Help me upgrade for VR | Advice please.

Adam Senior · 14 Jul 2017 at 00:51

Good day all, with the current price drop on the Oculus ($399) here in the USA, I can't "NOT" stop myself from taking the plunge.

The only thing that is stopping me is my current system. Everything is okay, other than my GFX. I honestly thought about going head first into a whole new system, but was wondering if I could spend the money on a new GFX card now, then upgrade cpu, mem etc in a year or so and transfer over the GFX.

I'm looking to get the best bang for buck on a new GFX card and was wondering if simply swapping that out now would give me the ability to play Oculus/VR without having to buy a whole new system.

Below is my current setup.

OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W Modular High Performance Power Supply
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1 TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s with NCQ 32MB Cache
Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2 - Crucial Technology
ASUS LGA 1155 - Z68 - PCIe 3.0 and UEFI BIOS Intel Z68 ATX
Intel Core i5-2500K Processor - Intel
Corsair 16 GB Vengeance Low Profile 1600mhz PC3-12800
Sapphire 11196-00-40G Radeon HD 7950 3GB DDR5 HDMI / DVI-I / Dual Mini DP PCI-Express Graphics Card - SAPPHIRE
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler (RR-212E-20PK-R2)

Any advice is welcomed. No real budget on a new card, but a "mid range" option would be ideal.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Regards,

Adam.

FlukeRogi · 14 Jul 2017 at 07:14

Adam Senior said:
was wondering if simply swapping that out now would give me the ability to play Oculus/VR without having to buy a whole new system.

Simple answer is yes. I'm still running a 2600k with only 8GB RAM, and it's still easily holding up (graphics card is a GTX 1070). On top of that, I've been on the Oculus subreddit long enough to see plenty of people with Sandybridge systems who have no issues.

When it comes to VR, graphics power rules - buy the absolute best you can afford. Although they've dropped the spec since launch, the original recommendation was a GTX 970, which will run a lot of stuff though I'd consider it a minimum spec card for VR. In a sane world I'd recommend at least a GTX 1070, but the whole mining thing has driven those prices to mental levels. I really don't know much about AMD cards, so they might be worth investigating. I've always been team nVidia really, and watching how the drivers have developed, new Rift driver features always seem to hit the nVidia cards first with the AMD cards playing catch-up, so you might want to keep that in mind.

Just buy the best you can - even if you get a card that runs everything you want, a faster card will let you turn up super-sampling options more, which in VR can make a very noticeable difference to visual quality.

edit - a bit of clarity (hopefully)

melmac · 14 Jul 2017 at 12:35

What Fluke said.

A 970 or a 1060 would give you a good VR experience without breaking the bank. The rest of your system is fine. Just one question are you overclocking your CPU?

Adam Senior · 18 Jul 2017 at 15:20

Hey, Guys — thanks for the advice...Ended up buckling

http://imgur.com/a/aJ0ox

And Melmac — I do overclock my CPU — nothing too crazy. Going to see how this Runs Fallout 4 in VR and possibly upgrade the rest of my system then. Though getting the 1080 should give me several years of gaming.

Quartz · 18 Jul 2017 at 15:32

melmac said:
A 970 or a 1060 would give you a good VR experience without breaking the bank.

From what I've read, reprojection rates on that level of GPU are too high and a GTX 1070 should be the minimum, so the OP is wise to go for a GTX 1080.

FlukeRogi · 18 Jul 2017 at 16:12

Quartz said:
From what I've read, reprojection rates on that level of GPU are too high and a GTX 1070 should be the minimum, so the OP is wise to go for a GTX 1080.

It really depends on individual games. The problem is that there are a lot of people out there with something like a 970 who moan about performance, yet they're trying to run stupid super-sampling levels on a card that can't handle it.

But yeah, more is better - when it comes to graphics hardware for VR, if you can afford it, buy it.

melmac · 18 Jul 2017 at 16:38

Adam Senior said:
Hey, Guys — thanks for the advice...Ended up buckling

http://imgur.com/a/aJ0ox

And Melmac — I do overclock my CPU — nothing too crazy. Going to see how this Runs Fallout 4 in VR and possibly upgrade the rest of my system then. Though getting the 1080 should give me several years of gaming.

Congrats mate, you won't regret it!! It will run everything fine, I am using a 1070 for reference. You might need a USB add on card depending on good/bad the USB ports are on the motherboard you have.

Clarkson · 18 Jul 2017 at 16:44

Hi there, I've not done an awful lot on VR yet but I can play assetto corsa without seemingly any hits to frame rates, even with post processing on and quite high settings.

I have the same CPU, even the same cooler (its a great little thing

) and the same amount/speed of RAM. What obviously makes it all happen is the GPU and I have a Zotac AMP 1070.

As said, I probably would go for a 1070 as a minimum to be resonably comfortable.

Edit: damnit, missed where you said you got a 1080..enjoy!

Mr.Cookie · 18 Jul 2017 at 18:19

Don't panic buy anything my 7950 runs stuff Done, I'm waiting for amd to show their hand but have played plenty of things worst issue i get is steam vr lobby (cant think what its called)

danoliver1 · 18 Jul 2017 at 18:27

My 980ti ran vr just fine with some super sampling.

Liamz51 · 18 Jul 2017 at 20:16

I'm on a i5 2500k with a 970. Only really played Robo Recall, Arizona Sunshine and House of the Dying Sun so far, haven't noticed any performance issues so you'll be absolutely fine with a 1080.