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CV1 PC New Build Advice

nabeday
Honored Guest
Hi All,

I am looking for some advice on my next PC. I have been using the DK2 for a while now on my current machine:

i3 2100 (3.10 Ghz)
8Gb DDR3
256 Samsung SSD 840
Palit GTX 970
Corsair CX 750 watt power supply

I understand that my CPU is underpowered and not using the graphics card to it's full potential, however I am still getting very enjoyable gameplay and demos with my DK2. The stutter at times does cause a bit of motion sickness, but I still am blown away with the experience.

With the upcoming release of the CV1 Rift, I am now in the market for a new PC rig and I'm thinking of going for the i7 5820k. I understand that this maybe a little overkill for gaming, but my intentions are to make this into a development rig as well. I have been doing quite a bit of research into the 5820k vs 6700k and a lot of people suggest going for the extra cores if using the Oculus. I really want to know what everyone's thoughts are on this. My plan is to purchase the overclocked bundle from scan.co.uk with a few upgrades and the following spec:

i7 5820K (Overclocked to 4.4 Ghz)
Corsair Hydro H100i GTX cooler with dual SP120L fans
Asus X99-A with USB3.1 Motherboard
32Gb DDR4
256 Samsung SSD 840 (Reuse from old machine)
Palit GTX 970 (Reuse from old machine)
Corsair CX 750 watt power supply (Reuse from old machine)

If anyone has a similar rig, what sort of performance can I expect from games like Euro Truck Simulator 2, Elite Dangerous, NewRetroArcade etc. ? Do you have a smooth VR experience without reducing the graphical settings too much?

Do you think this rig will handle the CV1 well enough? I was thinking of getting two GTX 970's on SLI, but having read that SLI VR support is still in the earlier stages I'm unsure about investing in another card at the moment.

I tend to have my hardware for a long time so don't expect to upgrade anything besides the graphics card and hard drive for at least 3 or 4 years.

Thanks in advance for your help.
9 REPLIES 9

Anonymous
Not applicable
Have ordered the parts for a new machine myself just yesterday. I've gone for the 6700K option instead because it worked out cheaper:

Intel i7 6700K
Asus Maximus VIII Ranger motherboard
16GB Kingston HyperX Fury Black DDR4-2133 RAM (2 x 8GB)
In Win GR One Full Tower case
EVGA 850W 80+ Gold G2 Power Supply
Lite-On iHAS124-14 DVD Writer

Am reusing my drives from my current machine and will use the iGPU (or my current 2GB 4870 if the iGPU can't produce the goods) until I can afford to get either a 980 Ti, Radeon Fury X or Pascal GPU when NVidia finally get off their arses and release the bloomin thing.

Both of our machines (or at least yours now and mine when I sort out a decent GPU!) should run things as smooth as silk because they're a couple of steps above the recommended specs for Oculus Rift.

nabeday
Honored Guest
"snowdog" wrote:
Have ordered the parts for a new machine myself just yesterday. I've gone for the 6700K option instead because it worked out cheaper:

Intel i7 6700K
Asus Maximus VIII Ranger motherboard
16GB Kingston HyperX Fury Black DDR4-2133 RAM (2 x 8GB)
In Win GR One Full Tower case
EVGA 850W 80+ Gold G2 Power Supply
Lite-On iHAS124-14 DVD Writer

Am reusing my drives from my current machine and will use the iGPU (or my current 2GB 4870 if the iGPU can't produce the goods) until I can afford to get either a 980 Ti, Radeon Fury X or Pascal GPU when NVidia finally get off their arses and release the bloomin thing.

Both of our machines (or at least yours now and mine when I sort out a decent GPU!) should run things as smooth as silk because they're a couple of steps above the recommended specs for Oculus Rift.


Thanks for the feedback. The spec you have went for is another option open to me. I just can't make up my mind between the 2 processors. The worrying thing is the GPU. A GTX 970 is the minimum supported card for the CV1. A GTX 980ti will perform so much better, but at least with a good rig, I can upgrade when required. I might also try overclocking the GPU as it is currently running at stock speeds. Not much point in overclocking until I remove the CPU bottleneck though.

cybereality
Grand Champion
The CPU is important too. I'm not sure an i3 would cut it. But your GPUs look good.
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV

Anonymous
Not applicable
I wouldn't worry about the GPU too much mate, the 970 will be fine until you have the cash to buy a new one. As you already have a 970 I'd personally wait for Pascal next year.

The 5820K will comfortably outperform the 6700K due to the extra cores and threads but it came down to finances for me in the end. I managed to get everything for mine for just over 700 quid, although I'm going to be replacing my Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo cooler with a Noctua NH-D15 before I start overclocking the CPU.

Am planning on getting a Pascal/980 Ti/Fury X in May next year and then Oculus Rift or Vive around this time next year.

LogicalIncremen
Honored Guest
This is something I'm really curious to figure out once and for all. I hope someone on the forum can help.

Just looking at the numbers, the raw graphical power you need to display game images on a CV1 screen is enormous. Taking into account the 1.4x 'eye buffer' on the 2160x1200 resolution, you get a true rendering resolution of 3024x1680 for a VR headset. Trying to target 90 FPS/Hz at 3024x1680 requires roughly 90% as much graphical power as rendering 4K (3840x2160) at 60 FPS/Hz. As Oculus have said themselves, it's also roughly 3 times the graphical power required to display 1080p at 60 FPS/Hz.

As everyone probably knows, rendering modern games at 60 FPS with 4K resolution is incredibly difficult to do. Looking at a modern PC game like Fallout 4, even a GTX 980 Ti averages only 46 FPS at 4K on Ultra settings. That would directly translate into about 77 FPS on an Oculus. A GTX 970 (the recommended GPU for Oculus) averages 33 FPS in Fallout 4 at 4K. That's about 55 FPS on an Oculus, directly translated.

If Fallout 4 were to have launched with VR support, you would need a much more powerful GPU than a GTX 970 in order to play it at 90 FPS on the Oculus. In fact, you'd probably need a multi-GPU system, but from my understanding, multi-GPU support for VR is still under development.

My concern is that many gamers are going to be building PCs with GTX 970s on the promise that it will run games at 90 FPS. But based on the math, many new AAA games will need much more power than a GTX 970 to run at high framerates.

I've brought these concerns up elsewhere, and some people have told me that games designed specifically for Oculus will indeed run at 90 FPS on a GTX 970 because that's the hardware that the developers are targeting. I hope they are right, but I'm still skeptical. You cannot escape the fact that you're trying to pump out 457 million pixels per second (3024x1680x90). Based on my knowledge, a GTX 970 simply cannot perform at that level unless the game is only moderately intensive on graphics. You sacrifice looks, or you sacrifice framerates.

A flagship VR game like EVE Valkyrie looks just as visually impressive as Fallout 4, if not more so. I'm going to be extremely impressed if the developers are able to achieve 90 FPS with a GTX 970 without sacrificing the visual quality of the game. I really, really hope they're able to. But I'm going to remain skeptical until I see it happen.

Can someone shed light on this concern? Am I completely off-base, or will the first generation of games designed specifically for Oculus just have to look very simple graphically compared to today's modern PC games?
Content Manager for logicalincrements.com

cybereality
Grand Champion
Developers will be required to optimize their game to hit 90Hz, in stereo, and at the necessary resolution. It won't be that you take an existing AAA game and expect it to run in VR without any sort of optimization.
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV

shadowfrogger
Heroic Explorer
Fallout 4 is a badly optimised game running on a old engine, it isn't the best case study for VR. As cyber says, any game on the oculus store has to run on a 970 perfectly but doesn't need to run at the highest graphical settings. With the lower resolution per eye, you can have the textures turned down too. Since there is a target platform, devs know how to extract the best performance/looks for made for VR games. This fine tuning will be for VR completly in mind which can save a lot of fps. altering non VR games will come at a performance cost.

Regarding a fallout VR type game, if fallout was made with VR from base up, cuts would have to be made but you could still get a pretty decent looking fallout game running on a 970 I think.
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carmenx
Honored Guest
your GPUs look good. I don't understand... Maybe this is really because Fallout 4 is a badly optimised game...
Regards.
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Gamyr
Explorer
Is the Maximus VIII Ranger the same as a Maximus VIII Hero, and if not, will the Hero be enough to use the Rift? :?: