Oculus Rift + Elite Dangerous = Drool++

I was a huge fan of Elite as a kid. The scope of the game on the classic 8-bit machines was breathtaking, the line vector graphics were a canvas on which my imagination painted metals, alloys and battle scars.

The original Elite for BBC Micro
The original Elite for the BBC Micro

I can retire my imagination with Elite Dangerous on Oculus Rift – the experience of looking out of your cockpit and craning your neck to keep an enemy in sight is the most immersive experience I’ve had in VR (DCS World Flight Sim comes close).

It does need a couple of tweaks though to render best on Oculus as it looks like the Oculus SDK can do a better job of super-sampling than Elite Dangerous’ native super-sampling.

First download the Oculus Platform SDK from the Oculus Developer Center and unpack to your drive, inside there is a Tools folder with a single application OculusDebugTool.exe

Every time before starting Elite Dangerous run the OculusDebugTool and set the “Pixels Per Display Pixel Override” to around 1.6 for a GTX 1070 or 1.8 for a GTX 1080. Yes you need to do this every time you play, the setting is not remembered.

In Elite Dangerous’ graphics options, set the Super Sampling to 0.65X, you only need to do this once.

The results should make drool come out of your mouth hole.

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