Keep 3070 or 6900XT?

User Support Hub Virtual Reality (VR)
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I was lucky to get a MSI 3070 Gaming X Trio earlier this year for a reasonable price (€ 670). But it struggles in VR with the G2 (my system is a 5800X with 32Gb 3600 CL16). So I’ve been targeting to get a 3080 and I’m on the EVGA list for a couple of months now. Nothing happens, so I’ve given up on that. Last Thursday I was lucky again to snatch a 6900XT at MSRP from AMD directly. I can sell the 3070 for the price of the 6900XT so it’s basically a “free” swap.

In normal games and under normal conditions this one is easy. However AMD seems to struggle with VR and upscaling in higher resolutions (4K and beyond). And of course there’s DLSS (if it comes) and raytracing (not sure about the benefits of that). And lastly the driver issues being reported here. CTD’s etc. AMD’s strong point (for how long) SAM doesn’t seem to do MSFS any good. However MSFS becomes a XBox title soon (will that matter?) and there will be the transition to DX12 also. And maybe AMD improve their drivers for VR a bit?

Is there anyone that has experience with both Nvidia and AMD cards?

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Amd 6900xt currently experiences semi random ctd’s in msfs. But only in msfs, and it can be mitigated by limiting gpu load imo.

If i use oxr at 100 and taa at 60-70, Everything else ultra, i get about 30+fps but i am limited by cpu(2700), and gpu is never used 100%, which reduces crashing. It is clearly a bug from the game or maybe driver incompatibility. It will be solved by Asobo i hope, they had ctd as top bug priority.

Go for the swap, at msrp it is a bargain. 6900xt is considerably faster at every resolution/game/whatever, more overclockable, and in other games i experienced no ctd’s. So to be clear, amd drivers are ok in other games. Also, with amd you can change your reverb headset color saturation/contrast/brightness.

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I can only give you an impression of the RX 6900 XT, I own. Actually mine is the Gigabyte Gaming OC Model. It has replaced the Vega64 I was using before (which still held up surprisingly good during the alpha, but began to choke on the workload when trying to run VR in MSFS).

In terms of raw rasterization performance, the only thing that beats it is the RTX 3090 and not by that far (especially when taking the extra budget into account).

I am running it with the Valve Index in VR and can reach up to 45 fps with decent settings, including setting super sampling in SteamVR to 150% or even above.

Also it delivers up to 58 fps on Ultra settings when playing “pancake” on a Samsung G9 monitor (5120x1440). Please note that I am using a Ryzen 7 2700X CPU, so please take into account that no SAM boosting happens on that machine.

In terms of CTDs, I am still testing and trying to narrow down options, I will gladly share my current findings:

  • Disabling the Issue detection feature in AMD driver seems to prevent at least driver timeout crashes.
  • I was able to do a full flight from Frankfurt to Stansted in a A320 Neo, yesterday without crashing. I assume the more you push it to the max, the more likely you might end up with a CTD, though I also encountered one while the GPU load was around 85%
  • Increasing the power limit in the driver by 3-5% and raising the fan curve up seems to help, too
  • CTDs are more likely to happen, if you fiddle around with graphics settings in your active game session a lot. If you restart MSFS and just do a flight without changing anything, you might have better chances
  • It looks like undervolting and reducing the max frequency slightly seems to drastically lower the chance of a CTD to happen.

If you got the chance to buy it at MSRP, it is a no-brainer. Swap it out and enjoy it. I am pretty sure, that the CTDs will be dealt with sooner or later and at least it looks like things can be done to at least get them appear less often in the meantime.

Aside from MSFS you will find that basically every other game will massively benefit from that GPU, well okay… unless you are enabling raytracing, I guess it is only fair to mention that this is an area, AMD still has to improve on.

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Keep your Nvidia card going from Nvidia to AMD is kinda like a downgrade.
Nvidia you are guaranteed to have better drivers.

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You mean like that driver about 4 years ago, which was guaranteed to brick particular gpus? Or the one that was guaranteed to have a mining hash limiter?
I wonder how nVidia manages to ride that bandwagon while downplaying the number of times they screwed up their own drivers pretty neat as well.

Don’t get me wrong, there were driver issues on the AMD side, though I honestly never experienced any driver issues personally with:

  • Radeon 9600
  • Radeon X800
  • Radeon R9 280X
  • Radeon RX 580
  • Radeon RX Vega64

Maybe I was lucky picking either the right gpu models or just happened to not play the games, which allegedly had massive problems with AMD silicon.

It has yet to be determined if the RX 6000 Series CTDs are a driver issue at all, also the forum states several RTX 3000 series owners, who also also encounter CTDs in VR.

As of now if you want the most performance you can get, you end up with the decision to buy a 3090 or a 6900 XT. I doubt that the upcoming 3080 TI nor that Asrock 6900 XTHC will change that much about it and as OP had a good chance to get his hands on the top tier AMD card for a very decent price (you lucky ■■■■■■■ ;-] ), that thing might deliver those frames needed to convert his VR experience into a better one.

One might speculate about upcoming improvements and performance gains on RDNA2 going with DX12 and the XBox launch, which are likely to appear considering what Capcom managed to pull out with the new RE:Village, though we aren’t there yet and we have yet to see if Asobo can do the same with the MSFS architecture.

nVidia isn’t your friend, neither is AMD, both are tech companies, who give a flying F* about you once they got your money.

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Haha, yes I’m a lucky ■■■■■■■ :-]. The card came in the mail today and I’ve decided to try the 6900XT for a few days/weeks before selling (or keeping) the 3070. It won’t hurt that much in price on the 3070 and I’m not a scalper on the 6900XT. So if I am going to sell that one, it is not new anymore. Hence it will reduce the price, but I was not in this to make money of it anyway.

I’ll post my review and experience going from team Green to team Red (and maybe back to Green again) in the next days / weeks. It won’t be scientific FPS comparisons, but more the overall feel and experience of both.

The first thing to note is that the card and box are heavy. Very heavy. The box and packing is also very very nice: “welcome to the Red Team”. Well done AMD! Of a much higher quality and feel than my MSI box (I don’t know about the Nvidia Founders Edition packaging).

I never cared much for the design of the card. A bit dull and “unimaginative”, being just a box with three fans. Especially compared to the Nvidia FE cards (which are very nicely done, kudo’s Nvidia). However I like that it isn’t of the cheap “loud” (in a figurative way) “RGB” kind that some (all?) of the AIB partners came up with. The card itself is built like a tank and in practice much better than I thought it would. The YouTube videos and photo’s don’t do it justice.

More to follow later…

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My first experiences with the 6900XT have been an mixed bag to be honest.

On the positive side. The card absolutely has a lot more horsepower. You can feel it is faster. On more or less the same settings in VR (on a G2) I think I get around 10-15FPS more in urban areas. Now getting around 35 FPS at a mix of high/ultra settings @ 100%TAA and 80% OXR (motion reprojection off). That was closer to 20 on the 3070. Also in “pancake mode” I’m much higher on FPS. The experience is much smoother overall. I also think everything is sharper on the 6900XT (also with sharpening in the driver set to off), probably that also has to do with the extra FPS.

I also prefer the AMD colors over the Nvidia colors out of the box. It all seems more natural to me. I don’t know if you can tweak that in Nvidia software (I think you can in the AMD software). But there is a request on the list to be able to do that in MSFS, so that may change in the future. A final note of personal preference is that I also like the AMD software to tune the card. It’s easy to use and all nicely packed together.

On the negative side. When I first started the card up it had some coil whine. However it has reduced to levels it doesn’t bother me anymore. I can only hear it on the startup screens when the card pumps out 500+ FPS. Also the fans are louder than my 3070. However I also changed the fan profile in the AMD software to a more aggresive one.

And then there are the CTD’s. The problem is real!! I’ve read a lot on the forum here, on AV SIM, on facebook and on the AMD community. It seems that the Reverb G2 in combination with the 6900XT or the 6800XT and MSFS in VR is not a happy mariage. The eventlog always shows a 0xc0000005 error in d3d11.dll or VCRUNTIME140.dll (and often an error in amdkmdag right before the CTD). So there is a bug somewhere (or maybe several). However it seems to be “MSFS in VR” specific. Everything else (incl. MSFS in pancake mode) is fine. So is this an AMD issue, an USB issue, a HP Reverb G2 issue or a MSFS issue? I don’t know but someone should look at this!

Believe me I’ve tried everything: DDU driver change, clean install windows, clean install MSFS, clean install OpenXR, WMR, Reverb G2, serveral AMD drivers, no mods, More Power Tool, disabling certain Logitech software, raising the fan speed, etc.

The only thing that gave me some stability during the last flights is to lower the max GPU clock by 5%. I’m not sure if this entirely solves it, but for now the situation is acceptable (where it wasn’t earlier). So for now the 6900XT stays, but since I have the luxury to still own a 3070 I can hang on that for a few weeks more to see how the situation develops.

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I have been experimenting with the CTDs as well. After some undervolting, I could play in VR for 2 hours and even with returning to the world map and starting another one two times. So far this would be guaranteed to CTD, but didn’t. Now here is the strange part:
Apparently, I forgot to save the undervolting profile for MSFS and when I started the sim a day later, there were no CTDs, but the card didn’t use the profile and therefore ran at base settings.

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I found a working setup for my 6900 that has no ctd’s.

Using steamvr beta, 3kx3k res in steamvr(100%), 60%TAA render ingame(1900x1800 something), mix of high-ultra, and important, radeon chill limiter of 31fps.

Using openxr gives ctd’s. Also i found that openxr dev tools is bugged as of right now. At 100 oxr it shows a resolution of 2550 something but it should have been 3100.

Later edit: i changed to openxr after some more testing. I deactivated “use preview” and also deactivated reprojection. Now it is not bugged anymore.

I have no idea what happened, but now i don’t have ctd’s anymore.

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Turning down the maximum clock didn’t help for me. It has nothing to do with the hardware being stressed. My first flights were a very low settings and it CTD-ed on my right away.

So the search continues. Could it be so simple as to turn off “preview” in OXR? My last flight went ok. Two hours flying in the King Air over Japan during sunset. Repo and preview turned off. No CTD. So lets continu investigating.

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I’ll make it short: keep it!
AMD will bring you no joy with MSFS 2020!
(AMD owner of a RX5700XT - no “bashing” intention, just being honest)

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Nvidia bringing DLSS to VR is bound to come to FS eventually too. That fact alone is worth sticking to 3070.

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UPDATE: The CTD’s were getting annoying up to the point where I was about to reinstall the 3070. I had my eyes on a 3080 or 3090, but not for the rediculous price of € 3100… I’m still waiting for the notification from EVGA to able to order a 3090 for around € 1700. Especially since I know the DLSS thing may be coming (however AMD seems to have its own tech coming our way) and the software is optimized more for NVidia than AMD (which is kinda strange knowing the Xbox is AMD hardware).

But I really wanted to stay with AMD. The 6900XT was a steal at € 1000 and has 16gb VRAM!! So I hung in a little while longer… Yesterday I read a post about updating the Realtek HD audio driver. So I did that. The latest driver for my MB (a Gigabyte Aorus B550 Elite V2) was quite old (november 2020) but I did it anyway. I also updated to the latest Chipset drivers (also ‘old’) and LAN drivers. Since then I haven’t had a CTD… Fingers crossed, but this has been the most stable situation for weeks. I even started fiddling around with sliders to optimize settings for visual clarity and FPS (last weeks were mainly about finding stability).

Now I’m at (for GA aircraft): 90% OXR, repo off, preview off, 100% TAA, LOD 200%, med/high/ultra settings and in AMD on Chill mode @ 30FPS min and max, sharpening on, Tesselation on AMD optimized.

I’ll post an update, later this week when I’ve flown more hours.

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Keep us updated whenever you get a ctd.

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I had some CTD’s right after the post. I disabled the AMD HD Audio also. That didn’t seem to help. After the update of OpenXR to the latest runtime (and now I am running the preview version) it seemed more stable. Had no CTD’s for two days. I saw another post about updating the C++ runtime to the latest version. So I did that also. And finally there is a post about changing the name of a file in a folder. Read it here: VCRUNTIME140.dll Error - #292 by KLM1494113

This post is worth checking out, it seems to solve some peoples problems. I haven’t had a CTD for three days now. Which is very good (I had them between 5 - 30 min in flight). So now it seems to be “rock solid”. Therefore I sold the 3070 today. I could have used it for mining but sold it to a fellow gamer instead.

I think the simupdates are more about changing flight dynamics, solving AP problems, adding new features to the planes, etc. So where the WU’s are about the scenery the SU’s are about the planes. They seem to have a major update coming that should improve the stability and engine of the sim quite a bit. You can even sign up to be part of a beta testing team. It may be the DX12 update. I hope that it solves the problems so many of us have.

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Thanks for the news. After some more crashes on my part, i actually got rid of the reverb as i got fed up with this madness. Now i play with no vr, and i never have ctd’s. I think it’s wise to wait a bit so Asobo fixes vr, and maybe valve releases an index 2 this year, as the reverb was not great anyway, and vpro2 seems not great either (for my expectations).
Good luck on the journey to no ctd’s!

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After a lot of other “fixes” (including making changes to the register) that - to no surprise - didn’t help, a couple of days ago I experimented somewhat with the USB connection of the Reverb G2. I used to connect it to the USB-C on my case or sometimes to the USB-C on the 6900XT. There is no difference between the two, I had CTD’s on just about any flight.

But I decided to try and use the USB-C/A adapter that was supplied with the G2. First I connected it to a powered hub. It couldn’t find the G2 and I got an error. Then I tried the USB-A on my case. It connects fine and … no CTD … I’ve flown around 10 flights after that and I had only one CTD (flying over Paris on Ultra settings with the ORBX observation plane - that was a kindy heavy workload with very low FPS). So it seems more stable than before. Though I must say that I’ve earlier instances of fixes that seemed to work, but in the end didn’t…

So this got me thinking is it a MSFS issue, a Radeon issue, a G2 issue of could it be a Ryzen (USB) issue? I’m on a B550 Motherboard and the current bios has AGESA ComboV2 1.2.0.1 A. Does anyone else have the same experience?

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I always used it with the usb a-c adaptor and still got ctd’s. For reference i have a b350 motherboard and older agesa. Never had the problems with g2 connection or sound/black screens that seem to appear on newer ryzens.

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I haven’t had sound problems either. Had some flickering on the loading screen. Nothing serious though. I haven’t had connection problems. The first thing I tried was the USB-C on the case and later when I got the 6900XT on the card (the 3070 didn’t have a USB port). Both worked without any problems (other than the CTD’s - which may or may not be related). Last week I started experimenting with an USB hub and checking out which USB ports work and which don’t. That was the first time I discovered that not all ports work. The USB-A on the case (Corsair 4000D Airflow) however did and has given me some “stability” over the last few days. Fingers crossed :slight_smile: …

I’m curious if the new DX12 build will solve the stability problems (probably it’s not just one thing). I hope to sign up for the test program. In the mean time the XBOX version has been announced for July 27th. It must be ready and coming soon.

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@InphaseSquare73

How has vr been working for you lately?

I have the quest 2 and a sapphire 6900xt and have tried every driver from amd but have reinstalled 21.3.2 as it’s the only driver I’ve found that I can fly more than 10 minutes without a CTD even though with this driver I still get one.

Only port I have is on the back of the case. I’ve not had any issues with the link disconnecting.