VR minimum specification for Elite Dangerous (DK2)
- Thread starter Zac Antonaci
- Start date
I think it's to have as many assets immediately available in RAM as possible.
Loading assets from disk takes time, anything that unexpectedly breaks the fluidity of VR leads to a mess
I haven't read every single post in this thread, so perhaps someone has mentioned this already, but just in case they haven't...
One MAJOR aspect of this whole "minimum VR spec" everyone needs to consider is the literal "physical" side-effects on the gamer using an under powered rig with a VR headset like the Occulus, VIVE of whatever... If the frame rates are not up there at a very high number and "maintained" there is a very strong likely hood that the gamer is going to quickly suffer from motion sickness, head aches and a whole litany of other maladies created by the disconnect between the eyes, the brain and the body.
This is why VR is unlike anything any of us have ever dealt with before. While it is annoying to be dealing with frame rate drops, hitches and other performance related issues when playing on a traditional monitor or HDTV, these issues don't make you physically ill.
Not taking the VR specs seriously has a lot more drawbacks associated with it than anything we as gamers have ever faced. I doubt most people are going to be able to power through these physical side effects and blow them off. Your brain and body are going to rule in that decision, and if they say NO GO! Then I am afraid it will always be NO GO as long as that gamer continues to try to run their VR rig with under powered or borderline optimal hardware.
My two cents.
Great discussion by the way! I plan to go through and read the entire thread front to back when I get some time to do so. I've been playing ED on the XB1 since day one of the GPP, and I simply LOVE this game! (Over 19 weeks invested according to my stats) But now I am ready to take it to the next level!
I am currently in the process of building my Ultimate Elite Dangerous Gaming PC! I'm personally not going to be getting into the whole VR side of ED right away, but the machine I am building is definitely going to be able to handle it. I never thought I would own another gaming PC, but Elite has been such a joy on the Xbox One that I want to experience the game on the highest level possible, and that means a high end gaming PC. And to future proof my investment, I definitely want it to be capable of running a VR headset if and when I choose to buy one.
And in case anyone is curious, here are the foundational components of the build I have chosen:
My "Elite Machine" is being built around the Intel Core i7-6700k with w/ASUS Z170 DLX Mobo, ASUS GTX 980ti (factory overclocked) 6GB vram Strix GPU and 32GB DDR4/2666 mhz RAM | I am going to run ED off of my SSD boot drive which is a Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 PRO M.2 [512GB]
My original budget was $5500.00 USD without a monitor, but based on what I paid for everything listed above I think I can bring it all in for much less than that by continuing to hunt down the best deals I can find on each and every component.
One MAJOR aspect of this whole "minimum VR spec" everyone needs to consider is the literal "physical" side-effects on the gamer using an under powered rig with a VR headset like the Occulus, VIVE of whatever... If the frame rates are not up there at a very high number and "maintained" there is a very strong likely hood that the gamer is going to quickly suffer from motion sickness, head aches and a whole litany of other maladies created by the disconnect between the eyes, the brain and the body.
This is why VR is unlike anything any of us have ever dealt with before. While it is annoying to be dealing with frame rate drops, hitches and other performance related issues when playing on a traditional monitor or HDTV, these issues don't make you physically ill.
Not taking the VR specs seriously has a lot more drawbacks associated with it than anything we as gamers have ever faced. I doubt most people are going to be able to power through these physical side effects and blow them off. Your brain and body are going to rule in that decision, and if they say NO GO! Then I am afraid it will always be NO GO as long as that gamer continues to try to run their VR rig with under powered or borderline optimal hardware.
My two cents.
Great discussion by the way! I plan to go through and read the entire thread front to back when I get some time to do so. I've been playing ED on the XB1 since day one of the GPP, and I simply LOVE this game! (Over 19 weeks invested according to my stats) But now I am ready to take it to the next level!
I am currently in the process of building my Ultimate Elite Dangerous Gaming PC! I'm personally not going to be getting into the whole VR side of ED right away, but the machine I am building is definitely going to be able to handle it. I never thought I would own another gaming PC, but Elite has been such a joy on the Xbox One that I want to experience the game on the highest level possible, and that means a high end gaming PC. And to future proof my investment, I definitely want it to be capable of running a VR headset if and when I choose to buy one.
And in case anyone is curious, here are the foundational components of the build I have chosen:
My "Elite Machine" is being built around the Intel Core i7-6700k with w/ASUS Z170 DLX Mobo, ASUS GTX 980ti (factory overclocked) 6GB vram Strix GPU and 32GB DDR4/2666 mhz RAM | I am going to run ED off of my SSD boot drive which is a Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 PRO M.2 [512GB]
My original budget was $5500.00 USD without a monitor, but based on what I paid for everything listed above I think I can bring it all in for much less than that by continuing to hunt down the best deals I can find on each and every component.
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Why does the thread title now have "(DK2)" on the end? I thought these were the specs for ED on the Vive originally and now CV1?
The post at the top is from last year, when ED only supported runtime 0.5 and SteamVR. After Horizons released it was pure horror for me. (GTX 970) Since 1.3 with ATW is supported I'm totally fine at least on my DK2.
I always wondered why it seem like folks favor Nvidia, I've been running my DK2 on i7 3.5GHz(NOT OC'd), Radeon 7970, 32GB RAM since July last year. My rig can handle it no problem at all. I've since added a second video card so I can crossfire and with that I've been able to put the setting to Ultra and it's smooth as a babies bottom.
At the time the 600 series came out, it was genuinely a good chip, 20% smaller than anything else in die size, fast, new tech and was heads and shoulders above competition.
The 700 and 900 series are generally a let down so i have skipped them and now waiting to see what comes out this summer. I don't really favor Nvidia or AMD, i just usually go for the best the money can buy at the moment. And AMD looks like it is having Nvidias in DX12 performance, so unless summer brings anything groundbreaking from Nvidia, AMD is very strong contender for me for my next card.
That's good to know, thanks.
I'm still disappointed that FD can't be bothered or are frightened to elaborate on their original post - NVidia or nothing, is that right FD?
My Nano is running most games at Ultra or almost maxed, and even in triple screen, ED is running at 120fps, so what's the problem with specifying an AMD GPU please?
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You would want to go with at least a R9 390x, but that is a little slower than an Nvidia 980. So, you would probably want a Fury or a Nano. I got the game to run on two R9 270x's in crossfire with little stuttering. (Most VR games require R9 290x) I wish I had at least two 390's, and that would make for a smoother game.
I am surprised that developers are only saying that you need a single graphics card for VR when it was intended to be used for SLI and Crossfire. You don't run into the same bugs as other games that link consecutive frames, because each eye is ran independently at a slightly different angle. Then each card can just work on creating the image for each eye.
For the absolute best performance, I would go with a Radeon Pro Duo, which is a single card with two Nano's in Crossfire built into it. It is actually almost as fast as two 980's in SLI. I wouldn't get a 1080, because it actually hasn't been performing twice as well as two 980's in the benchmarks, like Nvidia has been trying to claim (most likely to compete with the Pro Duo which already released). Only problem is the Pro Duo cost a little more than twice of what the 1080 will, but AMD is about to announce their general consumer card to be released at the beginning of next month, which is just around the corner here. I guess you can save money getting a Pro Duo by not having to get a computer that can fit two cards...
This game is pretty much GPU limited. My 1080 on a Sandy Bridge gives me the same performance as a 1080 on Skylake (running the game 1080p that is not 4k). CPUs and MBs from last 5 years are fine if you are only running a single card. SLI obviously you want to throw more CPU at the dual GPU setup but for one you are set pretty much with Sandy Bridge or newer.
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To my surprise I noticed that the game is playable (with occasional noticeable - but not jarring - judder (when in space)) on my 4Gb GTX770.
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My "Elite Machine" is being built around the Intel Core i7-6700k with w/ASUS Z170 DLX Mobo, ASUS GTX 980ti (factory overclocked) 6GB vram Strix GPU and 32GB DDR4/2666 mhz RAM | I am going to run ED off of my SSD boot drive which is a Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 PRO M.2 [512GB]
My original budget was $5500.00 USD without a monitor, but based on what I paid for everything listed above I think I can bring it all in for much less than that by continuing to hunt down the best deals I can find on each and every component.
Seriously if you're going to spend that much to play Elite on PC having already played it on Xbone, you need to buy an Oculus, NOW! Don't hesitate, I promise if you like this game that much you will not regret it.
I finally finished playing the demos, watching the films, playing other games in the Rift I finally received 4 days ago, teasing myself towards the main event. Elite.
There is no turning back. It is truly EPIC! I knew it'd be good but I wasn't prepared for how good. I can't imagine ever playing it any other way again. Everything seems so huge compared to on a screen and it feels real. I mean really real.
I currently have AMD FX8150 OCed to 4.2, 16 RAM, and a GTX670FTW.
I got the Rift last Thursday. I can run ED in ultra with no problem, I tried on High but the degradation to image was too obvious.
I'm hovering around the 60fps level with drops when engaging FSD and that's about it.
Not only is the 670FTW handling it but for some reason my MoBo won't recognise the Rift on it's USB3 ports so I have the HMD on a Sata/USB port (which the Oculus software accepts as the correct port) and the sensor in a powered USB2.
I intend to upgrade to a 10X0 as soon as they're in stock (probably 1070FTW), and at that point will get a PCI USB3 add on just because they're cheap enough, so why not.
Maybe there is something unusual about my rig that it's running so well with a way under spec GPU, but I doubt it, I think it's more likely that the minimum/recommended spec may be overplaying its hand.
I got the Rift last Thursday. I can run ED in ultra with no problem, I tried on High but the degradation to image was too obvious.
I'm hovering around the 60fps level with drops when engaging FSD and that's about it.
Not only is the 670FTW handling it but for some reason my MoBo won't recognise the Rift on it's USB3 ports so I have the HMD on a Sata/USB port (which the Oculus software accepts as the correct port) and the sensor in a powered USB2.
I intend to upgrade to a 10X0 as soon as they're in stock (probably 1070FTW), and at that point will get a PCI USB3 add on just because they're cheap enough, so why not.
Maybe there is something unusual about my rig that it's running so well with a way under spec GPU, but I doubt it, I think it's more likely that the minimum/recommended spec may be overplaying its hand.
But your performance is way below what is good for VR, you need a minimum of a rock solid 90fps. What is happening I guess is that you have a tolerance for low frame rate in VR.
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That's possible, as it's also my first VR experience maybe I just don't know any better!
I have ordered the USB3 PCI expansion already, nearly got a 1070FTW today but apparently five minutes after EVGA's in stock notification E-Mail is too long to wait! Hopefully I'll have better luck next time.
I'm wondering if I should buy two and immediately list one on eBay/Amazon to recoup some of my costs on the one that I keep.
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Newegg had 1070FTW at standard price (no gouging!) on back order yesterday, 5-7 day expected wait time, so I pulled the trigger.
Two hours later I got an E-Mail confirming the item is in stock, will be shipped in 24-48 hours!
1. I'm quite excited. In the same way that the Pope is quite religious.
2. Good opportunity to get the 1070FTW without paying over the odds if anyone is looking for it.
Two hours later I got an E-Mail confirming the item is in stock, will be shipped in 24-48 hours!
1. I'm quite excited. In the same way that the Pope is quite religious.
2. Good opportunity to get the 1070FTW without paying over the odds if anyone is looking for it.
In stations is the only spot I saw trouble on my i5 2500K with a GTX 960 (running HIGH or CUSTOM that was mostly high), as long as I didn't move SS above 1.0 (the default).
I've since moved to an i7 6700k and a GTX 1080. I can now turn up SS to 2.0, and have lost the occasional stutter. The experience is otherwise similar (I've run in both ULTRA and VR HIGH).
Oddly: I've recently started seeing a problem where ships will "jump".. it looks like in an MMO when the predictive algorithm has failed and there's an updated location from the server. I didn't see this until the hardware change a couple of days ago.
doubts on official hw requirements
new to ED Horizons and DK2 just wanted to chime in with my early findings:
on a 1055T@3.6 w 12GB and RX480-8GB i haven't experienced any noticeable fps drops so far. So i rather wonder about the 16gig and CPU requirements because i hardly saw any serious CPU usage yet, nor any RAM usage above 4-5gig.
Official Oculus requirement figures are a joke as well, looks more like a marketing effort in favor of Intel than anything else. Really painful to get around their setup obstacles for users not matching their gear of preference.
In general i question the official HW recommendations completely. In my own experience for DX11 games a 6 or 8 core CPU with reasonable GHz is not as prone to severe fps drops as any 4 core one. Unfortunately the majority of reviews today still look at the max FPS or average FPS when testing CPUs and GPUs. But for VR all we need to know is minimum FPS and minimum/average frame times only. To me it looks like they better would recommend 6 or 8 core setups only.
On the recommendation about the 16gig figure i wonder whether they pulled it from some internal pre beta testing or if they just doubled on 8gig out of the blue. I'd wish they would stick to precise figures from internal testing also for different HUDs. When for DK2 resolution 10gig is enough, they should state it that way. We will see different figures as soon as HUDs with higher res come to markets in future anyways. So a table with real requirements per HUD type would be necessary anyway.
Anybody ever experienced near 16gig yet?
latest info: as Oculus has lowered the minimum requirements for VR on their latest show off event i'm hoping we see improvements in ED as well (including DK2)....other thread here
new to ED Horizons and DK2 just wanted to chime in with my early findings:
on a 1055T@3.6 w 12GB and RX480-8GB i haven't experienced any noticeable fps drops so far. So i rather wonder about the 16gig and CPU requirements because i hardly saw any serious CPU usage yet, nor any RAM usage above 4-5gig.
Official Oculus requirement figures are a joke as well, looks more like a marketing effort in favor of Intel than anything else. Really painful to get around their setup obstacles for users not matching their gear of preference.
In general i question the official HW recommendations completely. In my own experience for DX11 games a 6 or 8 core CPU with reasonable GHz is not as prone to severe fps drops as any 4 core one. Unfortunately the majority of reviews today still look at the max FPS or average FPS when testing CPUs and GPUs. But for VR all we need to know is minimum FPS and minimum/average frame times only. To me it looks like they better would recommend 6 or 8 core setups only.
On the recommendation about the 16gig figure i wonder whether they pulled it from some internal pre beta testing or if they just doubled on 8gig out of the blue. I'd wish they would stick to precise figures from internal testing also for different HUDs. When for DK2 resolution 10gig is enough, they should state it that way. We will see different figures as soon as HUDs with higher res come to markets in future anyways. So a table with real requirements per HUD type would be necessary anyway.
Anybody ever experienced near 16gig yet?
latest info: as Oculus has lowered the minimum requirements for VR on their latest show off event i'm hoping we see improvements in ED as well (including DK2)....other thread here
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Hey guys, I'm tentatively looking at the Rift and HTC Vive. I'm leaning towards Vive at present but one thing that I hadn't expected was that my laptop may not be up to snuff.
According to the minimum requirements for either, my graphics card is a bit sub-par. From experience, or just a greater knowledge than mine, how would these specs cope running something like Elite in VR (either Occy Rift or Vive):
Processor
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz
Manufacturer Intel
Speed 2.6 GHz
Number of Cores 4
Memory
RAM 32 GB
Video Card
Video Card Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
Chipset Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
Dedicated Memory 128 MB
Total Memory 4.0 GB
Pixel Shader Version 5.0
Vertex Shader Version 5.0
Video Card #2
Video Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
Manufacturer NVIDIA
Chipset GeForce GTX 960M
Dedicated Memory 4.0 GB
Total Memory 4.0 GB
Pixel Shader Version 5.0
Vertex Shader Version 5.0
Operating System
Operating System Microsoft Windows 10 (build 14393), 64-bit
Any pointers or advice would be welcome.
Cheers boys and girls.
According to the minimum requirements for either, my graphics card is a bit sub-par. From experience, or just a greater knowledge than mine, how would these specs cope running something like Elite in VR (either Occy Rift or Vive):
Processor
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz
Manufacturer Intel
Speed 2.6 GHz
Number of Cores 4
Memory
RAM 32 GB
Video Card
Video Card Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
Chipset Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
Dedicated Memory 128 MB
Total Memory 4.0 GB
Pixel Shader Version 5.0
Vertex Shader Version 5.0
Video Card #2
Video Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
Manufacturer NVIDIA
Chipset GeForce GTX 960M
Dedicated Memory 4.0 GB
Total Memory 4.0 GB
Pixel Shader Version 5.0
Vertex Shader Version 5.0
Operating System
Operating System Microsoft Windows 10 (build 14393), 64-bit
Any pointers or advice would be welcome.
Cheers boys and girls.