VR minimum specification for Elite Dangerous (DK2)

[Mazhurg]

your gpu!. Crossfire is not supported in VR at the moment, so you are only using one of the cores of your GPU, which makes it lowish end for VR.

I am in the green camp so I may not be correct, however, iirc individually each single core of the 295X2 is slower than a single 290x.

VR is a tough mistress and imo may reset the whole high end gaming PC, much like sony did when they released the PS1 (and sega with the saturn) (both of these made what were high end gaming pcs up till then look almost obsolete)

Incorrect. The current SteamVr Benchmark uses crossfire by default. He should be getting in the high 8s, low 9s. Single card would be netting him an 6.7 or 6.8.

Imski - make sure that no other processes are taking resources during the test as it is heavily impacted by background processes.

 

[CaptainSodom]

Just saw Barnacules Nerdgasm review the Vive, and his commentary finally convinced me that it actually might be a good product and experience. Check 24:30 onward to see just how precise the controllers are, and how intuitively and accurately you can use them with very little practice.

But the price. Dear lord. Looks like on top of the rather steep 900 EUR for the Vive itself I'd definitely need to upgrade my GPU, which is another 500+ EUR for a GTX 980. Is my i5-4570 too slow, or should I also upgrade that, also?

Even with eBaying the old stuff I'd have to choose between a vacation somewhere far away and the Vive...

I have 32 gigs of memory and multiple SSDs so I'm ok there, at least.

 

[LordZoltan]

The people posting 980TI results are getting some some pretty hefty scores, that card might work pretty well with the Vive for sure. My 980 posts good but the 980 TI's I have seen are basically a straight line

A quick heads-up in case nobody else has said it.

Frontier were demoing their Vive builds in EGX Sept 15 with a Titan X and, having tried it, it was silky smooth. 980ti often posts similar if not better bench results to the Titan X (certainly a few of the OC editions you can get now, I went with MSIs gaming edition) so if you are building right now, cannot wait, and have the money - I'd say you can't go wrong with the 980ti.

Otherwise, if you're happy to wait then I concur with Arithon. This year's generation of GPUs should be able to offer similar performance in cheaper SKUs, so your buying choices will widen significantly in Q3.

I'd still say VRAM is absolutely critical (ATIs tradition of including more VRAM often means they beat NVidia cards at super-high resolutions, even if performance at lower resolutions is less) and I'd still say 6gb minímum for ED. Especially Horizons, at least.

Also - there is the Sli/CrossFire angle. VR is a natural fit for dual-gpu builds - and I sincerely hope that serious work is being done to make this work properly (especially since I bought 2 980tis and one is simply for show at the moment!). It's entirely possible that dual 970 builds might well have enough grunt to play ball then.

Oh and an apology - I wasn't ignoring some of the follow úps to my earlier posts, I forgot to sub this thread and forgot I posted here!

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

A quick heads-up in case nobody else has said it.

Frontier were demoing their Vive builds in EGX Sept 15 with a Titan X and, having tried it, it was silky smooth.

I am guessing that was pre-horizons tho?

In my experience the horizons content pushing my machine far harder than anything in the core game pre-horizons

Incorrect. The current SteamVr Benchmark uses crossfire by default. .

cool! I stand corrected, so crossfire (and hopefully SLI?) are now actually officially supported in VR now then? that is great news.

 

[LordZoltan]

Yeah that was before Horizons - as it was when they announced it. It was also demoing the training scenarios, too.

Now that we've had the good news about Rift 1.0 support from day one CV1 release in ED, I'll be eagerly awaiting the early beta release that Oculus announced so I can upgrade the DK2 drivers and really give it a good crack before my CV1 drops. I'll also be giving SLi a go of course, but I don't expect anything particularly impressive till the whole VR Sli thing is settled. Seems to be a complete mess to me at the moment. NVidia and Ati with their own driver APIs, and Oculus and Valve with theirs. It's a bloody shambles if you ask me.

Forgetting the SLi question, though, the first thing I'm expecting from an official rift 1.0 build is for the weird jumping issues that happen occasionally, regardless of being near a planet or not, to disappear.

The initial acid test for me will be in-station. Sometimes it's perfect, sometimes (in the same bleedin' station!) I get the dreaded 'lag', despite the core frame rate being alright.

 

[Kosaro]

970 overclocks to more than a stock 980, so an overclocked 970 should be just fine, right?

 

[Rhombus]

Hi, short question: My rig is quite fine for VR... i7 4790, GTX980, 16GB RAM. Elite runs smoothly. But anyway I'll upgrade the 980 as soon as something noticeably faster is there and now I wonder if more RAM would make a change.

Do you have any idea which difference upgrading from 16 to 32 GB will make?

Thanks,
Rhombus

 

[Bladesteel]

Hi, short question: My rig is quite fine for VR... i7 4790, GTX980, 16GB RAM. Elite runs smoothly. But anyway I'll upgrade the 980 as soon as something noticeably faster is there and now I wonder if more RAM would make a change.

Do you have any idea which difference upgrading from 16 to 32 GB will make?

Thanks,
Rhombus

Not much. Unless you run a lot of other stuff in the background.
I'm running 32gb and is sitting at 13% memory use with ed running in ultra on 1920*1080.

It obviously can't hurt, but if you're balancing a budget you miht want to put the money elsewhe.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Do you have any idea which difference upgrading from 16 to 32 GB will make?

Basically - none at all, unless you are planning on running a Titan X or installing Elite on a lovely RAMdrive

 

[N0speed]

good news for 970 users?!

I've just been reading a benchmark in a german computer magazine.
They've been testing the HTC Vive by playing several games with different graphic boards.

Base system has been a Intel Core i7-4770K with 8 GB RAM, Windows 10, GeForce 362.00 respectively Crimson 16.2.1 Hotfix and Windows 10 (64 Bit).
SLI / CrossFire has not been tested as was not supported for VR they say, so they tested single board setups.

Referring to Elite: Dangerous the results using ULTRA settings:

graphic board	relevant spikes exceeding 11.1ms	playable /w preset "ultra"?
Nvidia GeForce GTX 770	yes	no
MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4G	yes	no
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980	yes	no
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti	no	very good
AMD Radeon R9 280X	yes	no
PowerColor Radeon R9 290 PCS+	yes	no
AMD Radeon R9 390X	yes	no
AMD Radeon R9 Fury X	yes	no

So far, so bad - for people like me who don't have a 980 or similar or better (yet)

But - and here's the good news - if you lower your settings to HIGH they found out:

graphic board	relevant spikes exceeding 11.1ms	playable /w preset "high"?
Nvidia GeForce GTX 770	yes	no
MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4G	yes	good
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980	no	very good
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti	no	very good
AMD Radeon R9 280X	yes	no
PowerColor Radeon R9 290 PCS+	yes	no
AMD Radeon R9 390X	yes	no
AMD Radeon R9 Fury X	yes	no

[yesnod]

Please refer to the source at computerbase.de for further details and graphs.

 

[Monk]

I've just been reading a benchmark in a german computer magazine.
They've been testing the HTC Vive by playing several games with different graphic boards.........

Ahh, thanks for this.

I'm still curious to get a first hand account/opinion on how the experience is for 970 in Elite. Could there be more context provided around a rating of "good?"

I may consider picking up a Rift later this year if I have an unexpected influx of funds or if, for some crazy reason, there is a sale. However, the performance in Horizons is paramount to my decision. Next year, I'll get whatever Nvidia releases for their mid-high range (like the 970 of its series) on the Pascal architecture. (just need to find which of my friends isn't too broke to buy my current 970 from me)

 

[N0speed]

Ahh, thanks for this.

I'm still curious to get a first hand account/opinion on how the experience is for 970 in Elite. Could there be more context provided around a rating of "good?"

I may consider picking up a Rift later this year if I have an unexpected influx of funds or if, for some crazy reason, there is a sale. However, the performance in Horizons is paramount to my decision. Next year, I'll get whatever Nvidia releases for their mid-high range (like the 970 of its series) on the Pascal architecture. (just need to find which of my friends isn't too broke to buy my current 970 from me)

Well, apart from the results "very good, good, un-playable" they provided the benchmark itself.
Here we go for the 970, please refer to my previous post for the source link:





My personal strategy is to stick with the 970 for release and later this year, when pascal comes out, either to go for one of those or to get a second-hand 980 ti / titan x, depending on pricing

 

[wstephenson]

I've just been reading a benchmark in a german computer magazine.
They've been testing the HTC Vive by playing several games with different graphic boards.

Great summary for the non-German speakers, repped.

 

[Bladesteel]

My german isn't exactly good.
Can anyone tell if they included busy space stations and planetary landings in that test?

 

[wstephenson]

My german isn't exactly good.
Can anyone tell if they included busy space stations and planetary landings in that test?

No, it was vanilla ED in an asteroid field. We don't know if it was a training mission or regular online play.

 

[shadragon]

(User deleted)

 

[Defcon]

Should my Alienware Rift bundle work? It's not going to come with 16gb of ram only 8gb, and it's running an i5 not an i7. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BHN27M2

• PC specifications: Intel core i5 6400 2.7 GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB Hard Drive, NVIDIA GeForce GTX970 graphics card.

 

[kmw]

I realise Nvidia may be the favoured card, but still, you could have specified the equivalent AMD card as well.
I for one cannot stretch to a 980ti, but if a GTX980 can do it, then an R9 Nano or Fury X should be able to cope.

 

[Adam Lusardi]

I realise Nvidia may be the favoured card, but still, you could have specified the equivalent AMD card as well.
I for one cannot stretch to a 980ti, but if a GTX980 can do it, then an R9 Nano or Fury X should be able to cope.

I totally agree but maybe they cannot cope going by some of the threads. I would hope QA has AMD GPUs.

 

[kmw]

If they can't cope then someone needs to do some optimizing, either FD or AMD or both. I ran the Steam VR test with my Nano and it hit the far right of the green, meaning it is 'VR ready' and rated as 'very high fidelity 8.9'. I really hope they are working together to iron out any problems.

I will be a bit peeved if the a 980ti is the only card that can deal with it.

Reminds me of Microsoft Flight Sim x, even today it's difficult to find a system that can run that sim at full detail LOL. (And FD, Please don't take that sim as a role model, I love FSX, but it must be pretty poorly optimised to be so demanding so many years after release).