PC upgrade for VR

[Jean-François]

I want to upgrade my PC to be able to enjoy Assetto Corsa Competizione in VR. My current specs are the following;

- GTX 1060 6gb
- i7-4790 @3.6 ghz
- 16 gb of ram
- MSI Z97 PC Mate motherboard

I'm thinking about purchasing a new GPU since VR is very demanding. My budget Is about 500$, maybe a bit more if it's necessary. I'm wondering if I will suffer bottle neck if I'm only upgrading the GPU. I think I already have the best CPU my motherboard can support. I'm looking for some advice.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Slapped]

I want to upgrade my PC to be able to enjoy Assetto Corsa Competizione in VR. My current specs are the following;

- GTX 1060 6gb
- i7-4790 @3.6 ghz
- 16 gb of ram
- MSI Z97 PC Mate motherboard

I'm thinking about purchasing a new GPU since VR is very demanding. My budget Is about 500$, maybe a bit more if it's necessary. I'm wondering if I will suffer bottle neck if I'm only upgrading the GPU. I think I already have the best CPU my motherboard can support. I'm looking for some advice.

Thanks in advance!

Forget it - the tech to run ACC well in VR simply does not exist at the moment. ACC in VR is the new Crysis.

I'm using a Core i9 9900K, 32GB RAM, and an RTX 2080 Ti, and I've not come across settings that I'm happy with in VR. It's playable, but boy am I making some nasty compromises to make it so.

Honestly the original AC, or any other driving sim with VR support is a far far better experience than ACC is in VR at the moment.

 

[thepharcyde]

@Slapped sad times. I've got a DK2 and not even bothered trying with my setup. Stick to playing VR in RF2, and even that's demanding.

 

[Terry Rock]

Forget it - the tech to run ACC well in VR simply does not exist at the moment. ACC in VR is the new Crysis.

I'm using a Core i9 9900K, 32GB RAM, and an RTX 2080 Ti, and I've not come across settings that I'm happy with in VR. It's playable, but boy am I making some nasty compromises to make it so.

Honestly the original AC, or any other driving sim with VR support is a far far better experience than ACC is in VR at the moment.

You are certainly joking with those specifications and not being able to run ACC in VR properly right?
It should 'fly' for you.
Heck! it should 'walk' into the kitchen and make you a sandwich...that's how impressive it should be at running VR.

 

[Slapped]

You are certainly joking with those specifications and not being able to run ACC in VR properly right?
It should 'fly' for you.
Heck! it should 'walk' into the kitchen and make you a sandwich...that's how impressive it should be at running VR.

I wish I were. There's a massive thread on the AC forums where other people with similar HW setups to mine are complaining about the VR implementation.

Don't get me wrong, it is possible with a lot of tweaking to get it to run smooth, and, in my case @80FPS (Rift-S), but the overall image quality and resolution takes a massive hit in doing so, and looks considerably worse than the original AC in VR.

ACC is a fantastic sim, but it's not well optimised, and is an incredible resource hog even in flat mode. This I put down to the use of the Unreal engine. I can run just about every other driving sim in VR with all graphic options maxed out with barely a problem, but with ACC i'm pretty much down to low or off on everything while running the resolution at 70%.

If you really want to run ACC in VR then IMO your minimum entry point would have to be a second hand GTX 1080 Ti, or an RTX 2080 Super, but do not expect to be blown away with the visuals.

Maybe in time as Kunos really get to grips with the Unreal engine things will improve, but this is how it stands at the moment.

 

[RobertR1]

@Slapped I have similar specs (9900k/2080ti oc'd heavily) and in the few hours I've spent in ACC, it was not an immersive experience as the visual quality had to be turned down significantly to the point where the immersion was broken.

For a slideshow, I did more or less max out a lot of settings (except resolutions scale) just to see if the game has the potential to look good in VR. It absolutely does! It looked amazing actually. However, it's completely unplayable.

I fear that the gap between where we are today vs where it needs to be for good VR performance might not be possible. Even if you could get a 3080ti tomorrow with 30% more performance, it wouldn't make much of a dent or worse just shift the bottleneck.

I mentioned this before but if @kunos puts out an optimization guide regarding which options tax which resource and at what degree, it would help a lot of us try to optimize the game on our own and share that information across to others. A good example of this being done is in Content Manager which tells you the cpu/gpu/ram percentage impact of changing those settings.

The other problem is all the ini options. It's not enough to change settings in game but then you have a host of engine and game settings littered within .ini files with no comments and left purely to experimentation.

I hope this doesn't come across as bitter or a slant. I'm just trying to vocalize ways to improve the experience for many of us VR users who are on the fence with the game.

 

[Miguel Batista]

For that budget I would go with a 2070 Super or cheap 2080 if you can grab one. But apparently it won't run ACC in VR well enough. You will get a massive quality boost on other titles though.

 

[Jean-François]

Thanks, what about the compatibility of those GPU with my CPU. Will it bootleneck in ACC? The other title I play is AC and it runs well currently but a better GPU will certainly permit better graphic setting.

 

[Slapped]

I think you'll probably be fine with that processor. It's got a good base clock and it seems to happily accept some pretty reasonable overclocking on a good air cooling setup - an overclock to 4.7GHz isn't out of the question at all.

CPUs haven't really come that far honestly (other than throwing more cores at them), certainly not in the last 5 years, and certainly nowhere near as far as GPUs have come,

Before I got my current rig I was playing ACC on a 2017 iMac (with bootcamped windows) which has a i5 7600K and it worked well - the bottleneck was the GPU (an underclocked and crappy Apple implementation of the RX 580). Your CPU outperforms mine so you should be good to go.

 

[Miguel Batista]

Thanks, what about the compatibility of those GPU with my CPU. Will it bootleneck in ACC? The other title I play is AC and it runs well currently but a better GPU will certainly permit better graphic setting.

Depends on the resolution. At 720p definitely, 1080p, depends on the game, 4k/VR? Probably not.

 

[David Turnbull]

I think you'll probably be fine with that processor. It's got a good base clock and it seems to happily accept some pretty reasonable overclocking on a good air cooling setup - an overclock to 4.7GHz isn't out of the question at all.

if its only a 4790 then its not overclockable, if its the K then it is but having owned one for a number of years I'd say 4.7ghz is on the super lucky on the silicone lottery, I was only ever able to get mine to 4.5ghz and theres plenty folk who couldnt get them any higher than the 4.4ghz it runs at in Turbo, its also a very hot cpu so keeping it cool is a challenge.

I upgraded to a 2070 gpu when they first came out with the 4790k and the cpu was a bottleneck then and that was 18 months ago, now on a 9900k and now the gpu is the bottleneck.

 

[Jean-François]

It's only a 4790 not a k. In wich resolution did you play when you experienced cpu bootleneck?

 

[GuitarTech]

ACC is just badly optimized for VR. I have an i7-9700K @ 5.0Ghz, a 1080 with max overclock, and 32Gb RAM, all on a Gigabyte Z390 Aurus Pro WiFi Mainboard. In 2D mode on my 34" 21:9 monitor it runs fine with everything maxed out. It looks stunning, but in VR it's another story. I have to turn everything so far down until it runs fluidly that the immersion factor is no longer existent. Shame And the UI in VR is clunky too, but that's another subject.
Because I can't drive anymore in pancake mode since I've been using VR, due to all sims (not just ACC), looking just awful (to me), compared to VR, the end result is that I don't use ACC at all now. I'm hoping that they'll optimize it in the future, but because it's using the UE Engine, I'm not holding my breath.
Back to rF2, that's just getting better every day