Ok commanders,
with the 970, my in-game settings were VR low. This gave me the highest frame rate when in stations, on planets and in conflict (generally between 90 - in supercruise down to just 30ish in heavy battle activity). This is without supersampling, oculus debugtool et al (always ended up with lower fps or quality was compromised for fps in places when I did try these).
With the 1080 I ramped everything up to VR high (in beta I even tried VR ultra). My eyes tell me that everything is now clearer, smoother, brighter and can deliver a good fps in most situations when compared to the 970. During the beta slug-fest on Saturday night (using VR high), the fps did drop to 35-45 during intense combat but in regular gameplay it rarely drops below 50 in the most arduous graphics situations. I will now spend time fine tuning it using the aforementioned tools to try and improve the quality/fps further until my cpu/mb upgrades.
If you look at my sig, I'm running an older AMD cpu with a gigabyte 78LMT mb. I'm sure this will be a bottleneck for my system. Next step is a 6th gen i5 and decent gaming mb, so expect the quality to improve further still. Now I could easily play ED with the 970 which worked very well in VR but as I had the spare dosh for a 1080 I went for it. I wasn't expecting a huge leap in quality as the 970 is a pretty decent card (albeit with less than 4Gb usable memory), but it was a decent step towards better quality VR (some may say obviously).
I don't regret my purchase in any way but would advise anyone considering a move from 970 to 1080 to consider the following; if you are running a decent rig (i.e. 6th gen cpu, good mb, fast ram etc) you'll likely see an even better improvement than I did. However, if your rig also requires upgrading too (like mine) then you will see an improvement in quality from the start but your fps may still suffer a little until you upgrade the cpu etc. If you are having to scrabble around for the funds for a 1080 (rather than disposable income) - you may wish to stick with your current card or you may not consider the cost worth it (currently). If I had a 980ti I would likely not have upgraded yet.
Take care Commanders.
