositor Render Scale. This was way back before gpuSpeed profiling was added.

There was a brief time where beefy GPUs recently had very good gpuSpeed scores which boosted it above 1.5x Compositor scale, this was great. Overlays were very crisp, I loved those two days.

Then it got capped again to 1.5x.

I feel if you're set to Auto supersampling, gpuSpeed measuring makes sense.

I feel that otherwise, there should be a slider for the Compositor scale, just like anything else, even if it requires a SteamVR restart.

[CircuitLord]

Also overlay dev, +1 to everything ^

[ykeara]

^+1

[CrispyPin]

I agree with this

[xzkeee]

+1

[Curtis-VL]

Yeahhhh, still +1 to this. :)

Having users mess around with a config file which affects other areas of SteamVR simply because they want overlays to be clearer at a cost to performance is wild.

[ghost]

Another +1 coming in for this! I'm developing an overlay at the moment, but it's practically unreadable because of the low quality & lack of filtering, even with Overlay Render Quality set to High in the SteamVR video settings, which I presume only affects the dashboard... :(

[thinkyfish]

Bump for this, I'm creating a text based overlay program and this will be a problem if I cannot get a pixel perfect overlay. I'd like the ability to override this on the program side, but a user setting would be good too. Lower fps is fine in my use case.

[Lhun]

Bringing this back up. We currently have no user accessible setting for "renderCameraMode" : "raw" or GpuSpeedHorsepower which is way off for most people. I flip my system into a dynamic overclocked mode when I'm doing vr, and the ratings are just plain wrong. Not being able to see the native resolutions and having it fly all over just isn't consumer friendly. Either let us lock it manually please or decide a behavior. I bet most people would just prefer to manually set render target scales, and hardcore users almost univerally complely disable reprojection anyway.

[Curtis-VL]

Bringing this back up. We currently have no user accessible setting for "renderCameraMode" : "raw" or GpuSpeedHorsepower which is way off for most people. I flip my system into a dynamic overclocked mode when I'm doing vr, and the ratings are just plain wrong. Not being able to see the native resolutions and having it fly all over just isn't consumer friendly. Either let us lock it manually please or decide a behavior. I bet most people would just prefer to manually set render target scales, and hardcore users almost univerally complely disable reprojection anyway.

I actually do use reprojection! SteamVR's motion smoothing is quite nice when you have the GPU horsepower to back it up, otherwise yes, it becomes a bit 'ghosty'. (I guess that's a word for it?)

Totally agree about the GPU performance test though, there's many instances where this is just plain wrong anyway. Say for example you're an Oculus user, you'll be running Oculus Compositor in the background, this skews the result massively and leads to very low render scales unfortunately.