OK, so Fallout 4 VR is working, kind of OK-ish. Honestly, the only other title I’ve seen perform this poorly is PCars2 (in fact, I think Fallout 4 VR is actually worse). After a fair amount of tweaking, plus using AMD Fidelity FX, it’s clear that trying for anything above 60fps is just not going to happen at the level of clarity I desire. 45fps with Motion Smoothing does some extra weird stuff in this title; like a throbbing light that causes an entire area of the scene to ripple outwards like a wave, or an explosion. Just not going to be able to use Motion Smoothing I don’t think.
But this gets me to another question (maybe best for another thread, but here goes);
Back many, many PiTool and SteamVR versions ago, games that ran below the refresh rate still ran reasonably smoothy; kind of like you experienced on a regular display. Yes, they got less responsive, and you could see that the fps were dropping, but that was generally it. For racing SIMs in particular it never bothered me to have a low frame-rate, because it was still a smooth low frame rate and I wasn’t moving my body around. PCars2, for example, performs so poorly that it would sometimes dip clear down into the 30s. But the key was that it still looked like a game running at framerates in the 30s. Not great, but playable.
However, this behavior is no longer present in any game I try. Some titles are worse than others, but as a rule I must now maintain the refresh rate as an absolute minimum, because anything less than this starts to hitch, and stutter, and turn into something unplayable and awful. For example 90fps looks like 90fps, but 88fps looks like 20fps. In FO4VR it’s so bad it’s almost like prior frames are repeating; like I try to move and I’m getting micro-stutters in the opposite direction of movement or something. It’s just awful. I could probably stand to run FO4VR (or many other titles) and rates between, say 60 and 90, as long as it was smooth the entire time.
Is there any way to correct this behavior? I really liked it the old way far, far better.