AMD's ED drivers are nowhere to be seen and might never be seen. They know about it because I've told guys near the top in no uncertain terms that they are missing a trick here.
Dual 290's are a good bet going forward with all the major upcoming VR titles but I just can't tell if they'll ever get their act together in Elite. Games need to be LiquidVR and GameWorks VR compatible before Crossfire or SLI is properly implemented. I feel that there is a much larger chance of GameWorks VR being implemented than LiquidVR, mostly because Frontier seems a bit closer to Nvidia.
Current Crossfire and SLI is AFR based while multi card VR really needs to be SFR based.
AMD is pretty far ahead in VR because of Mantle and Asynchronous Shaders, neither of which Nvidia has. It's no good unless the game is LiquidVR compatible though.
https://community.amd.com/community...ectx-12-for-enthusiasts-explicit-multiadapter
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading
If those links are a bit technical this video explains part of the advantage -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3dUhep0rBs
The way I see it your choices are....
- 980 Ti, probably the best current choice for Elite assuming it never gets LiquidVR or GameWorks VR. Not a great choice otherwise tbh because Maxwell lacks important latency-reducing features and fine-grained preemption.
- Wait for Pascal which could be over a year out but at should at least put Nvidia on hardware parity with AMD's GCN. Software will likely still be behind because Mantle is so much more advanced than anything Nvidia has. That said, DX12 should be similar as it is basically based on Mantle anyway, so Pascal will likely be good enough and most VR games will be DX12.
- Get another 290 and hope AMD gets LiquidVR into Elite. I can't see this happening anytime soon tbh.
- Get a Fury X, Watercooled for a lot less than $1000, performs identically to a 980 Ti at high-resolution and is perfectly set for VR. Fury X Crossfire beats Titan X SLI in most games and will be further ahead in VR. It might not be awesome in Elite though, ever. A bunch of people at AMD need a good hard slap tbh, they are missing a golden chance here.
Right now I'd say Nvidia is better for Elite while AMD is better for the upcoming stuff like Eve: Valkyrie and possibly Star Citizen, and basically all VR titles. My advice however would be to wait unless you really can't. A 290 should be decent enough for Elite anyway if you can get your settings right.
Been pretty hard on AMD here because they deserve it but also be aware that Nvidia is lying and marketing through their teeth about the state of their VR program. They are nowhere and have given up the lead they had up till now in VR by basically resting on their laurels. GameWorks VR isn't even compatible with DX12 yet which is just a further joke with the headsets coming in a few months. They won't be anywhere near ready for the launch of VR proper and when Pascal comes around they'll drop Maxwell faster than you can say "holy fine-grained preemption Batman!".
- - - Updated - - -
yeah some of the stutter is certianly down to the game, sure, however I was talking about microstutter, which is (now bear in mind i am in the green camp and have not played on a crossfire machine in donkeys so things may have improved) but way back when, when using crossfire you would get tiny almost inperceptible - but not quite! - stutters, presumably when the cards were not quite operating in sync (incase you cant tell i am no dev so excuse poor lingo
)
AMD had awful Crossfire a couple of years ago but they're ahead again now because of
XDMA.
As mentioned above, you should probably avoid current SLI or Crossfire "AFR" for VR as it increases latency by a lot.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
