What is the actual best bang for the buck GPU to do VR in DCS (and MSFS for that matter)

[Jyge]

A friend of mine indicated interest for rig update and getting into the VR business. Now I myself have had my experiences. I had 1080 Ti for years, it brought me through original Rift, Samsung Odyssey 2 and both HP Reverbs. Once I went for Varjo Aero I updated my own rig and got myself 3080 Ti.

Now some might disagree here but I was pretty happy with 1080 Ti and the funny part is that somewhere there coming down from Rift I was always able to reduce the Pixel Density so I actually felt that Reverb G2 was hardly any heavier than the previous low res headsets. With G2 I set it to 1.0 and never touched it ever since. 

So if I am asked for an affordable solution that runs with an adequate enjoyable experience I would go for 1080 Ti and Reverb G2, but it does not really make any sense to go for 1080 Ti on year 2023 AD, so I am wondering what is the one that matches the performance and comes with a reasonable price tag. I think 2xxx and 3xxx cards costed more than they were worth and 4xxx seems to provide more with less money, so after a quick look I got the impression that 4060 Ti would be the way to go (and Reverb G2). Any takes on this?

I personally have not even installed MSFS, so I can not tell how everything works there, not even, if it is heavier than DCS. So I would appreciate some pointers on this one as well.

[Motomouse]

Reverb G2 is discontinued. What about a Quest 3?

[Jyge]

I don't really think that the cableless stuff is without performance hit, additionally, I would be loath to recommend anything from Zuckerberg, I am still sour how he shot down the Oculus development, if Oculus would have pursued Santa Fe, it might be that we would have had foveated rendering and depth focus already earlier. But that is besides the point, the headset is maybe a secondary question, I think the selection of a good GPU is where I would appreciate some tips.

[Gorn_GER]

vor 46 Minuten schrieb Jyge:

I don't really think that the cableless stuff is without performance hit, additionally, I would be loath to recommend anything from Zuckerberg, I am still sour how he shot down the Oculus development, if Oculus would have pursued Santa Fe, it might be that we would have had foveated rendering and depth focus already earlier. But that is besides the point, the headset is maybe a secondary question, I think the selection of a good GPU is where I would appreciate some tips.

I cannot agree with your thoughts on Meta Quest, because the headsets do as good with Meta as they did with Oculus (maybe even better. Today Hand tracking and app support are on a whole new level and I tell you by starting my VR life with Oculus DK2), just with the fact that there now is a big investor who pushes the success of VR with its own interests and this is good for the whole world of VR. But that is an other topic, quest 3 is the best you can buy for good money (because everything above is 200%-500% of the Q3 price) and is way better than G2 (my own experience given) 

 

in case of GPU: I used 3090 and now 4090. The 40th generation gives a huge performance boost, due to new driver Technologie that could not reached by 20th and 30th. So everything below 40XX is burned money because 3080 and 3090 is too expensive if you do not buy old used cards by people in the internet and everything below 3080 is not good for DCS (I tried 2070 and 3070 myself and it was terrible bad compared to what 3090+ gave me). Since the 4070 is nearly the raw performance of 3080 and has lower price, I would go with that or higher. 

Edited November 2, 2023 by Gorn_GER

[Nedum]

Coming from a G2 and going to a Quest 3 would be a little step back, if we talk about the image quality (sweet spot).

@GPU

The 40XX series is the best for DCS. If money isn't a big problem, go for the 4090. DCS eats VRAM like there is nothing else.

The 30XX series is too power hungry. Too much heat for what it can give you in comparison to a 40XX series. With less power, the 40XX series will give you round about 80
% more FPS. My 4090 needs 150 Watts less and is 80% faster as my old 3090. 

If you have not enough bucks, try to get a 4080 or 4070Ti. 

[Dragon1-1]

I would disagree that the 30 series is not worth buying at this point. My Reverb G2 works really nicely with a 3090 (albeit a fancy one from MSI), and it cost half of what I'd have to pay for a 4080. If I were willing to go for a Zotac, I could've paid two thirds of what I paid, but I decided to shell out a bit more for the MSI. In terms of bang for buck, a 3090 is a perfectly good GPU, and if you're not going to go into crazy framerates or beyond 4k, you don't really need a 4090, especially with DCS adding DLSS. A little undervolting and I have no problem with temps or excessive power consumption. I'm running my rig off a 1000VA UPS, including the monitor, and it's plenty even under full load (although on default setting it did manage to trip the overload light on occasion).

If you can afford it, go for the 40 series, sure. If you need to be smart with money, the 30 series, even used GPUs (try finding someone rich who's upgrading from it to a 4090 ), is perfectly capable of giving good VR performance. Not only that, it has plenty of VRAM, which is currently extremely important for DCS, perhaps more so than what the GPU chip itself can give you. A 3090 may actually give you, in DCS, better performance than a 4080 because of that.

We can expect Vulkan to be implemented in DCS at some point, which will potentially result in massive VR performance gains due to DX11 VR rendering pipeline being really inefficient (basically, it renders the whole scene twice). This means that a 4090 may become overkill for DCS, like it is for all other gaming. 

[diego999]

4xxx series are worth it if you can get one at good price, but only 4070 or higher. Stay away from the 4060 or 4060ti, they're garbage. At higher resolutions the equivalent previous generation cards (3060 and 3060ti) are actually FASTER on several tests.

Watch this:

 

Edited November 3, 2023 by diego999