Once Varjo reduced the price of the Aero by fifty percent, a clear upgrade path emerged for me as a Reverb user. I made the decision immediately, and today, my Aero arrived. Remarkably, there was no need to allocate 5000 bucks for both the headset and a 4090. The Aero, priced around 1500 with one base station and including tax, has set a new standard. My reliable 3080 is proficiently driving the Varjo Aero, at exceptional settings I hadn’t dared to imagine before.
What a delight it was to find that both MSFS and DCS functioned seamlessly with OpenXR and the Aero right out of the box!
Honestly these CPU/GPU companies need to be handing the flight sim companies a cut of the profit.
FSX/P3D and now MSFS have been the main factor with me upgrading hardware chasing FPS and smooth performance the past 20 years.
I’m about to hit my wallet with the double whammy…
For 2D (small resolutions like single display 3440x1440) - 4090 is probably an overkill unless you use multi 4K display setup.
But we are in VR subforum here.
Your 2D case: 3440x1440 = 4 953 600
Pimax Crystal with the resolution required for lens distortion correction, without supersampling: 4306x5102x2=43 938 424.
Nearly 9x more pixels to crunch!
For comparison triple 4K: 3840 x 2160 x 3 = 24 883 200, still way below the resolution Pimax Crystal requires to reveal it’s full potential.
If you own high resolution headset (Pimax Crystal, Varjo Aero) 4090 paired with a decent CPU (e.g. 7800x3D) means: no more tinkering with settings (nearly all Ultra) just flying at 35-50 FPS (I consider 35 FPS as minimum for VR, while 45 FPS is pretty decent for the headsets running at 90Hz), with nearly eliminated issues like stuttering. This is the H/W (especially 4090) required for handling massive resolutions required by these headsets (2880x2880 H/W resolution per eye for Crystal + some on top resolution required for VR lenses distortion correction 4306x5102 or even higher for supersampling if you use DLLS quality). We are talking massive resolutions here, anything below 4090 is unable to handle such resolutions and you will not fully utilize your headset resolution/crispness.
If you can afford it (it’s crazily expensive) and if you have modern VR headset - go for it.
This year my budget was strong enough to survive migration from:
i7-7700K
4070Ti
HP Reverb G2
to:
7800x3D
4090
Pimax Crystal
It was worth it, finally the sim is running on the H/W capable of handling it and the visuals are better compared to even 4K display, not to mention the stereoscopy and immersion provided by VR.
I like to see it as an investment in myself and my hobby.
When considering how much fun I have day after day, week after week and month after month, it’s not really that expensive anymore. Compared to what you pay for a fancy dinner which lasts for a couple of hours or when going on vacation which lasts for a couple of weeks.
Some good old chiming in here.
I was on the fence, you know, the one between a sensible person and a flightsim nutjob, for a long time.
I have an RTX 3080 and fly only in VR with a G2. The 3080 is a great card, but it just does not have enough memory for this game in VR. It has 10GB and MSFS always uses at least a touch more than that, and sometimes way more. So every single time when landing, or perusing custom scenery, my brain had to endure virtual seizures.
Finally I pulled the trigger and got myself the INNO3D RTX 4090, you know, a sensibly priced one
Blown away. I am now flying around looking at scenery and thinking :“So, that is what it looks like!”
Finally I understand what the developers have done with this game. It’s hard to describe.
Now, one thing I will mention. For utmost smoothness, motion reprojection is the magical sauce. It does not stutter when not using it, but the motion is less smooth.
In real life your brain smooths a lot, and it does so in the game as well, but if you look closely and do A/B comparisons, motion smoothing wins.
However, it does make things blurry right away, because it’s always on. I wish it would only intervene when needed but alas. I will dig a bit deeper into this, because maybe the Open XR Toolkit can do it that way. Not a fan of the tool though as I immediately notice a slight doctoring of the image, that’s probably just me noticing artefacts as I do a bit of graphics development myself.
So motion repro is off in my case and that’s just fine.
The last time I checked the Nvidia site, the 4090 FE was in stock for £1519. That was a week or two ago. Today it is out of stock at £1579.
Considering a few years back my GPU died, and I had to go to eBay to get a 3090FE, and paid a lot more than that, I consider that a good price, and I believe what they were originally intended to be before all the scalpers came in.
