I have played around with my Rift for a while now and started to play with Unity a bit tonight and I think I need to finally ask for advice on the various settings in the nVidia 3D settings and their likely effect on the OR.
I have read a lot about some settings (v-sync in particular) but not about a few of the settings or, at least, not enough for me to know what to tweak.
So I thought I would list the settings here (with their possible values) and ask if people could explain the effect they think each would have and what a recommended setting would be (with the caveat, of course, that different applications prefer slightly different settings.)
I know there is a lot but if people can give their view on it, then we can have a quick reference for people like me who don't quite know enough about 3D (having grown up with peek and poke on an Apple ][ !)
I have to disagree with Max pre-rendered frames 1. Different games are going to give you different results and in the past, it defaulted to 3 on a global scale. Some games did benefit from changing that value to 2, and what it did was decrease mouse lag, but when you set it to 1, it typically made the game worse. On a global scale, I would stick with default. If you find an application that benefits from lowering it, I would simply change the value for that app alone. Here is an excellent article on all of those settings. It's a little dated, but still relevant for our cards, and I think the author updates any major changes. http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_6.html
pre-rendered frames smooths out gameplay at the expense of latency... that's its whole purpose... the more pre-rendered frames you have, the more likely you'll get sim sickness... 0 pre-rendered frames would be ideal for VR, but huge performance hits on lower end cards...
if you can lower every graphics setting in your game and in the NV control panel to get 75 fps (for the DK2) with pre-rendered frames set to 1, do that.
the goal for VR is to decrease latency at any expense and pre-rendered frames do the opposite of that...
when rendering transparent objects like trees and grasses i have found that setting the antialiasing transparency to 8x really helps keep the trees from aliasing badly, in vr this is a lot more noticable than on a screen. It has a performance hit but its worth it if you can optimize your scene to keep the frame rate high.
I would love to know how you could access that parameter inside unity, anyone know?