Oculus rift questions

[calranthe]

Hello,
I have pre-ordered the rift but still have some doubts my main concerns is the following which I hope some one with experience can help me with.

1)we know the minimum spec but no one seems to talk about recommended spec for optimum use, is there one or does this gen hardware not seem to cut it.

2)What stable fps is needed for a good rift experience and how does that relate to the 90hz refresh rate.

3)What current hardware can hit the optimum fps without downgrading settings in game.

4)Why is crossfire/sli a bad idea.

Thank you

 

[Wolfox]

Hello,
I have pre-ordered the rift but still have some doubts my main concerns is the following which I hope some one with experience can help me with.

1)we know the minimum spec but no one seems to talk about recommended spec for optimum use, is there one or does this gen hardware not seem to cut it.

2)What stable fps is needed for a good rift experience and how does that relate to the 90hz refresh rate.

3)What current hardware can hit the optimum fps without downgrading settings in game.

4)Why is crossfire/sli a bad idea.

Thank you

1) we have the recommended no one knows the minimum.

2)>90fps

3)The current is...... ops New hardware, so the Current is.........Gosh new hardware came out, ok the current is...........uff another better hardware came out. Just spend get the latest and you are ok for some time.
4)Because it has to be supported, is not native on all games, then if you want a rig that "Always goes flawlessly stay on a more reliable single card config.

This is IMHO

Regards

 

[grammatonfeather]

Hello,
I have pre-ordered the rift but still have some doubts my main concerns is the following which I hope some one with experience can help me with.

1)we know the minimum spec but no one seems to talk about recommended spec for optimum use, is there one or does this gen hardware not seem to cut it.

2)What stable fps is needed for a good rift experience and how does that relate to the 90hz refresh rate.

3)What current hardware can hit the optimum fps without downgrading settings in game.

4)Why is crossfire/sli a bad idea.

Thank you

Recommended spec is really very simple... I have a friend with 980Ti and he can't run full settings on project cars but then it's known to be poorly optimized at this time.

I run a GTX 970 and need mostly low settings with Elite Horizons. I need absolutely the minimum settings running on the badly optimised SteamVR but I can increase settings a bit with 501 runtime.

If a single 970 can only run "low" with DK2 then that tells you dual 980ti would be required for CV1 in order to minimise the need to reduce settings.

I think you have to be prepared to downgrade settings unless you're wealthy (don't have a wife).

I have no issue with downgraded settings... Some of those settings are barely noticeable between ultra and medium/low. I tried playing with terrain settings on Ultra recently and noticed hardly any difference to the low I normally have it on.

Also some of the Elite settings have only low hit on FPS while others have medium to high. Ambient Occulusion and shadow smoothness have medium to high hit while draw distance and terrain have lower hit.

I can't comment on VR SLI since I don't run it at the moment but I look forward to VR SLI at some point.

 

[calranthe]

"I think you have to be prepared to downgrade settings unless you're wealthy (don't have a wife)."

Well that depends if said wife is as much of a gamer as you and gaming hardware comes high on the monthly budget.

From what I have seen though even a Titan X could not give a stable ultra settings rift ED Horizons experience unless I am wrong.

This is the systems I was going for.

X99 MB probably an Asus deluxe model.
i7 5820k
16gb 4*4 probably team or corsair
OS drive and taxing games Samsung 951 pcie 500gb
Main drive 4tb Caviar black
Windows 10 professional
Titan X.

Now the above spec should in theory non rift non 4k run any game out there at a stable top tier settings and when you are spending £5000 on two machines it is to be expected.

While I can admit I do love shiny and nice graphics especially when I have laid down that amount of cash if the game has the settings I should be using them (doesn't mean I do not play rpg maker games or minecraft).

My thought is this, build the above machines but stick in our old 970's until pascal or whatever amd brings out next because the money I would spend on a Titan X I could in 2-4 months spend on a next gen monster.

 

[Soda Popinski]

The current SLI/Cross-fire does increase FPS, but increases latency. Latency isn't that noticeable on a regular monitor, but it becomes more noticeable with head tracking. Here's a Reddit Thread on people's experience with SLI.

That said, both NVidia and AMD are working on optimizing SLI their technologies for VR, such as dedicating one GPU per eye. We haven't seen these show up in Elite yet.


As to why the system specs need to be so beefy, I'd guess because game developers push the hardware as much as they can, and this game wasn't designed for VR. So the Ultra settings are really for a 2D monitor experience on a top machine. VR implementations by definition need more computing power, so we need to expect we can't run all the bells and whistles in VR. Doesn't matter to me, as I'll take the immersion over visual quality any day. You go from playing a video game to flying a spaceship.

 

[Mazhurg]

From what I have seen though even a Titan X could not give a stable ultra settings rift ED Horizons experience unless I am wrong.

Upcoming cards (Polaris for AMD and Pascal for NVIDIA) should be both relatively less expensive and much better performers overall than their current counterparts - up to 4x the performance I heard. I suspect that even the mainstream ones will permit high settings and the enthusiasts ones will support top settings for this current season. Next year, when earth like planetary landings are introduced, this might be another story though.

 

[Bakkster]

The current SLI/Cross-fire does increase FPS, but increases latency. Latency isn't that noticeable on a regular monitor, but it becomes more noticeable with head tracking. Here's a Reddit Thread on people's experience with SLI.

That said, both NVidia and AMD are working on optimizing SLI their technologies for VR, such as dedicating one GPU per eye. We haven't seen these show up in Elite yet.

Yes, standard SLI runs by alternating which frame each GPU renders, adding a full frame of latency. The goal for VR is <20ms, one frame of latency at 90Hz is an additional 11ms.

SLI for VR works by having each GPU render each frame for one eye. One GPU renders the left eye, the other renders the right eye. However, Oculus has confirmed that because it's tightly coupled to the code, so developers need to implement SLI support specifically, it won't automatically be supported by the SDK.

 

[vic]

Recommended spec is really very simple... I have a friend with 980Ti and he can't run full settings on project cars but then it's known to be poorly optimized at this time.

I run a GTX 970 and need mostly low settings with Elite Horizons. I need absolutely the minimum settings running on the badly optimised SteamVR but I can increase settings a bit with 501 runtime.

If a single 970 can only run "low" with DK2 then that tells you dual 980ti would be required for CV1 in order to minimise the need to reduce settings.

I think you have to be prepared to downgrade settings unless you're wealthy (don't have a wife).

I have no issue with downgraded settings... Some of those settings are barely noticeable between ultra and medium/low. I tried playing with terrain settings on Ultra recently and noticed hardly any difference to the low I normally have it on.

Also some of the Elite settings have only low hit on FPS while others have medium to high. Ambient Occulusion and shadow smoothness have medium to high hit while draw distance and terrain have lower hit.

I can't comment on VR SLI since I don't run it at the moment but I look forward to VR SLI at some point.

I have strix gtx970 and run horizons on high settings and it's pretty smooth except on CZ rings. Setting evrything to low makes absolutely no difference in performance. My graphics card performance tool shows 70% peak use, so my card is not even working hard. The only lag delays I see are in heavy conflict zone on rings which is probably due to my cpu or network servers, definitively not my gtx970.