I think I'll post my specs to shimmer some light of hope for those reading this thread...
I'm using Vive. I was able to run Elite on, 8GB RAM, Ivy Bridge i5-3570k (non-overclocked) and a GTX 670. Yes you read that right. 670. Granted it was not that pretty, aliasing everywhere etc. HOWEVER... Everything besides stations and some seldom planetary configurations was giving a pretty okay gameplay. It was of course nowhere Oculus' clarity levels, because for that you need heavy supersampling. But it was playable and enjoyable and that was BEFORE Valve introduced the reprojection algorithms.
Stations are so poorly optimized that even friend with i7 and 1080 has heavy frame drops (compared to normal gameplay). IDK about 1080Ti.
I've since then upgraded to a 1070. I'm now able to run Elite on dr.kaii's VR recommended settings, which are quite high-ish. I play Elite without problems, however I haven't logged in since the alien bases so IDK if the performance didn't take a hit. Station's FPS is dependant of lightning conditions and where you are in the station - these hangars with blinding lights overhead tend to be the worst. Still its nothing which would turn your game into a slideshow (anything below I (subjectively) think 50 fps is totally unplayable in VR).
So no. CPU is not the bottleneck here. GPU, surely is.
All that said - 960 is a pretty rubbish card, sorry.
It was on par with my 670 in most benchmarks. And to quote the article:
In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 Gigabyte 3xWindForce Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 2GB. The GTX 960 has a 147 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 670, but the GTX 670 has 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 960.
IDK about the 1060, but it surely will be better than 960... I would skip that card and pony up for a 1070 which can handle everything currently on the market in FullHD ultra-high-whatevers and it is (or rather WAS) a great value for money. But with the cryptocurrency craze ruining the prices, I don't know anymore - that research is up to you. Or you might want to wait until next lineup (AMD Vega & NVidia Volta) comes out and hopefully knocks the current prices back to sane levels or the Ethereum craze will end.
henri said:
Frontier and many other developers are holding VR back by not implementing SLI/Crossfire so people have to upgrade to a high-end card instead of buying a second 970.
Yeah yeah its an international mafia agreement to force the SLI suc... owners to buy more expensive cards! I lol'd so hard
SLI is a developer's nightmare, it introduces microstutters out of the blue and there are so many combinations of hardware out there it is very costly to support correctly. And surprise surprise, it generally doesn't mix well with VR. Which is strange because in theory one card is doing one eye, and it should be good, right? No. That is not the case because the SLI memory is shared/cloned and the cards are alternating frames which is not what you'd want in VR (you want the same frame but different camera angle). Reading material:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/slizone_ask_mmm013.html