Very bad anti-aliasing in Enscape VR

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    Enscape VR has bad anti-aliasing or maybe completely disable anti-aliasing for some reason. I am thinking that there must a swich in the rendering engine to enable it. DLSS is already disabled, which is an even worse effect. I made a video which shows demonstrates the missing anti-aliasing by just looking at the Index controllers once in the Steam Home environment and once in Enscape. Same hardware, same session. Every Steam app/game renderes the Index controllers in comparable quality except Enscape. Why is that? Is extends to the Enscape rendered world too and causes lots of jagged lines and shimmering. Please give use anti-aliasing.



    Re-reading this "very bad" is an exaggeration. It is not *that* bad - still - all the shimmering and flickering is incredibly distracting in VR. Any idea what causes this and why it is some much better in Enscape outside VR, but also better in other VR apps?

    The VR controller models are rendered with 4x MSAA (only for very high resolution displays this is disabled for performance reasons) - usually this is enough to get clean edges. I'm not exactly sure what's going on there - what kind of resolution is SteamVR using with Enscape? You can see that in the settings.

    Quote from burggraben

    Running at 150% supersampling on the Valve Index, eg rendering at 2468x2738 per eye. What's the cuttoff at which point the 4xMSAA is disabled?

    That's already above the threshold (2180) and I wouldn't recommend to run with 150% super-sampling with Enscape. It's very likely that what you're seeing isn't actually pixel aliasing but reprojection artifacts because with that kind of resolution you're probably way below the native framerate of the HMD (you can check that if you enable developer settings in SteamVR I think). I think your overall experience will probably be better running at native resolution (100%).


    Quote from burggraben

    Just the VR controller models or the entire world? The flickering and jagged lines happen all over the Enscape world, not just the controllers. I just used the controller models an apple-to-apple comparison between Enscape and SteamVRHome.

    Just the VR controllers, the rest is done via Temporal AA. There shouldn't be much "jagged lines" with this kind of HMD resolution - regardless of the AA technique.

    Quote from Clemens Musterle

    That's already above the threshold (2180) and I wouldn't recommend to run with 150% super-sampling with Enscape. It's very likely that what you're seeing isn't actually pixel aliasing but reprojection artifacts because with that kind of resolution you're probably way below the native framerate of the HMD (you can check that if you enable developer settings in SteamVR I think). I think your overall experience will probably be better running at native resolution (100%).

    Thanks. The 2180 threshold explains the weird effect where the controller looks worse at higher resolutions. I have confirmed that they look a lot better when I render at 100% native HMD resolution. However, the opposite is true for the world.


    I am not running into reprojection issues. Running stable at 80FPS with basically zero reprojection (see left wrist info screen in video). Great job on improving the performance of the engine by the way guys. A year ago or so I wasn't able to run it at native refresh rates. Thanks!

    So currently I have to run Enscape at 150% supersampling to tone down the aliasing flickering in the world. It doesn't look that bad in the video, but trust me it is super distracting and immersion-breaking when wearing the headset and I don't see it that much in other VR apps. The video shows the flickering is improved at 150% supersampling and worse at 100% native resolution. My GPU usage is going from 60% at native to around 80% when supersampling. I guess what I am asking is that you let me spend this 20% GPU power on better anti-aliasing rather than on super-sampling. Do you think that would help? There must be some anti-aliasing or anti-flicker algorithm that other VR apps have enable that Enscape isn't using yet.


    Okay so, I ordered a Varjo Aero as an upgrade from my Index. This will bring my resolution from 1440×1600 per eye to 2880 x 2720 per eye. Probably means running the larger display at 100% native without super-sampling. Hoping this will fix some of the flickering.


    Are there any other engine limitation I will run into with the increased resolution? Is world anti-aliasing disable at a certain point like the controller anti-aliasing?

    Sorry to disappoint, but if it's mostly the edge aliasing you're after purchasing a higher res HMD seems overkill. You could "emulate" the higher resolution just by manually increasing the SteamVR supersampling further. Of course the better display will be noticeable in other regards, such as less screendoor effect, but I'm not sure how noticeable this still is with the Valve Index.

    We have not tested Enscape with the Varjo HMD yet, it should run as any other HMD that supports SteamVR, but there's no "official support" from our side so far.

    Thanks I will try the Aero and see how it goes. Probably will be a few more week before delivery. The Aero doesn't come with controllers. Will Enscape still recognizes that it should display Index controllers or is that based on which headset is connected at the time?

    There is some other type of problem with the controller display other than anti-aliasing, which causes this jagged line and jittering effect. Not sure how it is related but in an Enscape scene with a large site environment (9km on on side) the problem apears to become amplified, but it is also visible on smaller sites.

    The videos demonstrates:

    1 - SteamVR Home: Perfect controller display

    2 - Enscape with SteamVR Menu overlay still visible: Jittery outlines are drawn around the controller, never seen this in any other VR application. Inside the Controllers are still perfectly still

    3 - Ensacpe without SteamVR Menu: All of the controller jitters. In a large site it feels like moving back and forth 1cm and is pretty distracting


    Guys, not sure how to say it in other words, but there a problem with the rendering of the controllers.


    Thanks for the updated report - now we have some crucial context information: You're working with a very large project and viewing it from afar. What we're seeing here is not actually image aliasing, but geometric aliasing due to floating point precision, that gets worse the further away from 0 (-> the origin) you are. This is expected in such a case unfortunately.
    You can verify that if you test the same thing in a (properly centered) smaller project (e.g. the Revit sample) - in that case it should not happen.

    When working with that big project you can also check your current Enscape log file (%APPDATA%\Roaming\Enscape\Data\Logs) for the following log:

    "New Bounding Box exceeds dimension constraints: ..."

    It'll also give you an indication if the project is not centered on the origin of the coordinate system, which makes things worse.

    Quote from Clemens Musterle

    What we're seeing here is not actually image aliasing, but geometric aliasing due to floating point precision, that gets worse the further away from 0 (-> the origin) you are. This is expected in such a case unfortunately.
    You can verify that if you test the same thing in a (properly centered) smaller project (e.g. the Revit sample) - in that case it should not happen.

    Sorry for the late response. I can confirm that this is the case just as you described it. When moving to the origin, eg teleporting to the house modeled in Revit, the geometric aliasing is gone.

    Quote from Clemens Musterle

    Just the VR controllers, the rest is done via Temporal AA.

    Upgraded to the Varjo Aero and it solved all of my issue with jaggies. The much higher resolution display is a perfect fit for Enscape in a professional environment. Up to now I have been unable to run that kind of resolution in Enscape on my old 3090, but with the new 4090 I get acceptable VR framerates, with the GPU maxed at 99%, raytracin turned off and Enscape rendering quality set to medium . I am wondering one thing though:

    With Aero-kind of super high resolutions, do we even still need Temporal AA. Maybe the GPU cycles spend on AA would be better spent on higher FPS?

    I'd love a way to turn off AA with a checkbox in setting similar to how I can turn off ray tracing. Maybe even more fine-tuning of individual graphic engine setting would be nice to strike a better balance of FPS needed for VR and graphical fidelity.