RTX 4090 performance with VR (Ryzen 5900X / Reverb G2)

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Well, I caved in. Could not resist. Got it on launch day. RTX 4090 is enormous! I knew it, yet it was still shockingly massive. 4 slots wide, 34cm long. No wonder, it has up to 600W power draw in OC mode! A monster, i got myself a monster…

Now I will have to reconfigure my PC, as PCIE / M2 expansion card has to go out or the 4090 won’t fit. So the MSFS NVMe SSD drive will have to go into one of motherboard’s two M2 slots, and the slower SATA M2 SSD with gaming system partition will have to go to SATA adapter instead. Then I need to sort out dual boot again. If everything works, and the 4090 has enough power from my 850W PSU (1250W is on the way), I will post performance measurements tonight…

I’m upgrading from EVGA 3080 FTW3. The model I got is GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4090 GAMING OC. I hope I made the right choice. Hopefully will know soon.

TL/DR UPDATE:

For what it’s worth, here is the only feasible direct upgrade comparison I have. Because of all the problems you can read about below, I can’t fully trust the numbers, but my original benchmark with 3080 was this: “28-30 fps for a minute or so, then it fell to 20-22 fps”. Assuming the proper fps is 28-30, we can compare with the 44-50 I got with 4090 in the similar situation (same plane/area/weather). Taking an average values of 29 and 47 I got a 65% FPS increase after upgrading 3080 to 4090. This is by no means scientific comparison, but it’s consistent with the reviews, considering my CPU is the bottleneck now. Most importantly this is enough to push the system over the 30 fps MR hump reliably (with about 34% overhead in most situations), and occasionally even to 45 fps MR.

The 30 fps MR is the magic number that gets perfectly smooth experience with minimal MR artifacts. Reliably getting over this number at all times, including flying and landing in dense areas and challenging situations, is the holy grail. 4090 got me there. Flying during stretches of 45 fps MR I can’t really see the difference in smoothness and surprisingly MR artifacts (“warping” runway, window frame etc. while cockpit and scenery are perfectly fine) are just about as noticeable as they are at 30 fps MR. So pushing over 45 fps is not as amazing as pushing over 30 fps. Below 30 fps (22.5 fps MR) things get ugly and borderline unflyable, that’s why it’s important to eliminate this in all situations, and below 22.5 fps it’s unflyable, period. I expect that upgrading my 5900X CPU to 7900X3D when it comes out and faster DDR5 memory will further improve the performance.

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Good luck think you’ll need a CPU upgrade now :rofl: I think even the 3090 doesn’t come close to being pushed with the current generation of CPU’s.

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I’m very much GPU-bound in VR with G2. My CPU frametimes are about 10-12ms, and GPU 28-29ms with MR. That said, I’m waiting for a 7900X3D to be released so I can completely upgrade the system, or rather build a new one.

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I appreciate that it appears you have direct-connected your credit card to the graphics card so it can spend unlimited funds to keep it happy.

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I hope that width measurement is only the 4090 - cos nVidia gave a width of 63mm for the 4080 that I want to get! Not enough room for 75.

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Look forward to your results, I managed to exercise enough self restraint to not buy one yet which is a nice change of pace.

VR is definitely a huge performance pit, anyone who says you don’t need more GPU power clearly doesn’t play many games in VR on higher resolution headsets. Of my main games such as ACC, MSFS, DCS, AMS2 etc all could continue to benefit from much more power than even the 4090 has.

Btw saw derbauer saying it’s well worth reducing the power budget - you can knock 100-150w off for a sub 5% loss in performance. He didn’t (yet) get any better results by playing with under-volting.

Enjoy!

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I have no idea how you people manage to get stuff on day 1 of these launches. I sat in front of my computer for hours just to try to get the chance to order one and got skunked, lol. Looking forward to seeing some results in the G2, honestly I am at least happy with the 3080, but I want more power!

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It’s a combination of perseverance and luck. I think luck has a big role in it too. I’m with you, I threw everything at it at 6AM this morning on multiple sites, and HOURS of F5 refreshing. The sites get screwy, and I ended up seeing the stock available, add to the cart, then it errors. Sometimes I got to the payment, and then it would either go out of stock or just hang. I also got in in the “queues”… so many of them I have lost count. No dice.

It’s rough out there… even with these crazy prices, that I’m even surprised i’m willing to pay because of this flight simulator. lol It hurts the wallet… and what’s more infuriating is seeing the scalpers list these things on ebay for 3-4,000 dollars. I may be crazy enough to pay at these crazy MSRP prices, but I absolutely refuse to pay scalp prices.

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Congrats on getting one on release day. I managed to order an Asus Tuf OC 4090 online last night our time here in Oz, a few minutes after release. Some models had already sold out. However I checked back just now at lunchtime and they still had the Tuf OC in stock as well as the Strix, so way different that the last gen release.

The Asus cards are gigantic though. The card will fit in my case, but I don’t think the stupid cable adapter will allow me to put the glass side panel back on. Somebody should make an after market cable with a 90 degree right angle plug, so you don’t have to bend the cables over.

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Well, the first result it very puzzling and discouraging…
I wanted this to be a scientific test, but MSFS has crushed my hopes and plans again. So here’s the whole mess I got, with every gory detail:

  • I downloaded the new 522.25 drivers, created NVCleaninstall version, and installed them. The moment MSFS loaded into the main manu, displays blanked, requiring hard reboot, which resulted with error beeps (1 long 3 short) and no boot, no post, no BIOS… I disconnected the power, waited 10 seconds and restarting again. Only worked after a few tries. Then it happened again 3 times! MSFS was shuttin off displays upon load etc. I reinstalled the old driver - everything is fine instantly. Disconnected second monitor, leaving single monitor, reset NVCP oreferences to default, reinstalled new driver - seems to work after that. I suspect there’s something wrong with the driver, and that’s why I’m telling all this. Remember, this all was before swapping GPUs, on my tried and true 3080!

  • I created a flight with 737 at JFK facing Manhattan with Broken Clouds at 5pm, AI traffic only. I set TAA 100%, disabled OpenXR Toolkit completely, set OpenXR Developer Tool to 100%, motion reprojection disabled. This is not flyable with 3080, but I wanted to measure the FPS, otherwise it would be locked to MR. What I got is 28-30 fps for a minute or so, then it fell to 20-22 fps. OK, that’s what I expected more or less. 100% resolution was not realistic with 3080. I exited VR, closed WMR, reenabled OpenXR Toolkit (no resizing, just FPS overlay) and entered VR again: It started with 31 fps. I got 16ms CPU / 43ms GPU frametimes. This should mean that I’m heavily GPU limited. After a minute or so fps crashed to 22 with frametimes 18/35. Several VR restarts started with 30 fps and after a while fell to around 22fps again. Weird… But I continued…

  • I installed the new and huge 4090 with the support bracket etc. Oh boy, it’s huge…

  • Booted up and launched MSFS, carefully doing everything in the same sequence. Loaded the same flight. I got 22 fps and it stayed there. What??? It’s worse than 3080! I enabled OpenXR Toolkit with MR Off and scaling off, just for the counter and it showed 22 fps too, with 15 / 22 ms.

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  • Curiously I got “Target missed” message, despite MR is set to off both in OpenXR Toolkit and OpenXR Dev Tool. I disabled OpenXR Toolkit again and got the same 30fps, no MR cleacly this time… I don’t understand it at all. It’s the same I got with 3080, despite being GPU-limited by a large margin!

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I enabled OpenXR Toolkit again, set to no scaling, but FFR Quality/Wide, and I was able to get steady 30fps MR for a minute (which was NOT possible with 3080 on TAA100%/OXRT100%, so there is some potential clearly) but then it always falls again after a minute or so to 22fps. I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all… I disabled OpenXR Toolkit again to eliminate it from the equasion… Got the same thing…

While I was writing this it was sitting in VR, and now now showed 18fps!!!

But after I restarted the flight again - It’s now 40fps no MR now, which while not really flyable, is a decent improvement over 30fps I initially had with 3080. Now, the OpenXR DevTool shows that I am CPU limited! My head is going to expload…

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I’m going to take a break, reboot and test again. Istead of a clear and scientific test it ended up in a huge mess…

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Totally weird. Have you tried some tests in 2D to see how that goes? Maybe run some synthetic benchmarks and try another game to see if things are working properly. Good luck.

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Oh boy, I’ll follow your thread, I’m right bout to sell every non critical component of my pc just to buy a rtx4090. Keep us updated :slight_smile: Thanks a lot!!!

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I got the same 4090 as you @RomanDesign and am getting big improvements over my 3080.
In the 737-700 at KSAN with broken clouds preset at 5pm, I’m getting 45ps on the ground and 60-80fps in the air at 2000ft. This is with mostly ultra/high settings and TAA 100, OpenXR 100%. The new DLSS in SU11 gives me pretty much the same performance. LOD 150 and Object detail 150. DX12

Reverb G2
5800x3D

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Thats… not normal. What are your thermal temps? Also, what PSU are you running? Just want to make sure you aren’t thermal throttled or have a weird power issue.

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Well, so far I rebooted and trued again. No OpenXR Toolkit. Got 30fps no MR, but MR was set to “Always On” in OpenXR Dev Tool. Unexplainable… I restarted WMR/VR again and this time got the MR working. Why - I don’t know. I got 30fps MR (23ms CPU / 20ms). But after 20 seconds it sunk to 22fps again. Why?

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However I then restarted again, and now it seems to hold at 30fps MR, I even added Clouds to Ultra, and it still shows 30 fps solid, no falling back to 22 fps now. Frametimes are 24ms CPU / 23ms GPU.

So I’m more CPU bound now, which is logical I guess, and after setting clouds to Ultra it looks like I’m pretty much evenly CPU/GPU bound. Though withot MR it’s awfully close to what was there before, and there is no solid benchmark to show: the numbers do not make any sense. I wish I had a proper benchmark for you, but MSFS never ceases to surprise me with its unpredictability and impossibility to properly measure and gauge performance.

However, one thing is for sure: there is no way in hell I could do 100%/100% scaling with Reverb G2 (OpenXR Toolkit disabled) and maintain a solid 30fps MR lock at KJFK. Now it seems to be sitting like that for the last 15 minutes. If I can make it last all the time, this is a game-changer.

737 at KJFK with overcast clouds is a pretty much worst-case scenario. If it can maintain 30fps at native resolution, this was never ever possible. Not even close. The only (barely) working options for me were OpenXR FSR at 77% + FFR Quality/Wide, or using DLSS, but the ghosting and blurry glass panels were bad, so I switched back to TAA 100% / FSR 77% + FFR. No this is holding 30 fps so far with TAA 100%. And that is at native 100% resolution in OpenXR Dev Tool. I’m starting to regain hope now. If this can be stable, this may have been a good buy…

I will keep testing and will update. I will run a few benchmarks to make sure 4090 is working properly and will share the results as well. I will also try DLSS just in case.

I’m in Canada, Toronto area. This wasn’t a problem really. FE at BestBuy was unavailable when I looked. I tormented myself with the decision about buying or not, which AIB card to get, watched the reviews and comparative benchmarks, and only tried to order around noon. Local store had it in stock, I ordered online and picked up.

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I tried DLSS, it didn’t get me over 45fps, so I staid at 30 but not as sharp, more jaggies and blurred instrumentation and number changes. All I got with DLSS is very slightly less GPU frametime.

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Wth DLSS MR off I got 40 fps, CPU-limited.

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What CPU are you using? Also DX11 or DX12? Win 10 or 11?

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One more weird discovery: I made the 4090 purchase based on being sure I’m heavily GPU-limited when running with MR (a must-have for me, I can’t stand anything below 60 fps non-MR). However now looking at OpenXR Toolkit overlay and OpenXR Developer Tool overlay together I see two very different pictures:

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Framtimes are shown as 24ms CPU / 18ms GPU in DevTool, but 12ms CPU / 17ms GPU in OpenXR Toolkit! Ouch! All my math is now blown to smithereens… Which one is correct? No idea. Maybe both and they are showing somehow some different CPU things? They are called the same, I was sure they are the same, but they are definitely not.

I dialed in OpenXR Toolkit for 100% scaling, 30% sharpening, FFR Quality/Wide, mask off, and I did a short 15 min. flight around Manhatten in Ultra clouds in 737, and it was able to hold 30 fps MR locked at all times. Never even dipping below. There were still occasional stutters, probably scenery-related, not fps-related. But the visuals were stunning. Never have I ever seen my Reverb G2 so clear and smooth (with exception of those annoying dense scenery stutters, but they were not very frequent and not regular, though it wasn’t stutter-free at all). So while I can’t measure the exact performance gain for some reason, as MR off inexplicably gives me almost the same FPS as 3080 does (if not worse), but with MR it’s a game-changer for me. I was dreaming to finally see my Reverb G2 in its full resolution glory, and it was plain impossible before now. 4090 makes it possible, it seems so far. With High textures and Ultra clouds, and they are beautiful I have to say.

On the first glance, 4090 seems to have enough overhead to comfortably keep within 30 fps MR in the most challenging scenario. So if it holds true, this is what matters to me. Though I was hoping I could see 45 fps MR and I’m not seeing that at all. But, in a sparse area and a smaller plane, I may still see it yet.

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As the title says Ryzen 9 5900X. DX11, Win10.

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Ah thanks, I missed that. I’m half asleep after staying up to snag a 4090 and then watching benchmark reviews till 3 am, lol.

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