Witcher 3 VR v0.9.4 Alpha 1 (V1117)

This release aims to fix DLSS, improve performance, resolve long-standing bugs, and add a preliminary native asymmetric-projection renderer.

Highlights

DLSS

True DLSS is finally here in its complete form. I finally managed to use motion vectors properly, so there is no longer any need for a fake HMD-based motion-vector table.

DLSS is now fully implemented using the real parameters provided by the engine. I also fixed a ghosting issue caused by an input being shared between both eyes.

Performance

I made several improvements almost everywhere and integrated findings from the djules75 fork — thank you! CPU bottlenecks and overhead have been greatly reduced.

Asymmetric Projection — Native Stereo Rendering

I managed to implement native asymmetric-projection rendering. It is currently available only in No AA mode; support for the other modes will come later.

Asymmetric projection does not waste pixels outside the headset's visible field of view: the full rendered image is used by the headset.

For comparison, on Quest 3 the Godlike resolution with symmetric projection uses only about two-thirds of the rendered pixels. A 3072×3216 render window is cropped to approximately 2473×2696 in this game. This means that Virtual Desktop Ultra with asymmetric projection can still look better than Godlike with symmetric projection.

Other headsets may see a smaller improvement. My Pimax 5K, for example, gains only about 3% more usable pixels. The improvement varies from headset to headset.

This can provide a huge performance gain, especially on the GPU, because you can lower the preset, resolution, or supersampling while retaining excellent image quality. You no longer need such high resolution values with asymmetric projection—but if your hardware can handle them, the resulting quality can be insanely good.

This mode still has some limitations. Many effects lose their correct positioning with asymmetric projection and must be adjusted individually. I have already fixed most shaders and effects, including smoke, fire, and lights, and added an automatic detection and correction routine that should also handle shaders I have not encountered yet.

Some shaders may still require a manual fix. You can help me find them: contact me on Discord and I will explain how to report them.

Shadow rendering and culling are fully fixed. You may still notice small differences between the eyes, but these are caused by LOD selection rather than a shadow-rendering error.

This mode is experimental, so there is no guarantee that it will look correct everywhere.

Auto Recenter

The mod now automatically recenters after every loading screen.

Changes

• Restored the previous symmetric-projection routine. It still uses full-screen rendering, but displays slightly fewer pixels than v0.9.3—approximately 3% fewer on Quest 3.

Fixes

• Fixed DLSS ghosting.
• Fixed incorrect or dark colors inside the headset.
• Fixed culling for shadows, objects, and textures: shadows no longer flicker, NPC textures no longer look washed out, and items no longer disappear after only a few meters.
• Smoke no longer rotates or moves with the headset.
• Fixed incorrect convergence on some headsets.
• The launcher now warns the user when it cannot write to the game files and provides manual setup instructions.
• The launcher now correctly handles UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE dx12filelist.txt files and repairs files corrupted by older launcher versions.

Presentation Size tip

Lowering Presentation Size can increase apparent image quality further by presenting the same rendered resolution over a smaller angular area, effectively zooming the scene out. Horizontal and vertical black bands will gradually appear, so choose the lowest value where they are still invisible or acceptable for your headset and fit. This adjustment has no additional CPU cost.

For Quest 3, 0.85 is a good starting point. Unless the headset is worn extremely close to the lenses, the borders are practically invisible.

Known issues

• Far/Distante game camera modes are not yet corrected. Only close/near cameras are currently supported.
• Ray Tracing and Screen Space Reflections set to High are not supported.