[Issue] Global Illumination Different Between HTC Vive and Oculus Rift

Hello, everyone. I've been working on a VR game with an HTC Vive. I just now had the opportunity to borrow an Oculus Rift to see if everything was working cross platform, and noticed an interesting issue.

The Global Illumination within the Rift appears to be 5x more intensive than within the Vive.

I have confirmed in the Rendering > Lighting Settings for both HMDs, the GI Intensity I have set is the same, at 0.5.

As I have been developing with the Vive, the visuals are working as intended on that HMD. However, if someone uses the Rift, the GI is over-powering, and severely affecting the game's atmosphere.

This is my first time creating a VR game, so I am not sure if I missed something or not. Additionally, I have been unable to find any articles or forum posts relating to this issue on the web.

Both are relying on OpenVR and SteamVR assets and APIs, as I have the Oculus api listed last in the XR supported section of the player settings.

The bottom line is, I would like both the Vive and the Rift to share the same visuals, and any other HMD down the line. Any advice or insight is much appreciated.

 

Further research has revealed that many Oculus Rift owners have complained about washed out colors, and very bland dark values, as if contrast settings were set very low.

Articles explaining the issue state that Nvidia graphics cards often default to a limited RGB color gamut, and would need to be changed in the Nvidia control panel to send full RGB values through the HDMI port.

I followed the article's steps, but am still unable to get the Oculus Rift's visuals to mirror the quality seen within the HTC Vive. The issue others reported sounds very similar to what I am seeing.

I, now, suspect that the HDMI cable used on an Oculus Rift CV1 may not support full color gamut, but that is just my speculation. Along the same lines of that thought, perhaps the HTC Vive looks so much better due to being allowed to use 3rd party HDMI cables that could have wider bandwidth for more advance digital video features, such as HDR. Again, this is just my speculation at this point.

If anyone has further advice or information, I would be much appreciative.

 

Welp, I was never able to confirm if the issue I saw was or wasn't attributed to an incompatibility between Nvidia full color output and the Oculus Rift, or if it was something else.

I ended up adding code to accommodate the Rift's difference in visuals, and leaving the other HMDs with the same functionality as before. Effectively, brute forcing a solution.

Perhaps I'll re-visit this again in the future if I decide to add full Oculus Rift support to my game.