ValkyrieUltraSettings — image courtesy CCP Games

‘EVE: Valkyrie’ Gets New ‘Ultra’ Graphics Option Thanks to Nvidia VRWorks

News Bits

By

Dominic Brennan

-

Jul 13, 2017

As part of this week’s EVE: Valkyrie update, which includes AI improvements, balance tweaks, and stability fixes, the game has also received some visual optimisations courtesy of Nvidia VRWorks. Suitable for higher-spec Nvidia cards (GTX 1070 and above), the new ‘Ultra Settings’ option enables ‘God rays’, improved cockpit lighting and projectile effects.

The latest ‘2017_R3’ patch for EVE: Valkyrie rolled out yesterday, detailed on the game’s official site. According to an Nvidia press release, it is Valkyrie’s support for VRWorks’ Lens Matched Shading rendering technique (only possible on the Pascal architecture) that maintains the level of performance required to render these higher quality visuals.

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CCP Games have incorporated Nvidia Volumetric Lighting to achieve the ‘God rays’ effect, along with a new anti-aliasing technique developed by Nvidia called ‘Multi-Sample G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing’, which reduces visible aliasing of geometry edges and specular highlights. ‘Ultra Settings’ also improves the fidelity of reflections and shaders, adds dynamic lights to projectiles, and upgrades the lighting and shadowing “in every area and level”.

Many more PC VR games could see Nvidia-specific visual enhancements, as VRWorks is now supported in both Unreal Engine 4.16 and Unity 2017.1.

✨EnkrowＸ✨

Gameworks for VR?
Sad to see.
- Rick
  
  They’re pushing optimization forward, of coarse it’s going to benefit their company first, they made it. Nvidia isn’t the bad guy for making better developer tools to work with their GPUs. The only reason people are mad its Nvidia only is because it cool stuff. If it sucked, no one would care. In the grand scheme, this is only bettering/pushing the tech forward.
  - ✨EnkrowＸ✨
    
    If it’s anything like normal gameworks, then this tech isn’t about working well as much as it is about business.
    Nobody ultimately benefited from gameworks aside from nvidia, and if this is more of the same we won’t benefit this time, either.
    They don’t care if a technology doesn’t actually enhance anything, as long as it reduces performance on AMD cards more than theirs.
    It’s all about the bottom line for them, that’s why they don’t support freesync, either.
    
    The problem is nvidias middleware solutions don’t necessarily provide anything new, they just gate certain features which don’t need to be gated, and would likely end up being better if the developer actually developed the effect in-house. It’s preventing innovation, really.
    
    What will be interesting to see is if this VR middleware is aimed at crippling performance, like gameworks was, or if they are putting that behind them.
    I hope it’s the latter, but I’ve been skeptical of nvidia ever since I found out that their drivers and middleware were to blame for poor performance from my 780.
    - Rick
      
      What part is stifling innovation? PhysX cloth and particle simulation is incredible and also optimized to run on Cuda, but over time it has been used is in all sorts of games just running off the CPU alone. While not used to it’s fullest extent, it still benefited the entire community and that’s just the past few years. And if you don’t have an Nvidia card, you can just turn off those settings, how does it hinder performance on other cards?
      - mareknr
        
        “how does it hinder performance on other cards”
        
        It is only in minds of some AMD fanboys. They think, that if GW features are turned of, they still influence performance in games. They just needed to find something they complain only because it is from NVIDIA.
    - Rainabba
      
      I don’t think those terms mean what you think they do. All these technologies are available to developers on other platforms. They have to be developed, matured, etc.. first, but these days that’s a very fast cycle.
      
      I’m not sure if you missed the last sentence or perhaps it was added later, but if there’s any reality to your concerns, this should address them well: “VRWorks is now supported in both Unreal Engine 4.16 and Unity 2017.1.” That makes the tech even more accessible (though it could be used previously with much more effort).
      
      Also: https://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-vrworks-coming-unity/
    - mareknr
      
      VRWorks does not adding new graphical features. It is only improving performance in VR. See for yourself:
      
      https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks
      
      BTW I also had GTX 780 and I do not remember poor performance. And after DX11 improved driver (as answer to Mantle), the overall performance go up significantly. But I used it only in full HD resolution so maybe that is why I can’t complain on missing performance.
      - Raphael
        
        Yes, it’s about performance boosting for vr and the performance increase is so high you can push up the graphic settings in game and have perfectly smooth gameplay. This is exactly what I get in Raw Data.
      - mareknr
        
        I hope, they will add VR Works also to Fallout 4 VR and Doom VFR. In these games it would be great.
        BTW what GPU do you have and how high was performance increase in Raw Data after added VR Works?
      - Raphael
        
        Post on their twitter accounts asking if they’re adding vrworks. Gtx 1070. Massive difference. I can push graphics to insane levels now.
      - mareknr
        
        That is great. Many VR games should get such performance increase. I hope NV will support in this way single player games too. Not only massive multiplayer games for marketing reasons. I have GTX 1080 so I am looking forward for that.
        Give us please info about VR Works usage in Fallout 4 and Doom VR if they reply to your posts on twiter. Thanks.
Peter Hansen

Do we have HOTAS support by now? Space combat with a game pad is just ridiculous.
- ✨EnkrowＸ✨
  
  They have full HOTAS and pedal support on PC. I’m not sure about PS4.
- Uaise
  
  Yes you can use a HOTAS with it. The problem remains that even with it the game still feels like it was made to be played on a controller, particularly when it comes to speed control. Don’t bother.
  - Raphael
    
    Speed control is unimportant on a fast dogfighter like this. There is braking, full speed and boost and that’s all that’s needed here. I detest eggbox controllers and my main flight sim of choice is dcs world so i know what i’m talking about.
    
    Eve is all about fast combat and it excels at that.
    
    Hotas flight response is excellent.
    - Uaise
      
      It really isn’t. Only effectively having 3 speeds is terrible and you can’t even do stuff that uses inertia to your advantage like cutting engines and manoeuvring your ship independently of the movement vector: We’re talking about stuff that was in dogfighters 15 years ago.
      - Raphael
        
        Are you aware Eve is an arena dogfighter? It’s equivalent to the air combat in battlefield. It’s not supposed to be a detailed physics sim. Making a sweeping reference to “stuff” from 15 years ago is irrelevant. It’s not yet illegal to make a space game without inertial damping switch. Combat in eve is fast and fun. Having fine throttle control is actually pretty unimportant in this game. For Elite and SC it’s important. For a battlefield arena style game it’s unimportant.
      - theonlyrealconan
        
        Thanks for the info. I think I will still hold off and keep playing ED. Seems like everything Eve tries, ED does better.
  - Peter Hansen
    
    Thanks for your assessment!
  - dogbite
    
    I had my HOTAS working well with EV. I uninstalled and later when the game expanded, I re-installed it. Could not get it working right at all. Terrible controls set in this. When back to Elite Dangerous.
    - Raphael
      
      I have perfect hotas setup with Eve and Elite so one of us is dumb… :)
Mike

“enables ‘God rays’”
I already have god rays, thanks to the fresnel lenses. I wish there were a feature to cancel out god rays.
- RFC_VR
  
  yes, “reverse God Rays”…now that would be a neat trick ;)
  - Darshan
    
    All RIFT CV1 owners will go GA GA over “Reverse God Rays”
    They want it on every title they buy for CV1
    - Mike
      
      Vive has it too. I have Vive. Though I think it was a little worse on the Rift.
michael j Laird

So Awesome people with great computers can actually justify getting good computers keep up the awesome work
- Get Schwifty!
  
  It also means that “great computer” has a longer life in VR….
Raphael

This is great news. Eve has had so many improvements and content updates since launch. Sad to see it under constant attack from dumb trolls who think it’s trying to be Elite or Star Citizen.

VRWorks has made a massive difference to Raw Data so it’s great i will get full performance with Eve now.
J.C.

I’m in the process of relocating my VR setup, and it’s…unfortunately not a small project. I probably won’t have it up and running for at least a week, an annoyance that’s been made moreso by the arrival of my Vive audio strap.

So, for those who CAN fire this up, did they add in the ability to crank SS over 130%? If so, at what point does it start causing issues (and what card are you running)?

I’m glad to hear that Raw Data’s jump to the VRworks toolset yielded significant improvement, it’s sadly rare that an NVIDIA-specific feature actually HELPS performance. Also, these tools have been such a long time coming that I had assumed they weren’t coming at all.

Does AMD have anything like this coming? They’re already painfully far behind in GPU performance, this gives Nvidia such a huge advantage that it’d be foolish not to go Nvidia for VR now.