newbie which vr headset and what to upgrade to
- Thread starter barbel
- Start date
To be honest, you probably notice the biggest improvement by upgrading your GPU first, but stock levels being what they are, I've had to go new Mobo, CPU and Ram and will swap out my GPU a little later on (have my eye on the new RTX 3080TI once it launches). With regards to your GPU upgrade AMD GPU's are just not showing in stock anywhere (at RRP) and going by my own research the 5700 XT is around 3x the performance of my current GTX 980TI which is only now showing signs of not being enough for newer titles, so this might be a good option from team red.
Soldato
I have a 3070 and although my experience with VR is also quite new, have to say Im quite happy with the performance. I still can't run it maxed out and get the full framerate but i cant really notice much difference from running it slightly lower settings. Everything PC side is crystal clear, smooth.
My old GPU was an RX480 which is about the same performance as your R9 290 and it was massively struggling.
Your i7 has about half the performance as my 1700X 8 core in multithread and about the same performance as mine in single thread. You'd benefit from an upgrade here (as would I) but I'd definitely prioritise the GPU.
What is your current thinking regarding an upgrade path? You could pick up some used DDR3 for presumably quite cheap but I wouldn't spend too much, better put towards a more modern system?
i was thinking of another 8gb ram which is about £60 along with gpu but am considering a new m/b which poss be £100 and then ram and gpu can salvage everything else from old pc
do you play alyx or what titles are you showing signs of not enough gpu power
Soldato
Can you upgrade the motherboard without upgrading your cpu? I doubt it's worth doing. New mobo for old chip, cant see why you'd bother.
Do you have a budget in mind for total package (VR headset plus upgrades). You might get more specific ideas then.
wasn't thinking about cpu thats that blown out the water then i will just got gpu and more ram then upgrade the rest as and when no chance of a gpu yet anyway i suppose loooking at stock levels
Soldato
I would suggest thinking about how much you want to spend in total.
Depending on what that is you could target a 3060 Ti or a 6700 XT (when released), or you could go for something off the used market.
In all honesty if you have the budget, I would go for one of the new series GPUs over previous generation, they are much more suited to VR demands, and the used market is not as cheap as it should be in my view, making value for money poor.
But, you could also get a Quest 2 and leave the PC upgrade for a while, because there are games you can play standalone that are very good, including some first person shooters.
The good thing about the Quest 2 is that you can use it without connecting to a PC, so there is no rush on upgrading any parts.
To be honest most games still run fine, but recently Virtual Desktop has had a performance overlay option added which shows your latency from the game being rendered, network, encoding and decoding and using this I can see that I am getting frame drops in some of the more demanding games (don't have Alyx), not enough to ruin the experience except for Asgard's Wrath where I can see massive frame drops and lag. With all the next gen hardware coming out it prompted me to upgrade. I suppose like all PC games you can tweak some settings down etc, but I'd rather upgrade and play everything maxed out especially in VR.