Got my new PC yesterday, as ever taken many hours to tweak windows and get stuff set up ( for example discovering a 26GB hibernation file on my SSD!), but seems like it was worth it for ED, especially with the DK2.
Now i've only done a few tests, probably about 30 mins total due to having all sorts of hardware issues getting the rift to work, but so far i've gotten pretty surprising results compared to what others have been posting. The PC is a 5390k @ 3.5Ghz (overclock keeps failing, might have to send it back) with a single MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G ( MSI have overclocked it a little ), using the latest nvidia drivers, ED beta 2.06. In ED I started with 'high' settings, then disabled AO, AA and set shadows to low, FOV is at max which in the config gives a value of 60. I'm using RivaTuner to report the framerate in game.
With those settings i'm mostly staying at 75Hz in several tutorials I tried - Docking, first combat (shooting the barrels in ice asteroid field), SuperCruise. Occasionally in the asteroid field it dips to 70 fps for a few frames, but that might just be loading more data. Indeed the only times it really drops by any substantial amount appears to be when Elite is loading in new assets (e.g. during system supercruise and approaching planets) and I suspect while that could be improved, it's something that will happen in any taxing game on the rift. Now i'm surprised at these results as from what I'd read a number of people even with sli 970's were having problems and people repeatedly talked about using low settings. I'll have to do some proper testing when i've had more than 4 hours sleep to be sure of these results, but I suspect with a gpu with the performance of a 970 should be able to run most options at medium or high as long as AO , AA are disabled and shadows are set to low or maybe off.
Things get stranger though, as the last few tests involved going into a solo game, where the sidewinder of the tutorials was replaced by my Eagle ( though in the past few days I seem to have lost all my credits, was there a character wipe?) in Azeban and with the nvidia DSR set to x2. Performance was pretty bad initially hovering around 60-65 fps, though after sitting in the hanger for 30 seconds it seemed to settle around 70 -75 fps. I was able to launch and fly around the station and eventually come back to and and generally framerate seemed to stay above 65 fps worse case, whilst everything looked far better due to DSR x2. The best aspect was that i'd actually forgotten i'd set DSR ( first solo game got stuck on black screen) so I feel it definitely had an effect when I caught myself wondering why Azeban station hanger and the Eagle looked so good. I do want to retest using a sidewinder though, as i've found elements such as UI to be greatly affected in terms of visual quality based on what ship you are in, since UI can be closer or further away.
Anyway point is i'm pretty happy with my new system and single GTX970. Going SLI would no doubt improve matters, but i'm going to wait it out for CV1 or maybe details of nvidia's VR Direct. In the meantime over the next week I want to do more testing and try and get some reliable performance figures based on specific set ups as I'm really confused at the breadth of results people are posting with GTX970/980 single/sli.
Oh I also discovered in that you can create your own presets for quality by adding a .fxcfg to the folder <install directory>\Elite\EDLaunch\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1002\OptionDefaults. In that folder you'll find the high, med, low presets and you can use one as a template to create your own, adding in additional options found in C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics\Custom.fxcfg such as OculusPixelsPerDisplayPixel. I've not tested this extensively so unsure if some options from Custom.fxcfg might be ignored and obviously as Frontier updates the beta the options may get superceeded. However from a quick test cycling through high, med, low and my own the graphic options seemed to update correctly. The only bug is that my custom setting comes up with no name as you cycle through them, not sure why.
