I was considering to buy a 3080 last summer to go with my Rift cv1, possibly from the second hand market. I never got to it, and I sort of lost touch with the flight sim world for a while.
Now I’m back after upgrading to a Quest 2. Of course my trusty old GTX 1070 is not powerful enough so again I’m looking for an upgrade.
My eyes have fallen on the RTX 4070. It seems to have a nice value for the money. Why not a 4070 Ti you say? Well, the price. The price of a new 4070 is about what I would have paid for a second-hand 3080 a year ago, and it feels OK to spend this amount on a graphics card.
Also, my rig is probably kind of CPU limited (a very old i7), so maybe I wouldn’t benefit much from getting the Ti version anyway. On top of that, the 4070 have all the same DLSS features as the 4070 Ti, and I hope that these features will be the big step up to make MSFS playable again in VR.
How is my reasoning? How well does the 4070 perform in VR? Any experiences out there?
It’s an interesting thread. The 4070 Ti would definitely be good enough. The question is whether the 4070 would also be nearly as good for a CPU limited computer rendering at close to 4K.
As I understand it DLSS 3 is not supported in VR. Is that a never, or could it be supported in a near future?
According to this site the 4070 seems to be pretty much on par with the 3080 at 4K, before turning on DLSS 3. It will be hugely better that 3080 if DLSS 3 can be brought to VR.
I was considering a used RTX3090 but eventually went for the 4070 at similar cost to get better performance on my Pico 4, first experience of VR (I had a 3060). Since then I’ve been viewing Utubes and forum posts in an effort to get the best I can, making adjustments as I go. The problem I seem to have come up against now though is I’m CPU limited! Looks like I’ll be studying overclocking!
Of course no rig is exactly the same so I’d suggest you start with a USB-C cable link, pairing it with a power adapter which you can buy for not a lot. This helps with the router connection in case you have any WiFi problems - yes I know a feature of the Pico 4 is it’s cable-free abilities but it has made a bit of latency improvement and also will mean you’re not limited by battery life to a couple of hours.
Then buy Virtual Desktop, it’s so much easier than Picos own connection software.
Finally get Open XR Toolkit which lets you make all sorts of adjustments.
For all of these there are some good vids plus search the forums for help. Armed with this info go play, making adjustments (in small increments in case you do something too drastic) as you go along until you find what’s best for your system. I’ve managed to get nice smooth action (I don’t “do” FPS, just what I see with my own eyes) and am now working on trying to get sharper visuals.
The 4070 is never going to achieve the smooth sharp action you see in lots of posts, vids etc.but, given many of us have limited budgets, I’m satisfied that it lets me enjoy my “flying” so much more than just watching a 2D screen!
I built my VR rig in 2020 with a 2070 Super as the GPU, has always been impressive but of course FS2020 was a constant battle for FPS versus quality of visuals. In a moment of madness I splashed out on an RTX4090 which thanks to spending big on the rest of the system in 2020, required only an upgraded PS (750W to 1000W). Initially the swap-out was a disaster; black screen and GPU fans at max RPM every few hours and artefacts all over the screen, not to mention a less that amazing performance improvement. Spent maybe a day chasing my tail with shader purging and various ‘this fixed my problem’ rabbit holes. Basically there were two things I had to do to reach enlightenment:
Swapped my single power cable (PS to 4070, the lead with a very wierd pin header marked 600W) to the 4-headed adapter that comes witht the Gigabyte RTX 4090 24G; and attached 4x PCIe 8-pin power leads to it.
Reformatted my C: Drive, went with a lean clean installation and avoided resource gobblers like armoury crate and Gforce Experience. Installed Steam and left it all to trickle in the 100Gb+ needed to fully restore my FS2020 installation.
This time, on launching for the first time I had my first trully Wow! VR experience since first donning my Rift S headset; back in the days when immersion felt so real I’d get stomach churns… kinda miss that. FS2020 on Ultra Setting, ground detail like nothing I have seen before, smooth clean and vibrant. Of course the panels are still blurred and I need to squint close to read fine details but that’s the RiftS not the tech… next stop will be whatever VR headset finally addresses that last pain point.
In a nut-shell, as tough as it may seem to do, a clean install may be the only solution if you’re having the same experience I initially did.
My initial attempts on good settings have not been successful. I am trying to fly over Copenhagen as it is a photogrammetry area. I get good framerates only if I lower the “Terrain level of detail” to absolute minimum (10-15). The graphics is less than pretty at that level. but anything higher and I get awful stutters. It seems like I’m limited by GPU, not CPU as I thought.
I’m not sure how to interpret this. If I play without VR I get fantastic results even when I set “Render scaling” to max (200%). It seems like VR is a lot more requiring not just because of its high resolution.
I have tried to experiment with various settings in OpenXR as well, but all I get is even uglier graphics and no fps increase. I guess I need to spend a lot more time on this - less time flying.
VR is around 3 times more demanding, at same resolution, than 2D on monitor. You have the double computing and display, one for each eyes, and you need to add all the 3D management, 6DOF positional, etc. Seems obvious, but that’s why devs always propose separate settings for both 2D and VR.
Saying that I’m surprised as TLOD, Terrain level of detail, is often more CPU demanding than GPU. I guess high density city is the “problem” here. I nearly never flight VR over big city… In any case TLOD need at least to be at 100 or 150% (in VR, TLOD 150 for me with i7 10700K and RTX3070), below it’s not really “sexy”…
You can display the debug menu on the monitor to check where power is grabbed the most and fine tune settings accordingly.
3 times more demanding for VR seems high. I get that you have to calculate the scene from two different viewpoints and all, but the physical world model (weather, other trafic, forces, instruments etc.) is only done once.
Ok. Will check the on-screen debug info. The info displayed from OpenXR is a bit confusing. It can say something like FPS 27, CPU 12ms, GPU 15m. That would make me think I’m GPU bound since the GPU takes a longer time. But I am most likely CPU bound. I can sett all graphics settings to High and Ultra without much impact on the FPS, except for TLOD.
Some progress though. I have started to play with the FOV rendering settings in OpenXR, the one with oval shaped zones of lower quality, and I can get rid of quite a lot of rendering work by culling areas that are out of view, and by lowering the quality for things in the periphery. This way I can raise the TLOD to about 50 and still get ok results. 100 is still not possible.
So what’s next? I have an old i7-4790 CPU and I doubt that I can upgrade it to something much better without changing the whole motherboard, reinstalling Windows etc.
By the way, has anyone compared the Nvidia DLSS (Anti-alias in the MSFS graphics settings) to the scaling in OpenXR (NIS, FSR)?
DLSS saves a lot of the load, it’s a gamechanger, a way to go for me with 4070Ti. For planes with glass cockpits I apply a bit of super sampling for my G2 in the OpenXR tools for WMR, to bring back the sharpness reduced by DLSS.
I would like to upgrade from i7-7700k, to i9-13 series. This requires Mobo replacement. How you can keep your Windows 10 with all the apps, without reinstalling from scratch?