Rift now more affordable for Australians

[Ravvin]

Hi all.
I've been enviously following a lot of your threads about the Rift for a while now. What has put me off buying one myself was the extra charges that non-US buyers got stung with.
In the US, the Rift was $599 US ex postage. As soon as you selected Australia as a destination, it jumped to $649 US as they added on their state taxes. This is all before postage, which was another whopping amount, something like another $130 US, which pushed it over $1000 AU with the conversion rate.
The next problem for us was that anything bought from overseas that cost $1000 AU or more gets stopped at customs and you get billed the 10% for GST, which I was moderately fine with, but you then also got hit with Import duties and handling fees. Then, to add insult to extortion, they classed my state, Tasmania, as an island, (well technically it is.) They won't ship to us "Islanders". If we try to use an address on the "mainland" as our shipping address, they cancel your order when the billing and delivery addresses don't match.
From memory, the last time I went right through the checkout process, it ended up working out to around $1300 AU, including our GST and import extortion. Duties, I mean.

Today I found out that, now that the initial rush is over and supply levels are back in the black, Amazon.com are selling them and are happy to ship to us "Islanders".
I went through their checkout process and the payment went through with no hiccups. I have the confirmation and another email saying it will be dispatched to their shippers today, US time.
All for $889 AU. Sure beats $1300 from only 4 weeks back. Yay for us.

After all that, I thought I better actually see if my PC would run it in E.D. Apparently, no.
My system is a I7-4770K CPU at 3.5Ghz, 16Gb Ram and a "Radeon R9-200 series" video card. I couldn't remember what that was and had to pull it out to check. It needed a dusting anyway.
My card turned out to be a Gigabyte Windforce R9 28X OC -3GD 3GB ram card. The Rift compatibility tool wants a R9-290 or better.
I'm pretty sure it will run it, maybe not as full noise, but I thought I'd ask if anyone else had experience with using the Rift with cards not on their list.
I currently run the game with everything turned up and the only time I get any issues is coming up to stations and sometimes leaving supercruise, where I get a little stutter, but I figure this could also relate to my poor internet connection.
So what do you all think? This card OK or will I have to upgrade it?
Either way, can't wait to see E.D in VR. Got a week off work coming up in a fortnight. Hope it rains so I don't feel guilty about staying in and playing E.D. [hotas]

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

Hey Ravvin - glad you took the plunge - you won't be disappointed.

I was lucky to get mine on the last day of pre-orders, then Oculus bungled the shipping dates and then refunded the shipping cost so that dropped the pain a bit!

Au Perth here too.

As to the video card - Guru3D reviewed your card back in 2013;
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/gigabyte-radeon-r9-280x-windforce-review,1.html

The benchmarks pretty much put the Gigabyte Windforce R9 28X OC in right next to the nVidia 770GTX.

I ran on a 780GTX to begin with... just a bit faster than the 770GTX - ED worked fine, I did have to turn settings down to med-high; you might need to use mediums throughout.

My 3770K cpu is under the spec for the Oculus Home really basic hardware check, but its fine (ED sits about 25% usage for hours on end). Your 4770K will be fine.

All in all, see how it goes, and update the 3D card as means allow (and wife if present)

 

[Ravvin]

Well, the Rift was sitting on my doorstep when I got home last Friday. Coincidentally, the following week was my first time off work, except for public holidays, since last November, so I was pretty pleased.
The initial setup seemed pretty straight forward, just follow the on-screen steps until it said to continue with the Rift on my head. Black screen, sound working though. Worked through a heap of posts and finally uninstalled about a dozen C++ Runtimes, uninstalled the Rift and ATI video drivers, ripped out the Oculus folders hidden in the Appdata folders that don't get deleted with the uninstall, and reloaded everything again. This time it worked and I got lovely clear images through the headset.
I had a bit of a look through the Oculus store and downloaded most of the free stuff. How frustrating that it will only download one at a time and pauses it if you try doing anything. I had a bit of a play in Farlands and called it a night at 1.30am.

I had a few issues with getting E.D working though. At first, I was getting a lot of crashes just before exiting Supercruise. It appeared to be a driver issue as the message would pop up about D3d recovering from a problem. Unfortunately it still meant I had to restart E.D and fight with the galaxy map to plot my route again. I finally worked out that if I looked down the side of my nose, I could see the keyboard just enough to type the system name. Once it zoomed to it, I just had to move the mouse around until the call-out to my current system disapeared, then click the Search button again and it would usually pop up the call-out thing for my destination system. From there I could click it with the mouse.

I played about 2 hours, jumping around 550LY to collect my Python while exploring along the way. It looks amazing, with just an occasional jerk or flicker if I turned my head too fast. I think looking around while jumping between systems is what caused the crashes.
The next night I played 4 hours with similar results, a few crashes and some weird sound drop-outs while jumping. Then I woke up at 3am with the worst headache I think I have ever had. At first I thought I must be dehydrated or having caffeine withdrawls, but a couple of cups of coffee and basic pain killers didn't drop it much. I skipped playing that night and all was good. I played 2hrs the following night and the headache came back. It has to be the Rift. [cry]

I read a few posts and downloaded the Debug Tool. I ran it and left the pixels setting at 0 and set the in-game options at VR-Medium. As soon as I loaded into the hanger, the debug tool showed I was running at 23 FPS and had an Overhead of around -180 to -230%. [big grin] I know where my headache came from. The poor old video card fans were fairly whining and I could feel a lot of hot air blowing off it. (I had the Gigabyte OC Tool set to Auto this time. I hadn't used it before.)

I figured I better look at upgrading the video card. I can put this one in my second system to make my second account run better, for when I want to transfer Engineer Commodities.
After reading through a lot of comparisons, bench tests and buying guides, I realised that although the 1070 would cost me around $650 to $700au, I would be far better off paying the extra (huge extra) to go to a 1080. These cards run the much faster GDDR5X memory and should cope better with running the higher graphic settings in E.D in VR.
After shopping around a bit, I got a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming Premium Pack, 8GB V2.0. And a 240gb SSD. I run my OS on a SSD already, so I'll fit this one as just a games drive to keep room free. The card ended up coming to $1149au, so I'm REALLY hoping this fixes the headaches issue.
It's just a pity I didn't get this card when I ordered the Rift. I could have had it for my week off. Oh well, I suppose this way I will actually get some work done around the house. Oh, wait. I can still run E.D at Ultra on my monitor until the card gets here. Housework can wait.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

hey Ravin - sounds great, glad you're enjoying it - here's some tips from my experience you might find useful;

Make sure you have the IPD distance set correctly - this can cause eye strain and headaches pretty quickly too. If you hit the Oculus button on the remote, it'll take you to the grey grid/room where on the right is the IPD setting. get the green crosses clear and leave it alone after that (or memorise the distance if others have a go etc.

Also, make sure its not strapped on too tight... you can have it fairly loose and it will stay on your bonce no problems (so long as you're not upside down etc).

Lastly, try to ease into it - its synthetic 3D, and not all visual cues that your eyes and brain use are present. It does take time to adjust, and everyone is different it seems. 4 hours is a fair bit to bite off in the first few days (but I did too haha)

I'm running a 1080 too. I run the Oculus Debug Tool at 1.25 or 3 depending on what I'm doing (lower on planets etc). Most detail is set to high/ultra with blur off, bloom on medium, depth of field off, shadows to medium and ambient occlusion set to medium. Those help out a fair bit and pretty much net you the 1.25 debug supersampling bost for free (almost).

Also, getting the registry hack for the new Oculus ASW mode is worth it - even on a GTX1080. Really all the faster card will get you is more detail, which at the Rifts lower resolution, will only get you so far! With ATW/ASW, all Rift owners will see 90fps, except on very low hardware - as you found out.

Agree Oculus has a ways to go with their software... it obviously wasn't written by gamers, for gamers. LOL. Not being able to install to different drives/folders for items you download kinda sucks, as does the pausing downloads while you're playing something in VR. Meh, they'll get there though, early days yet.