£500 Upgrade for VR, CPU or GPU?

phil675 · 23 May 2023 at 10:23

Hi all.

I've been using an original HTC Vive, playing Blade and Sorcery, Contractors. They are mostly fine fps wise, until you have a lot of people on the screen in B+S, things slow down. My specs are pretty average which is why I got the Vive:

I7-6700
16GB cheapo RAM
RX580

I'm hesitant to get more games in case they run awfully. If you were going to spend about £500 would a new mobo/cpu or graphics card be the way to go?

Wing-Man · 23 May 2023 at 10:31

GPU upgrade is needed without a doubt, but the CPU will be getting a little long in the tooth too

phil675 said:
They are mostly fine fps wise

this will be a big problem in VR it can make you feel very sike if its not smooth

mickyflinn · 23 May 2023 at 10:33

I would download MSI afterburner and see what's happening when the slow down occurs.

GPU looks weak and have you got games loaded on a SSD ?

BigBANGtheory · 24 May 2023 at 08:46

Honestly I'd sell your entire system and then use the proceeds + £500 to build new, if you want to try and find the bottleneck then run an app like fpsVR or use the developer settings in Steam VR to look at the frame timings anything above 11ms from the CPU or GPU is a problem. In the meantime though the obvious thing you could try is lowering the render resolution which should have an immediate effect of trading image quality for performance, some games run noticeably slower in multiplayer mode DCS being an obvious example.

The long and short of it though is PCVR being a hungry beast and most games are not that well optimised you basically want to throw as much at it as you can comfortably afford OR wait it out for price/perf to improve.

GPU usually has the biggest impact and without something punchy in place VR isn't that great imho.

phil675 · 24 May 2023 at 10:30

Thanks for the replies. I think I'll get a 4070 (if it fits in the case) to tide me over after summer and then a 13th gen cpu/mobo later in the year. In B+S it's fine with a couple of enemies but now that I'm getting better at it, 5 bodies and 5 active enemies at the same time really slow it down.