Might as well put this first.
My hardware is currently is from 2014, apart from the gpu that was an upgrade around christmas 2016.
Rift.
980ti,
i5 4670k @ stock.
16gb ddr3 @ 1600mhz
I have been doing some thinking, and then a little bit of obsessing, but I have not been able to get what I would consider stable and good performance in my Rift during combat.
This is not new, it's basically been like this since I started on VR, and the Rift seem a bit more optimized than the Vive.
And I have mostly been saying to myself 'Yup VR is first gen, we will need more hardware power and optimisation before it gets good' But I have a 980ti.
It should be able to do a little more than 45 fps in combat, and I just tested, regardless of ASW or not, it drops as low, and even below the 45 fps mark even if ASW is disabled.
And if the amount of npc's drop or things calm down, I can see fps in the high 70's or more.
Graphics quality settings doesn't really do much either, currently running at medium, and supersampling and HMD quality at 1. No AA.
in supercruise, I get 90.
I get 90 or just about inside stations, unless it's also a busy instance with lots of npc's, but Resource sites, or just busy combat or on planets I start to struggle a bit.
My current working theory is the npc AI and my cpu is holding me back a bit.
I have been peeking through my nose gap at HWmon (I use CPUID HWMonitor) And I see some cores, mostly all of them, reach 80-90% utilization, then ASW kicks in and they drop to 60%.
It might just be me fooling myself, but doing things like shutting down the running AV shields, and other not really used programs seem to smooth some things out.
And in game, things like deploying SLF has an impact.
Another thing that seems to impact me is wingmen, if I have just one or two wingmen in instance I can be fine, but add a fourth and things can get real shaky when the bullets and lasers are flying.
I have tried over clocking the cpu before, but didn't really do anything.
So at the current moment I believe I am being throttled by my CPU (and possibly my slow RAM).
The fact that makes me feel rather certain on this is I see my cpu cores utilization reach about 90%, then ASW kicks in.
This new notion, and the hype around Ryzen has me thinking.
Due to VR I have been considering a new build, but I don't believe the performance gap between a 980ti and a 1080 is worth the cost.
I was hoping to at least get to next series on this card, but if it is the rest of my PC that's keeping me back.....
The thought I am having now is to maybe get a Ryzen build, keep the 980ti, and upgrade to a 2080/1180 (depending on what Nvidia decides to name it) when they release.
Currently looking at this build, but as always I really shouldn't spend the money.
But then again I don't have a SO to complain about why we have been eating oatmeal for a month...
CPU - AMD AM4 RYZEN 7 1800X 8-core
CPU cooler - Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo CPU cooler (It's included in the upgrade package)
Motherboard -ASUS AM4 CROSSHAIR VI HERO
RAM - 2x(32GB total) Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 16GB
Case - Fractal Design Define R5 Sort
OS - Microsoft Windows 10 Home, (USB drive)
PSU - Corsair CX750M, 750W PSU (ATX 12V V2.3, 80 Plus Bronze, Semi-Modular. 4x 6+2pin PCIe, 8x SATA, 6x Molex
Disk 1,2 - Kingston SSDNow UV400 240GB 2.5" SSD OEM (one for OS, one for games)
Disk 3 - Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5'' HDD (big storage)
Would run me about €2k.
Thoughts, comments, or opinions ?