The Oculus Rift is an amazing piece of technology. It was the first high-end consumer virtual reality headset on the market and its birth helped kickstart a revolution. The Rift has a wonderful lineup of games, amazing experiences, and enormous potential in the world of modern electronics. However, in this sea of positives there does float the occasional driftwood of negativity.
One of the most cited problems with the Oculus Rift is its resolution. The headset uses two separate OLED displays that receive their visual information from very powerful PCs running some of the world’s best graphics cards. Despite this, the resolution on the Rift is certainly far from perfect and even falls below modern HD televisions.
This is a legitimate knock against the Rift, but as often happens when times get dark, a hero has emerged to better the circumstances for all us lonely serfs.
UploadVR’s French VR friends, Enter the Rift, posted a way to increase the Rift’s perceived resolution in a recent article:
Step 1 – Have an amazing graphics card – there’s no getting around this one. Your GPU will need to be at least Oculus speech or above to pull this off.
Step 2 – Download Oculus SDK 1.3.2
Step 3 – Launch the Oculus debug tool: find the ‘Pixels Per Display Pixel Overide’ feature and change 0 to 2. You can experiment with other inputs to suit your exact GPU. Press ‘Enter’.
Step 4 – Close the debug menu: This is to avoid straining your PC during gameplay.
Step 5: Launch Oculus home, pick your game and enjoy the increased resolution!
Many Rift users are already reporting positive results after following these steps. Benqoi even included a GIF demonstrating the resolution increase this process provides.
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Increasing display resolution is undoubtedly a major focus for Oculus as it continues to develop the Oculus Rift 2.0. Workarounds like these, however, can help manage the pain until that mythic piece of hardware is finally released.
