I’m thinking about an upgrade. My current setup: Ryzen 7 5800x3D, 32 GB RAM, Win 11, Radeon RX 5700 8GB, Meta/Oculus Quest.
Maybe I’d like to buy GeForce RTX 4070 (12 GB) or Radeon RX 7800 XT (16GB). With the upcoming 4070 Super I hope for price reductions. I learned that GeForce is more powerful with upscaling while Radeon has more VRAM (to keep it simple).
So, my questions are:
Will MSFS use up 16 GB, or will 12 GB be sufficient? Right now, 8 GB is almost completely occupied most of the time.
Can somebody say something about the difference between NVidia and AMD upscaling in reality (fps gain, sharpness etc.)? Is the NVidia version worth the extra money?
Are these video cards powerful enough to handle the new Quest 3 (in terms of resolution, and how does the necessary compression of video data for transmission affect the performance)?
Maybe, somebody would like to share her/his findings? Thanks for your replies.
I can’t answer all your questions from my experience, but will offer what views I can. My gpu (4090) also rarely uses above 8GB VRAM, and system memory utilisation doesn’t go above 16GB (out of 32), so I think either of your choices will be fine on that front.
As far as I have read on here and in various FB groups the Nvidia upscaling process is better, but I do not use it as I find that TAA anti-aliasing gives much better quality visuals. With either a 4070 or 7800 XT you will see the same, and should have no need of DLSS or other frame rate trickery.
I haven’t tried a Quest 3, but I used to have a Q2 in my old pc with an RTX3070it and it was fine, so either choice should drive a Q3 OK but I believe Nvidia is considered better for VR.
Unless you already have the headset, I would strongly recommend finding a way to try out VR on your PC before you buy one. Personally, I couldn’t live with the compromises - even with a mega pc and headset, the visual quality isn’t great compared to a 4K monitor, there will be screen door effects and field-of-view restrictions, and you can’t see your flight controls and other monitors with charts etc.
I went with a head tracker instead of VR. Yes, it is not quite so immersive but it doesn’t have the compromises I mentioned above. You can try out the effect for free if you have a webcam, using the StableView and OpenTrack apps.
I’m using an Intel Arc A770 with 16 GB of VRAM. It often uses more than 8GB. Don’t have a screenshot with that telemetry, but here is one of the MS/Asobo Boeing 747 on the runway at Capetown (FACT). VRAM is 7.699 GB (45%):
I’d not suggest cards with 12 GB - go for those with 16 GB or more if you can afford them. These newer cards might make the sim CPU-bound today, but if you are thinking of purchasing MSFS 2024 when it is released, the improvements to the core code might lessen that limitation.
Can’t speak to your NVidia / AMD or Quest questions as I have no experience with any of those.
My setup is quite similar to yours, but with a slightly better graphics card. I’m using an AMD 5800+ 6900. However, I find the performance of the 6900 to be less than satisfactory, and the AMD configuration panel often leaves me unsure about which settings to adjust. The upside is that I’m hoping the upcoming FSR3 will give AMD an edge over Nvidia cards. But considering future VR gaming, it seems that this is another area where Nvidia has an advantage.
Definitley get Nvidia if you want to use VR. It’s better performance overall for VR and DLSS is extremely useful for getting a good image and good performance in MSFS, while reducing shimmering. My HMD uses over 12GB the way I run it.
I have the 7900xtx w/24gig of vram and using DX12 will use 17gig of the vram just sitting on the runway at EGLL (4k+HDR10). DX12 is the future of the sim and can utilize as much vram as available. More vram = smoother sim.
I think for Nvidia cards DLSS works great and as for AMD cards FSR works great so I don’t expect you’ll see any significant differences in upscaling.
I just got a Quest 3 VR headset a few days ago and while it is looking good so far I’m still in the learning curve with setting the abundant number of parameters within the various layers of SW . Again, I don’t think there will be much difference in the video compression, however, I do believe Meta fine tuned their VR headsets for Nvidia first and is playing catch up with AMD cards. You should be able to find YT videos regarding VR and the 7800xt/4070 that you can review.
One last thing is that AMD will be releasing their FSR3/AFMF frame generation technology in their base line driver within the next month. I’ve been using a preview driver for the last few months and indeed you’ll see double the frames in MSFS and it looks great! I don’t think a 4090 could do any better with the sim (except for maybe VR) over the 7900xtx at half the price.
Daniel Owen did a comparison for the 4070 super against the 7900xt to see if the extra is worth it. It very much depends on your resolution. MLD was indicating that the 4070 super was not selling well, which could mean price drops beyond the MSRP. Waiting for price drops is always a gamble, and can always backfire on you if people start buying the stock out.
. Again, I don’t think there will be much difference in the video compression, however, I do believe Meta fine tuned their VR headsets for Nvidia first and is playing catch up with AMD cards. You should be able to find YT videos regarding VR and the 7800xt/4070 that you can review.