Although Intel’s A770 drivers installed easily and we set up our Valve Index, SteamVR refused to recognize the Index and Intel confirmed lack of Arc driver support. Fortunately, we were able to set up a Reverb G2, a WMR (Windows Mixed Reality) headset, and charted A770 performance versus the RTX 3060 using FCAT VR.

The Reverb G2 is a much more demanding headset than the Valve Index. We do not recommend using entry level VR cards like the A770 or RTX 3060 to drive it any more than we would for 4K pancake gaming, but the G2 is our only WMR headset. Fortunately, despite many crashes to desktop, we were able to benchmark six VR games on generally the lowest settings using FCAT VR.

VR Games & Settings

We benchmark using FCAT VR on Windows 11 Pro Edition 2H22 with Intel’s Core i9-13900KF, and 32GB of T-Force Delta RGB 6400MHz CL40 DDR5 2x16GB memory on an ASUS Prime-A Wi-Fi Z790 motherboard with fast SSD storage. All VR games and benchmarks are patched to their latest versions, and we use Intel’s most recent drivers.

For this review, we benchmarked the Reverb G2 using FCAT VR and allowed the default SteamVR 100% render resolution (3168×3096). It uses a factor of ~1.4X (the native resolution is 2160×2160) to compensate for lens distortion and to increase clarity. We are going to compare the performance of the A770 with the RTX 3060, generally at each game’s in-game lowest VR settings.

Here are the six VR games we tested.

VR Games

• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Moss: Book II
• Project CARS 2
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

IMPORTANT: BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” – measuring only one important performance metric – which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS, faster is better.

In addition, FCAT VR does not distinguish between dropped and synthesized frames using the G2.

Let’s individually look at our 6 VR games’ performance using FCAT VR.

First up, Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous (ED)

Elite Dangerous is a popular space sim built using the COBRA engine. It is hard to find a repeatable benchmark outside of the training missions.

A player will probably spend a lot of time piloting his space cruiser while completing a multitude of tasks as well as visiting space stations and orbiting a multitude of different planets. Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a dedicated following of players.

We picked the Lowest settings but we left the Field of View on its maximum.

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR:

The A770 managed 69.73 unconstrained FPS with 3301 (40%) synthesized or dropped frames but no Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivered 77.41 unconstrained FPS with 4667 (50%) synthesized or dropped frames and no Warp misses.

Although the A770 delivers only ~10% less unconstrained frames per second, the Elite Dangerous VR experience is much better using the RX 3060. The A770 framerate delivery is uneven leading to visible stutters which break immersion.

Let’s look at F1 2022.

F1 2022

Codemasters has captured the entire Formula 1 2021 season racing in F1 2022, and the VR immersion is good. The graphics are customizeable and solid, handling and physics are good, the AI is acceptable, the scenery is outstanding, and the experience ticks many of the necessary boxes for a racing sim.

Here is the frametime plot for F1 2022.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The A770 managed 38.58 unconstrained FPS with 5935 (61%) synthesized or dropped frames but no Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivered 59.13 unconstrained FPS with 6202 (54%) synthesized or dropped frames and no reported Warp misses.

The A770 falls way behind the RX 3060 in raw performance. The A770 framerate delivery is fairly even due to Motion Smoothing, but the artifacting is very annoying and there are immersion breaking stutters.

Stay tuned. Rodrigo has two not-to-be-missed in-depth major video card reviews coming shortly.

A personal note from BTR’s now retired E-I-C, Mark Poppin

After a great 15 years since ABT and then BTR were established, I am retiring from my duties as Editor-in-Chief and lead reviewer as of today, January 1, 2023. BTR’s has been acquired by JPR (Jon Peddie Research) splitting ownership with Mario who is now BTR’s manager, and Rodrigo is now the lead reviewer. I’ll continue to contribute some VR reviews regularly.

Thanks to all of our loyal readers who turn to BTR for the best reviews – It will get even better!

Happy New Year & Happy Gaming!

The $999 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX arrived at BTR for evaluation last week from PowerColor. We have been comparing it against Nvidia’s new $1199 RTX 4080 Founders Edition (FE) and $1599 RTX 4090 FE plus five additional top cards. We focus on raw performance by benchmarking 42 PC and 10 VR games, GPGPU, workstation, SPEC, and synthetic benchmarks.

We will also compare the performance of these three new competing cards with the RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT reference editions and their competitors, the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3080 FE.

Features & Specifications

Although launched at reference $999 XTX pricing, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has its factory Game Clock set 30MHz higher than the reference version’s 2300MHz. According to PowerColor specifications, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX can boost its Game Clock to 2330MHz (2270MHz Silent) with the OC BIOS. The Game Clock is the expected GPU clock while running average high-load gaming scenarios with a regular non-overclocked total graphics usage situation. However, the GPU Boost Clock can reach as high as 2525MHz – 25MHz higher than reference – by using the OC BIOS and we will test this.

Here are the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX features.

Additional Information from PowerColor

• The Hellhound has 2 modes, OC and Silent with a BIOS switch on the side of the card. Even on performance mode it’s said to be considerably quieter than reference board and the silent mode is indeed very quiet.
• The 14 layer high TG PCB board has 12+3+2+2+1 Phase VRM design. Hellhounds are over-spec’d in order to deliver the best stability and overclocking headroom. By having high quality VRMs, it will run cooler and last longer.
• DrMos and high-polymer Caps are used without compromise.
• The cooler features three 9-blade ball bearing fans with 8 heat pipes (8X6?) across a high density heatsink with a copper base. The PCB is shorter than the cooler.
• It uses mute fan technology and the fans stop under 60C.
• The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX includes card stands for supporting it so as to not put extra strain on the PCIe slot.

The RX 7900 XTX is AMD’s brand new RDNA 3 flagship card, and the Hellhound represents one of the best choices for a mildly factory overclocked $999 card by virtue of its high-quality components and carefully selected GPUs coupled with good support and great warranty service.

The Test Bed

We benchmark using FCAT VR and FrameView on Windows 11 Pro Edition 2H22 with Intel’s Core i9-13900KF, and 32GB of T-Force Delta RGB 6400MHz CL40 DDR5 2x16GB memory on an ASUS Prime-A Wi-Fi Z790 motherboard with fast SSD storage. All games and benchmarks are patched to their latest versions, and we use recent drivers.

First, let’s take a closer look at the new PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX.

A Closer Look at the PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX

Although the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX advertises itself as a premium 24GB card which features ray tracing, Radeon Boost, and Anti-Lag, the cover of the box uses almost no text in favor of stylized imagery.

The back of the box touts key features which include ray tracing, Anti-Lag, DisplayPort 2.1, RDNA 3, FidelityFX, Infinity Cache, streaming aids, and Boost, as well as states its 800W power and system requirements. There is no mention of VR Ready Premium. Also highlighted are PowerColor’s custom cooling solution, Dual-BIOSes, fan improvements, and output LEDs. The default LED color is an eye-pleasing amethyst.

We open the box and note there are parts for a card stand.

The complete package contents except for the anti-static bag are pictured above together with the card holder parts. Above the stand is fully assembled. Although the Hellhound is relatively heavy, it is not 4090-heavy, and we didn’t feel a need for it.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a large tri-fan card in a three slot design which is quite handsome with PowerColor’s neutral colors and even more striking with the LED on.

Turning it over we see a sturdy backplate featuring the Hellhound logo which also lights up with amethyst being the default color.

Looking at either long edge, we see the entire PCB is covered by heatpipes and heatsink fins. Additional power is provided by the PSU’s 2 x 8-pin Molex cables to the card connectors. There is also a switch to choose between the default overclock (OC) BIOS and the Silent BIOS. We didn’t bother using the Silent BIOS as the card is really quiet anyway, but it is good to have in case a flash goes bad.

The card should perhaps be locked down with two thumbscrews instead of one because it is heavy or the stand can be used.

The Hellhound’s IO panel connectors include 3 DisplayPorts and 1 HDMI connection.

Below is the other end which is very plain.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX looks great inside a case.

The specifications look good and the card itself looks solid. Now let’s check out its performance after we look over our test configuration and more on the next page.

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-13900KF (HyperThreading and Turbo boost at stock settings)
• ASUS Prime-A Z790 LGA1700 motherboard (Intel Z790 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 5.0, DDR5)
• T-Force Delta RGB PC5-51200 6400MHz DDR5 CL40 2x16GB kit, supplied by TeamGroup
• Valve Index, 90Hz / 100% SteamVR Render Resolution
• Hellhound RX 7900 XTX, 24GB, factory clocks, supplied by PowerColor
• RTX 4080 16GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• RTX 4090 24 GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• Gigabyte RX 6900 XT GAMING OC, 16GB, factory clocks
• RX 6800 XT Reference 16GB, factory clocks, supplied by AMD
• RTX 3080 Ti 12GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• RTX 3080 10 GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• 2 x 2TB T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440 (5,000/4,400MB/s) PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSDs (one for AMD/one for Nvidia)
• T-Force M200 4TB USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C external SSD (2,000x2000B/s), supplied by TeamGroup
• Super Flower LedEx, 1200W Platinum 80+ power supply unit
• MSI MAG Series CORELIQUID 360R (AIO) 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Corsair 5000D ATX mid-tower (plus 1 x 140mm fan & 2 x 120mm Noctua fans)
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz
• LG C1 48″ 4K OLED HDR 120Hz display

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 526.98 drivers for the RTX 4090/4080 and 527.27 for the RTX 3080/3080 Ti. Adrenalin 22.11.2 for the RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT, and press drivers for the RTX 7900 XTX.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the Nvidia control panel.
• High Quality textures, all optimizations off in the Adrenalin control panel
• VSync is off in the control panel and disabled for each game
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are Ultra Preset or highest with 16xAF always applied – no upscaling is used
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• VR charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom; higher is better)
• Windows 11 Pro edition; 22H2 recent clean install for GeForce and Radeon cards using separate but identical NVMe SSDs.
• Latest DirectX
• SteamVR latest beta

Games

Vulkan

• Sniper Elite
• DOOM Eternal
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow Six: Siege

DX12

• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Spiderman: Remastered
• F1 2022
• Ghostwire: Tokyo
• Elden Ring
• God of War
• Dying Light 2
• Forza Horizon 5
• Call of Duty: Vanguard
• Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
• Far Cry 6
• DEATHLOOP
• Chernobylite
• Resident Evil Village
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Hitman 3
• Godfall
• DiRT 5
• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Watch Dogs: Legions
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• Borderlands 3
• Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

DX11

• Overwatch 2
• Total War: Warhammer III
• Days Gone
• Crysis Remastered
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Grand Theft Auto V

VR Games

• Assetto Corsa: Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Kayak Mirage
• Moss: Book II
• No Man’s Sky
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Sniper Elite
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

Synthetic

• Time Spy & Time Spy Extreme (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• VRMark Blue Room
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 3.3.0 benchmark
• Geekbench
• Sandra 2020 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperfect 2020
• FCAT VR benching tool
• OpenVR Benchmark tool

Adrenalin Control Panel settings

Here are the Adrenalin Control Panel settings.

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Overclocking, temperatures and noise

We spent little time overclocking the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX for this review as we encountered some unexpected results that require further investigation. The card is very quiet and its fans never spin up even under a heavy load so as to be irritating or even noticeable. It’s quieter than the Gigabyte 6900 XT or the RTX 3080 Ti.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is factory clocked 30MHz higher than the reference version at 2330MHz using the OC BIOS. According to its specifications, the Hellhound boost can clock up to 2565MHz out of the box. From our benching, we generally see it boosting even higher and it generally settles in above 2750MHz with peaks above 2780MHz.

The Hellhound temperatures stay in the low to mid-60s C with the fans quietly running well below 50% even using the OC BIOS under a full gaming load. It is an exceptionally well-cooled and quiet card.

Let’s head to the performance charts to compare the performance of the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX with six other cards.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX vs. the RTX 4080 FE and 5 other cards benchmarked with 42 games

Here are the performance results of 42 games and 3 synthetic tests. The highest settings are used and are listed on the charts. The benches were run at 2560×1440 and 3840×2160. Click on each chart to open in a pop-up for best viewing. Gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font which represent a game’s average 1% lows (99th percentiles).

The first set of charts show the seven main competing cards. Column two represents the $999 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX performance in between the $1599 RTX 4090 FE in column one and the RTX 4080 FE, its $1199 primary competitor, in the third column. The RTX 3080 Ti results are in the fourth column next to Gigabyte RX 6900 XT OC version performance results in the fifth column, followed up by the RTX 3080 in the sixth and the RX 6800 XT in the seventh column.

“Wins” between the RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4080 are denoted by yellow text. If there is a tie, both values are in yellow.

Playing with the RX 7900 XTX, Elden Ring locked up the PC even after verifying files and reinstalling Adrenaline drivers and it appears a driver issue prevented ray traced Guardians of the Galaxy running on the RX 6800 XT.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 are cards that are primarily suited for 4K and high-FPS 1440P gaming and they stand out from the other four cards. The RX 7900 XTX trades blows with the RTX 4080 in rasterized games – they are equivalent cards if ray tracing is not considered.

Although RX 7900 XTX ray tracing has greatly improved over the RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT, it now appears to perform similarly to the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti but far behind the RTX 4080. FSR 2.0, although still not on the same image quality level as Nvidia’s DLSS 2, will almost double framerates for a very minor IQ hit and will make most of the games quite playable at Ultra/4K in this 52 game benching suite. Gamers who are not so impressed with ray tracing or who are not picky about image quality perfection may well prefer to save $200 on a $1000 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX over buying a $1200 RTX 4080.

Let’s look at synthetic benches.

Synthetic benches

We hold synthetic benches to be meaningless for predicting real world gaming performance versus competing cards with different architectures although they have other practical uses like overclocking and ranking. The RX 7900 XTX performs better in the synthetic tests than in gaming.

Let’s see how the Hellhound performs in ten popular VR (Virtual Reality) games next.

10 VR Games

For this review, we benchmarked the Valve Index using FCAT VR and set the SteamVR render resolution to 100% (2016×2240) which uses a factor of 1.4X (the native resolution is 1440×1600) to compensate for lens distortion and to increase clarity. We are going to compare the performance of the RX 7900 XTX with the RX 4080 and versus the RX 4090 at each game’s Ultra/Highest settings.

Unfortunately, FCAT VR still doesn’t work with MS Flight Simulator 2020 or with Star Wars Squadrons. Here are the ten VR games we tested.

VR Games

• Assetto Corsa: Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Kayak Mirage
• Moss: Book II
• No Man’s Sky
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Sniper Elite
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

Synthetic

• Time Spy & Time Spy Extreme (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• VRMark Blue Room

IMPORTANT: BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS, measuring just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our 10 sim-heavy VR games’ performance using FCAT VR.

First up, Assetto Corsa: Competizione.

Assetto Corsa: Competizione (ACC)

BTR’s sim/racing editor, Sean Kaldahl created the replay benchmark run that we use for both the pancake game and the VR game. It is run at night with 20 cars, lots of geometry, and the lighting effects of the headlights, tail lights, and everything around the track looks spectacular.

Just like with Project CARS, you can save a replay after a race. Fortunately, the CPU usage is the same between a race and its replay so it is a reasonably accurate benchmark using the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. iRacing may be more accurate or realistic, but Assetto Corsa: Competizione has some appeal because it feels more real than many other racing sims. It delivers the sensation of handling a highly-tuned racing machine driven to its edge.

Here are the ACC FCAT VR frametimes using VR Ultra using the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX, the RTX 4080 FE, and the RTX 4090 FE.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 7900 XTX managed 85.77 unconstrained FPS with 6339 (50%) synthesized frames with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 118.42 unconstrained FPS with 207 (2%) synthesized frames with 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 164.03 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic frame but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The ACC racing experience is best with the RTX 4090 although the RTX 4080 delivers a nearly constant 90 FPS on the Epic VR preset unlike the RX 7900 XTX which requires one-half of its frames to be synthesized.

Next, we check out Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous (ED)

Elite Dangerous is a popular space sim built using the COBRA engine. It is hard to find a repeatable benchmark outside of the training missions.

A player will probably spend a lot of time piloting his space cruiser while completing a multitude of tasks as well as visiting space stations and orbiting a multitude of different planets. Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a dedicated following of players.

We picked the Ultra Preset and we set the Field of View to its maximum.

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 7900 XTX managed 185.21 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 230.98 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthesized frame and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 brings 296.16 unconstrained FPS together with 2 synthetic frames but with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses.

Although the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has the lowest performance, the experience playing Elite Dangerous at Ultra settings is not perceptibly different on any tested video card. However, the RTX 4090 has a lot more performance headroom to increase the render resolution or to use a higher resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2.

Let’s look at our newest VR sim, F1 2022.

F1 2022

Codemasters has captured the entire Formula 1 2021 season racing in F1 2022, and the VR immersion is good. The graphics are customizeable and solid, handling and physics are good, the AI is acceptable, the scenery is outstanding, and the experience ticks many of the necessary boxes for a racing sim.

Here is the frametime plot for F1 2022.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 156.57 unconstrained FPS with 6 synthesized but no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 achieved 200.24 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 delivered 254.72 unconstrained FPS together with 3 synthetic frames plus with 3 dropped frames and 3 Warp misses.

The experience playing F1 2022 using the Ultra preset is not very different on any of these video cards but the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 have considerably more performance headroom than the RX 7900 XTX to use 120Hz/144Hz or to use a higher resolution headset.

Kayak VR: Mirage

The outstanding near-photorealistic visual fidelity really sets Kayak VR: Mirage apart from other simulators. It boasts a wide range of locales with day/night/sunset options offering tropical, icy, desert, and even stormy scenarios with trips to Costa Rica, Antarctica, Norway, and Australia and occasional interactions with wildlife. It can be played as a relaxing sim or as a strenuous workout with competitive time trials which offer asynchronous multiplayer and ranking on global leaderboards.

We benchmark at 100% resolution with the highest “Cinematic” in-game settings but do not use DLSS or FSR.

Here is the frametime plot for Kayak VR: Mirage.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 198.98 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 257.16 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthesized and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 got 329.35 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic frame and 1 dropped frame plus 1 Warp miss.

Kayak VR: Mirage looks fantastic at 100% resolution with maximum settings and would be well-suited for play on the Reverb G2 with any of our test cards.

Next, we look at Moss: Book II.

Moss: Book II

Moss: Book II is an amazing VR experience with much better graphics than the original game. It’s a 3rd person puzzle adventure game played seated that offers a direct physical interaction between you (the Reader) and your avatar, Quill, a mouse that bring real depth to the story. Extreme attention has been paid to the tiniest details with overall great art composition and outstanding lighting that make this game a must-play for gamers of all ages.

Moss II boasts very good visuals and we use the in-game highest settings.

Here are the frametimes plots of our four cards.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 189.29 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 308.44 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 436.34 unconstrained FPS no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

Unfortunately, the experience playing Moss II on the Valve Index using the RX 7900 XTX is marred by visual issues including artifacting and shimmering.

Next, we will check out another demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky (NMS)

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

Here is the No Man’s Sky frametime plot. We set the settings to Maximum which is a step over Ultra including setting the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgrading to FXAA. We did not use any upscaling method.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs.

The RX 7900 XTX brought 108.17 unconstrained FPS with 3536 (50%) synthesized frames but no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 159.10 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthesized frames but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 achieved 201.96 unconstrained FPS together with 17 synthetic frames but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

RX 7900 XTX gamers may want to lower some individual settings to remain above 90 FPS. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 have enough performance headroom to increase the refresh rate, render resolution, or to perhaps use a higher resolution headset.

Let’s continue with another VR game, Project CARS 2, that we still like better than its successor even though it is no longer available for online play.

Project CARS 2 (PC2)

There is still a sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings.

We used maximum settings including for Motion Blur but picked SMAA Ultra instead of MSAA.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 194.77 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized nor dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 got 200.88 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames nor dropped frames and no Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 achieved 253.50 unconstrained FPS together with 3 synthetic frames plus 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 using maximum settings is similar for all three video cards.

Next we will check out a classic VR game, Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked vanilla Skyrim using its highest settings plus we increased the in-game Supersample option to maximum.

Here are the frametime results.

Here are the details of our comparative runs as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 7900 XTX provided 218.2 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 achieved 239.08 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthetic frames plus 2 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 delivered 337.76 unconstrained FPS together with 2 synthetic frame and with 2 dropped frames plus 1 Warp miss.

All cards deliver an identical vanilla Skyrim VR experience with a ton of extra performance headroom to add mods and, in addition, to raise the render resolution using the two faster cards.

Next we check out Sniper Elite VR.

Sniper Elite VR

Sniper Elite VR’s visuals are decent with good texture work that is well-realized. The building architecture and panoramas look good, explosions are convincing and the weapons convey a sense of weight, although not achieving realism. It is primarily an arcade style sniping game featuring its signature X-Ray kill cam, but it offers multiple ways to achieve goals including with explosives and by using three other main weapon choices besides your rifle.

We benchmarked using the Highest settings.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details:

The RX 6900 XT delivered 197.98 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 223.33 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 brought 318.03 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

All three cards deliver a similar playing experience on High with the RTX cards offering more performance headroom. We recommend that any performance headroom be used for increasing the SteamVR render resolution.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 10 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are very good and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its High preset and we left the Pixel Density at 100%. Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 7900 XTX delivered 198.93 unconstrained FPS with no synthetic nor dropped frames or Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 got 260.94 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic frames and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 366.41 unconstrained FPS together with 6 synthetic frames and with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses.

The RX 7900 XTX experience was marred by artifacting and shimmering.

Let’s check out synthetic VR tests and unconstrained framerates.

Unconstrained Framerates & Synthetic VR Benchmarks

The following chart summarizes the overall Unconstrained Framerates (the performance headroom) of our three cards using our 10 VR test games. In addition, we added recent RTX 3080 Ti and 6900 XT results for comparison. The preset is listed on the chart and higher is better. In addition, we present three synthetic VR benchmarks.

Although synthetic VR benches (except for OpenVR benchmark) predicted good VR performance, we were disappointed with our 7900 XTX VR experience, unlike with pancake games. In at least two games, we experienced distracting visual artifacting and texture shimmering. The 7900 series may benefit from some attention to VR from the Radeon driver team as in many cases it even falls behind the RX 6900 XT.

At AMD’s press event in Las Vegas, the presenters noted that AMD drivers continue to improve for the entire life of the architecture – generally with an up to 10% performance gain – often compared to “fine wine” aging well. However, for VR enthusiasts today, the RX 7900 XTX is disappointing and it performs well behind the RTX 4080 not logging a single performance win.

We next look at creative, pro, GPGPU, and workstation apps.

Creative, Pro & Workstation Apps

Let’s look at non-gaming applications next to see if the RX 7900 XTX is a good upgrade from the other video cards that we tested starting with Blender.

Blender 3.3.0 Benchmark

Blender is a very popular open source 3D content creation suite. It supports every aspect of 3D development with a complete range of tools for professional 3D creation.

We benchmarked three Blender 3.3.0 benchmarks which measure GPU performance by timing how long it takes to render production files. We tested seven of our comparison cards using CUDA, Optix, and OpenCL.

For the following chart, higher is better as the benchmark renders a scene multiple times and gives the results in samples per minute.

The RX 7900 XTX sits well ahead of the RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT but well behind the GeForce cards.

Next, we move on to AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks.

AIDA64 v6.80

AIDA64 is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. Its GPGPU benchmarks measure performance and give scores to compare against other popular video cards.

AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are well-optimized for every popular AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and VIA processor by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s full version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days. CPU results are also shown for comparison with both the RTX 3070 and GTX 2080 Ti GPGPU benchmarks.

Here are the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX AIDA64 GPGPU results compared with an overclocked i9-13900KF.

Here is the chart summary of the AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks with seven of our competing cards side-by-side.

The RX 7900 XTX is a fast GPGPU card and it compares favorably with the competing cards being weaker in some areas and stronger in others. So let’s look at Sandra 2020 next.

SiSoft Sandra 2020

To see where the CPU, GPU, and motherboard performance results differ, there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2020. SiSoftware SANDRA (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a excellent information & diagnostic utility in a complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software, and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking.

There are several versions of Sandra, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. Sandra 2020 R10 is the latest version, and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. Sandra 2020 features continuous multiple monthly incremental improvements over earlier versions of Sandra. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC while giving recommendations for improvement.

We ran Sandra’s intensive GPGPU benchmarks and charted the results summarizing them.

In Sandra GPGPU benchmarks, since the architectures are different, each card exhibits different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses. However, we see some very solid solid improvement of the RX 7900 XTX over the RX 6900 XT and the RX 6800 XT.

SPECworkstation3 (3.0.4) Benchmarks

All the SPECworkstation3 benchmarks are based on professional applications, most of which are in the CAD/CAM or media and entertainment fields. All of these benchmarks are free except for vendors of computer-related products and/or services.

The most comprehensive workstation benchmark is SPECworkstation3. It’s a free-standing benchmark which does not require ancillary software. It measures GPU, CPU, storage and all other major aspects of workstation performance based on actual applications and representative workloads. We only tested the GPU-related workstation performance as checked in the image above.

Here are our SPECworkstation 3.0.4 raw scores for the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX. RTX 4080 raw scores are displayed below the XTX results for a detailed performance comparison.

Here are our RTX 4080 SPECworkstation 3.1 raw scores:

Here are the Hellhound XTX SPECworkstation3 results summarized in a chart along with six competing cards. Higher is better.

Using SPEC benchmarks, since the architectures are different, the cards each exhibit different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses.

SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Benches

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a new 2020 version of its SPECviewperf benchmark recently that features updated viewsets, new models, support for both 2K and 4K display resolutions, and improved set-up and results management.

We benchmarked at 4K and here are the summary results for the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX.

Here are SPECviewperf 2020 Hellhound RX 7900 XTX benchmarks summarized in a chart together with six other cards.

Again we see different architectures with different strengths and weaknesses. After seeing these benches, some creative users may upgrade their existing systems with a new card based on the performance increases and the associated increases in productivity that they require.

The question to buy a new video card should be based on the workflow and requirements of each user as well as their budget. Time is money depending on how these apps are used. However, the target demographic for the reference and Hellhound RX 7900 XTXs are primarily gaming for gamers.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

The Conclusion

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX improves significantly over the last generation RX 6900 XT, easily exceeds RX 6800 XT performance, and it trades blows with the $200 more expensive RTX 4080 FE in rasterized games although overall it is slightly slower using our 42-game benching suite. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX beats all of the last generation cards including the RTX 3080 Ti although it still struggles with ray traced games compared with RTX cards.

For Radeon gamers, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a good alternative to GeForce Ada Lovelace cards for the vast majority of modern PC games that use rasterization. The RX 7900 XTX offers 24GB of GDDR6 to the 16GB of GDDR6X that the RTX 4080s are equipped with, but that 8GB of vRAM shouldn’t make any practical difference to game performance in the near future.

At its suggested price of $999, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX costs about $200 less than the RTX 4080 FE and offers a good value for Radeon gamers. Unlike with the RTX 4080 which increased from $700 for the RTX 3080 to $1200, the RX 7900 XTX is priced the same $999 as AMD’s last generation RX 6900 XT. For Radeon buyers, what makes the Hellhound XTX particularly attractive is that there is no price premium for this mildly overclocked PowerColor card.

The only real issue that we see with Radeon 7000 series cards is that AMD’s FSR solution is still inferior to Nvidia’s DLSS AI upscaling that delivers similar performance but with better image quality. On the flip side, there are still relatively few ray traced games released every year in comparison to thousands of rasterized games where the RTX 7900 XTX trades blows with the much more expensive RTX 4080.

One major issue although affecting relatively few gamers is poor VR RX 7900 XTX performance compared with the RTX 4080. It’s going to need some attention from AMD’s driver team before we can recommend the RX 7900 XTX for the best VR gaming.

We recommend the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX as a great choice out of multiple good choices, especially for any AMD PC gamer looking for good looks with LED lighting, an exceptional cooler, great performance for 2560×1440 or 4K, PowerColor’s excellent support, and overall better value compared with the slower RX 7900 XTX reference version.

Let’s sum it up:

Hellhound RX 7900 XTX Pros

• The PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is much faster than the last generation RX 6900 XT by virtue of new RDNA 3 architecture. It trades blows in the majority of rasterized games with the RTX 4080 FE for significantly less money ($200 less)
• The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has excellent cooling with very little noise and has a very good power delivery and a 3-fan custom cooling design that is very quiet when overclocked even using the OC mode
• Dual-BIOS give the user a choice of quiet with less overclocking, or a bit louder with more power-unlimited and higher overclocks
• FidelityFX 2.0 allows for upscaling and improved sharpness with almost no performance penalty, and there is a low latency mode for competitive gamers
• LED lighting and a neutral color allow the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX to fit into any color scheme
• 24GB vRAM compared with 16GB for the RTX 4080

Hellhound XTX Cons

• Cost. It’s still very expensive at $999
• VR performance is subpar
• Weaker ray tracing performance than the RTX 4080

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a good Radeon card choice for those who game at 2560×1440 or at 4K and want the best that AMD has to offer. It represents a good gaming alternative to the RTX 4080 albeit with weaker ray tracing performance. It is offered especially for those who prefer AMD cards and FreeSync2 enabled displays which are generally less expensive than Gsync displays. And if a gamer is looking for something extra above the reference version, the PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a very well-made and good-looking card that will overclock better.

We are giving the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX BTR’s Recommended Award.

The Verdict:

• PowerColor’s Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a solidly-built handsome card with higher clocks out of the box than the same-priced reference version. It trades blows with the RTX 4080 in rasterized games. I t is a kick ass RX 7900 XTX.

Stay tuned, there is much more coming from BTR. We will soon return to VR with a mega performance evaluation to test the role of the CPU for VR performance. And we’ll retest the RX 7900 XTX using higher resolution headsets after AMD’s driver team has a chance to address it’s VR issues. We also plan to test Intel ARC video cards in VR.

Happy Gaming!

BTR received a $1199 RTX 4080 Founders Edition (FE) from Nvidia but are late because we got a bad case of COVID-19 after the AMD Event in Las Vegas over two weeks ago. This Part 1 RTX 4080 review is a 10-VR game performance analysis versus the RTX 3080 Ti, the RTX 4090, and the RX 6900 XT using the Valve Index. Although the RTX 4080 is not a workstation card, we have included workstation SPEC benches and selected popular creative and synthetic apps. Next week, Part 2 will feature the performance of more than 40 games and we will include DLSS 3.0 results.

We will focus on raw VR performance to consider whether the new RTX 4080 Founders Edition at $1199 delivers a good value as a compelling upgrade from the last generation Ampere RTX 3080 Ti which also launched at $1199. We will also compare performance with Nvidia’s current flagship, the $1599 RTX 4090, and the former AMD flagship, the RX 6900 XT, which launched at $999. In addition to gaming, VR, and SPECworkstation3 GPU results, we have added creative results using Geekbench, the Blender 3.3.0 benchmark, and complete Sandra 2020 and AIDA64 GPGPU benchmark results plus some pro applications including Blender rendering and OTOY OctaneRender.

We benchmark using FCAT VR and Windows 11 Pro Edition 2H22 with Intel’s Core i9-13900K that we just upgraded from i9-12900K, and 32GB of T-FORCE DELTA RGB 6400MHz CL40 DDR5 2x16GB memory on an ASUS Prime-A Wi-Fi Z790 motherboard. All games and benchmarks are patched to their latest versions, and we use GeForce Game Ready 526.98 drivers for GeForce cards and Adrenalin 22.11.1 for the RX 6900 XT.

Let’s first take a quick look at the RTX 4080 Founders Edition before we go to the test configuration

The RTX 4080 FE

The RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 are externally physically identical twin cards. Refer to the RTX 4090 unboxing as the features and sizes are the same.

The primary differences lie inside in the RTX 4080’s cut down GPU chip capabilities with about 40% fewer CUDA cores and its lesser power draw requirements. Nvidia recommends a 850W minimum PSU for the 450W TDP RTX 4090 and includes a 4X Molex cable adapter while the 320W TDP RTX 4080 only needs a 750W minimum PSU and a 3X Molex cable adapter is included in that box.

Newer PSUs may offer the new PCIe Gen5 single cable connector instead of using a bulky quad or tri cable adapter. Nvidia advises that the adapter should be firmly inserted into the card before installing it in the PC as an improperly seated connection may cause overheating and melting of the connector.

Both the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 Founders Edition cards are beautifully designed using a very unique industrial style, and they are each much larger than the RTX 3080 Ti which is itself an imposing card. However, these new 40×0 FE cards tend not to heat up like the smaller last gen cards and they are also much quieter under full load. Either card looks great installed inside a case.

Disassembly appears to be difficult and should give pause to any enthusiast who may have custom watercooling in mind. In fact, we think that watercooling is a waste for the RTX 4080 Founders Edition as it doesn’t have any thermal issues.

Let’s check out our test configuration.

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-13900KF (HyperThreading and Turbo boost at stock settings)
• ASUS Prime-A Z790 LGA1700 motherboard (Intel Z790 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 5.0, DDR5)
• T-Force Delta RGB PC5-51200 6400MHz DDR5 CL40 2x16GB kit, supplied by TeamGroup
• Valve Index, 90Hz / 100% SteamVR Render Resolution
• RTX 4080 16GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• Gigabyte RX 6900 XT GAMING OC, GV-R69XTGAMING OC-16GD 16GB, factory clocks
• RTX 3090 24GB Founders Edition, factory clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• RTX 4090 24GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, supplied by Nvidia
• 2 x T-Force Cardea Ceramic C440; 2TB PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSDs (one for AMD/one for Nvidia)
• T-Force M200 4TB USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C external SSD, supplied by TeamGroup
• Super Flower LedEx, 1200W Platinum 80+ power supply unit
• MSI MAG Series CORELIQUID 360R (AIO) 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Corsair 5000D ATX mid-tower (plus 1 x 140mm fan & 2 x 120mm Noctua fans)
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz
• LG C1 48″ 4K OLED HDR 120Hz display

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 526.98 drivers for Nvidia cards, and Adrenalin 22.11.1 for the RX 6900 XT.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the Nvidia control panel.
• High Quality textures, all optimizations off in the Adrenalin control panel
• VSync is off in the control panel and disabled for each game
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are Ultra Preset or highest with 16xAF always applied – no upscaling is used except for five DLSS games tested using the Quality preset.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• VR charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom; higher is better)
• Windows 11 Pro edition; 22H2 clean install for GeForce and Radeon cards using separate identical NVMe SSDs.
• Latest DirectX
• SteamVR latest beta

Games

VR Games

• Assetto Corsa: Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Kayak Mirage
• Moss: Book II
• No Man’s Sky
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Sniper Elite
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

Synthetic

• Time Spy & Time Spy Extreme (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• VRMark Blue Room
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 3.3.0 benchmark
• Geekbench
• Sandra 2020 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperfect 2020
• Octanebench
• FCAT VR benching tool
• OpenVR Benchmark tool

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Unfortunately, we also did not have time to check out overclocking, but temperatures and noise levels are much lower than the RTX 3090 or RTX 3080 Ti FEs. We plan to follow up with a 40-plus pancake gaming review including DLSS 3.

Let’s check out performance using 10 VR games plus Workstation and creative benches.

First, we look at VR performance.

10 VR Games

For this review, we benchmarked the Valve Index using FCAT VR and set the SteamVR render resolution to 100% (2016×2240) which uses a factor of 1.4X (the native resolution is 1440×1600) to compensate for lens distortion and to increase clarity. The Index is still considered one of the best overall headsets due to its outstanding tracking and solid feature set, and we are going to compare the performance of the RX 4080 versus the RX 4090, the RX 3080 Ti, and against the RX 6900 XT at each game’s Ultra/Highest settings.

IMPORTANT: BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS, measuring just one important performance metric, faster is better.

We had planned to include Star Wars: Squadrons and MS Flight Simulator 2020, but neither game records properly with FCAT VR. So let’s individually look at our 10 sim-heavy VR games’ performance using FCAT VR.

First up, Assetto Corsa: Competizione.

Assetto Corsa: Competizione (ACC)

BTR’s sim/racing editor, Sean Kaldahl created the replay benchmark run that we use for both the pancake game and the VR game. It is run at night with 20 cars, lots of geometry, and the lighting effects of the headlights, tail lights, and everything around the track looks spectacular.

Just like with Project CARS, you can save a replay after a race. Fortunately, the CPU usage is the same between a race and its replay so it is a reasonably accurate benchmark using the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.

iRacing may be more accurate or realistic, but Assetto Corsa: Competizione has some appeal because it feels more real than many other racing sims. It delivers the sensation of handling a highly-tuned racing machine driven to its edge.

Here are the ACC FCAT VR frametimes using VR Ultra using the RTX 3080 Ti, the RTX 4080, and the RTX 4090. Unfortunately, the latest ACC patch made it impossible to bench the RTX 6900 XT.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 91.83 unconstrained FPS with 4649 (36%) synthesized frames with 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4080 delivered 118.42 unconstrained FPS with 207 (2%) synthesized frames with 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 164.03 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic frame but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The ACC racing experience is best with the RTX 4090 although the RTX 4080 delivers a nearly constant 90 FPS on the Epic VR preset unlike the RTX 3080 Ti which requires more than one-third of its frames to be synthesized. Only the RTX 4090 has the performance headroom to increase the render resolution to above 100% or use the Index’ faster refresh rate (120Hz/144Hz) or even to use a higher resolution headset like the Reverb G2.

Next, we check out Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous (ED)

Elite Dangerous is a popular space sim built using the COBRA engine. It is hard to find a repeatable benchmark outside of the training missions.

A player will probably spend a lot of time piloting his space cruiser while completing a multitude of tasks as well as visiting space stations and orbiting a multitude of different planets. Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a dedicated following of players.

We picked the Ultra Preset and we set the Field of View to its maximum. The RX 6900 XT wouldn’t run with the latest driver according to the error message.

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 182.93 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthesized frames plus 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4080 delivered 230.98 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthesized frame and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 brings 296.16 unconstrained FPS together with 2 synthetic frames but with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses.

The experience playing Elite Dangerous at Ultra settings is not perceptibly different on any tested video card but the RTX 4090 has a lot more performance headroom to increase the render resolution or to use a higher resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2.

Let’s look at our newest VR sim, F1 2022.

F1 2022

Codemasters has captured the entire Formula 1 2021 season racing in F1 2022, and the VR immersion is good. The graphics are customizeable and solid, handling and physics are good, the AI is acceptable, the scenery is outstanding, and the experience ticks many of the necessary boxes for a racing sim.

Here is the frametime plot for F1 2022.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6900 XT delivered 132.21 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 152.67 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 achieved 200.24 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 delivered 254.72 unconstrained FPS together with 3 synthetic frames plus with 3 dropped frames and 3 Warp misses.

The experience playing F1 2022 using the Ultra preset is not very different on any of these video cards but the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 have considerably more performance headroom to use 120Hz/144Hz or to use a higher resolution headset.

Kayak VR: Mirage

The outstanding near-photorealistic visual fidelity really sets Kayak VR: Mirage apart from other simulators. It boasts a wide range of locales with day/night/sunset options offering tropical, icy, desert, and even stormy scenarios with trips to Costa Rica, Antarctica, Norway, and Australia and occasional interactions with wildlife. It can be played as a relaxing sim or as a strenous workout with competitive time trials which offer asynchronous multiplayer and ranking on global leaderboards.

We benchmark at 100% resolution with the highest “Cinematic” in-game settings but do not use DLSS or FSR.

Here is the frametime plot for Kayak VR: Mirage.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6900 XT delivered 189.78 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 201.89 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic frame plus 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4080 delivered 257.16 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthesized and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 got 329.35 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic frame and 1 dropped frame plus 1 Warp miss.

Kayak VR: Mirage looks fantastic at 100% resolution with maximum settings and would be well-suited for play on the Reverb G2 with any of our test cards.

Next, we look at Moss: Book II.

Moss: Book II

Moss: Book II is an amazing VR experience with much better graphics than the original game. It’s a 3rd person puzzle adventure game played seated that offers a direct physical interaction between you (the Reader) and your avatar, Quill, a mouse that bring real depth to the story. Extreme attention has been paid to the tiniest details with overall great art composition and outstanding lighting that make this game a must-play for gamers of all ages.

Moss II boasts very good visuals and we use the in-game highest settings.

Here are the frametimes plots of our four cards.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 6900 XT delivered 260.40 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 242.83 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 308.44 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic and 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 436.34 unconstrained FPS no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The experience playing Moss II on the Valve Index is identical between cards. It is not demanding so it can be played on a high resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2 and supersampling may also be used.

Next, we will check out another demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky (NMS)

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

Here is the No Man’s Sky Frametime plot. We set the settings to Maximum which is a step over Ultra including setting the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgrading to FXAA+TAA. Since DLSS is available for RTX cards and the Quality setting improves performance without impacting image quality, we used it. Updated: We did not use any upscaling method.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs.

The RX 6900 XT brought 104.13 unconstrained FPS with 1601 (23%) synthesized frames plus 9 dropped frames and 9 Warp misses.

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 119.88 unconstrained FPS with 14 synthetic frames and with 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4080 delivered 159.10 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthesized frames but no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 achieved 201.96 unconstrained FPS together with 17 synthetic frames but with no dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The experience playing No Man’s Sky using the highest settings is not very different using the three GeForce video cards but RX 6900 XT gamers may want to lower some individual settings to remain above 90 FPS. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 have enough performance headroom to increase the refresh rate, render resolution, or to perhaps use a higher resolution headset.

Let’s continue with another VR game, Project CARS 2, that we still like better than its successor even though it is no longer available for online play.

Project CARS 2 (PC2)

There is still a sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings and we prefer playing with SMAA Ultra rather than to use MSAA.

We used maximum settings including for Motion Blur.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6900 XT delivered 163.67 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthesized and 1 dropped frames plus 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 142.16 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthetic frames plus 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 got 200.88 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized frames nor dropped frames and no Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 achieved 253.50 unconstrained FPS together with 3 synthetic frames plus 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 using maximum settings is similar for all four video cards but the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 have far more performance headroom to increase the frequency to 120Hz or to use a higher resolution headset.

Next we will check out a classic VR game, Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked vanilla Skyrim using its highest settings plus we increased the in-game Supersample option to maximum.

Here are the frametime results.

Here are the details of our comparative runs as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6900 XT provided 162.13 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 194.63 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 achieved 239.08 unconstrained FPS with 2 synthetic frames plus 2 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 delivered 337.76 unconstrained FPS together with 2 synthetic frame and with 2 dropped frames plus 1 Warp miss.

All cards deliver an identical vanilla Skyrim VR experience with a ton of extra performance headroom to add mods and, in addition, to raise the render resolution using the two faster cards.

Next we check out Sniper Elite VR.

Sniper Elite VR

Sniper Elite VR’s visuals are decent with good texture work that is well-realized. The building architecture and panoramas look good, explosions are convincing and the weapons convey a sense of weight, although not achieving realism. It is primarily an arcade style sniping game featuring its signature X-Ray kill cam, but it offers multiple ways to achieve goals including with explosives and by using three other main weapon choices besides your rifle.

We benchmarked using the Highest settings.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details:

The RX 6900 XT delivered 222.93 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 3080 Ti got 239.07 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4080 delivered 223.33 unconstrained FPS with no synthesized or dropped frames nor Warp misses.

The RTX 4090 brought 318.03 unconstrained FPS together with 1 synthetic and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

All four cards deliver a similar playing experience on High with the faster two cards offering more performance headroom. We recommend that any performance headroom be used for increasing the SteamVR render resolution. Since the RTX 4080 only matches the RX 6900 XT and is behind the RTX 3080 Ti, we suspect it may be a driver issue.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 10 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are very good and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its High preset and we left the Pixel Density at 100%. Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6900 XT delivered 240.00 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic frames and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 3080 Ti managed 222.18 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic frames and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4080 got 260.94 unconstrained FPS with 1 synthetic frames and 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

The RTX 4090 achieved 366.41 unconstrained FPS together with 6 synthetic frames and with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses.

Playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game Ultra preset and 100% Pixel Density is similar for all 4 cards but there is significantly more performance headroom for the RTX 4090 and to a lesser extent the RTX 4080 for increasing the render resolution or using a higher resolution headset.

Let’s check out synthetic VR tests and unconstrained framerates.

Unconstrained Framerates & Synthetic VR Benchmarks

The following chart summarizes the overall Unconstrained Framerates (the performance headroom) of our two cards using our 10 VR test games. The preset is listed on the chart and higher is better. In addition, we present three synthetic VR benchmarks.

The RX 4080 FE averages close to one-third higher unconstrained frames for many VR benchmarks and sits in between the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 4090 FE in this important performance metric. However, unconstrained framerates are just one metric that has to be taken together with the frametime plots to have real meaning.

It is clear that the RTX 4090 and the RTX 4080 are ready for higher resolution headsets than the Valve Index. In many cases, either card may be able to use the higher refresh rates of 120Hz/144Hz for fast-paced and/or sim racing games.

Creative, Pro & Workstation Apps

Let’s look at Creative applications next to see if the RTX 4080 is a good upgrade from the RTX 3080 Ti or RX 6900 XT. We test starting with Geekbench.

GeekBench

GeekBench is an excellent CPU/GPU benchmarking program which runs a series of tests and times how long a GPU (in this case) takes to complete its tasks. It benchmarks OpenCL, Vulkan, and CUDA performance

OpenCL, Vulkan, and CUDA Performance

The RTX 4080 OpenCL, Vulkan, and CUDA performance are charted below.

Next we test the summary charts below show the overall comparative performance scores.

Again, the RTX 4090 performance is outstanding.

Next up, Blender benchmark.

Blender 3.3.0 Benchmark

Blender is a very popular open source 3D content creation suite. It supports every aspect of 3D development with a complete range of tools for professional 3D creation.

For the following chart, higher is better as the benchmark renders a scene multiple times and gives the results in samples per minute.

Blender’s benchmark performance is highest using the RTX 4090, and often the amount of time saved is substantial over using the next fastest card, the RTX 4080.

Next, we look at the OctaneBench.

OTOY Octane Bench

OctaneBench allows you to benchmark your GPU using OctaneRender. The hardware and software requirements to run OctaneBench are the same as for OctaneRender Standalone.

We run OctaneBenc 2020.1.5 for Windows and here are the RTX 4080’s complete results and overall score of 946.30

Here is the summary comparing the three cards that can run this render benchmark.

The RTX 4090 is a beast of a card when used for rendering and the RTX 4080 sits in between, above the RTX 3080 Ti.

Next, we move on to AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks.

AIDA64

AIDA64 is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. Its GPGPU benchmarks measure performance and give scores to compare against other popular video cards.

AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are well-optimized for every popular AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and VIA processor by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s full version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days.

Here is the chart summary of the AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks with the RTX 4090, the RTX 4080, the RTX 3080 Ti, and the RX 6900 XT side-by-side.

Generally the RTX 4090 is faster at almost all of AIDA64’s GPGPU benchmarks than the other cards with the RTX 4080 in second place. So let’s look at Sandra 2020 next.

SiSoft Sandra 2020

To see where the CPU, GPU, and motherboard performance results differ, there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2020. SiSoftware SANDRA (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a excellent information & diagnostic utility in a complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software, and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking. Sandra is derived from a Greek name that implies “defender” or “helper”.

There are several versions of Sandra, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. 20/21-R16a is the latest version, and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. Sandra 2020 features continuous multiple monthly incremental improvements over earlier versions of Sandra. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC while giving recommendations for improvement.

With the above in mind, we ran Sandra’s intensive GPGPU benchmarks and charted the results summarizing them. The performance results of the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 are compared with the performance results of the RTX 3080 Ti, and the RX 6900 XT.

Second only to the RTX 4090, the RTX 4080 is faster than the RTX 3080 Ti and it distinguishes itself in every area – Processing, Cryptography, Financial and Scientific Analysis, Image Processing, and Bandwidth.

Next up, SPEC benchmarks.

SPECworkstation3.1 Benchmarks

All the SPECworkstation 3 benchmarks are based on professional applications, most of which are in the CAD/CAM or media and entertainment fields. All of these benchmarks are free except for vendors of computer-related products and/or services.

The most comprehensive workstation benchmark is SPECworkstation 3. It’s a free-standing benchmark which does not require ancillary software. It measures GPU, CPU, storage and all other major aspects of workstation performance based on actual applications and representative workloads. We only tested the GPU-related workstation performance as checked in the image above.

Here are our RTX 4080 raw SPECworkstation 3.1 raw scores:

Below are the SPECworkstation 3.1 RTX 4090 results summarized in a chart along with the three competing cards, the RTX 4090, the RTX 3080 Ti, and the RTX 6900 XT. Higher is better since we are comparing scores.

The RTX 4090 is not a workstation card, yet it uses brute force to win most of the benches against the other cards with the RTX 4080 in second place.

Finally, we benchmark using SPECviewperfect GPU benches.

SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Benches

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a 2020-22 version of its SPECviewperf benchmark that features updated viewsets, new models, support for up to 4K display resolutions, and improved set-up and results management. We use the highest available 3800×2120 display resolution for high end cards.

Here are SPECviewperf 2020 GPU RTX 4080 benchmarks summarized in a chart together with our three competing cards.

Although we see three architectures with different strengths and weaknesses, the RTX 4090 is a beast in SPEC benchmarks followed by the RTX 4080 in a solid second place.

After seeing the totality of the benches, creative users may choose to upgrade their existing systems with a new RTX 4080 or 4090 based on the performance increases and the associated increases in productivity that they require. The question to buy a RTX 4080 should be based on the workflow and requirements of each user as well as budget. Time is money to a professional depending on how these apps are used.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

Final Thoughts

Besides suffering with COVID-19, this has been an enjoyable exploration evaluating the new Ada Lovelace RTX 4080 FE versus the RTX 4090 FE, the RTX 3080 TI FE, and Gigabyte RTX 6900 XT Gaming OC. The RTX 4080 performed brilliantly performance-wise, blowing away its other two former flagship competitors and slotting in almost one-third slower than the RTX 4090.

The RTX 4080 at $1199 is a decent upgrade from the $1199 RTX 3080 Ti although it is not as impressive as upgrading from a RTX 3090 ($1499) to a RTX 4090 ($1599). If a VR enthusiast wants the very fastest card, then the RTX 4090 is the best choice for high resolution VR headsets and for creative/workstation apps. For $400 less, the RTX 4080 is a solid choice and it will provide a performance uplift over the RTX 3080 Ti, but not as dramatically as the RTX 4090.

In the last Ampere generation, the $699 RTX 3080 provided the best value, but almost unbelievably, the RTX 4090 provides the best performance bang for buck in Nvidia’s new Ada Lovelace lineup so far. We also notice that there is plenty of performance room for a possible future RTX 4080 Ti to slot in between the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4090.

We are very impressed with the RTX 4080 raw performance after testing it over the past few days in VR. It currently stands as the second fastest video card in the world and would be a solid choice for a high resolution VR headset.

The Founders Edition of the RTX 4080 is well-built, solid, good-looking, and it stays cool and quiet even when overclocked – the big card does not get hot like the RTX 3090 and under load it is quieter than the RTX 3080 Ti FE. The RTX 4080 Founders Edition offers a big performance improvement over the previous $1199 RTX 3080 FE for VR and pro apps although it doesn’t give as great a value as when the RTX 3080 FE launched for $699 two years ago.

However, we cannot give any final verdict now as there is a lot more RTX 4080 benchmarking results on the way next week. We will more extensively test the RTX 4080, RTX 4090, RTX 3080 Ti, and RX 6900 XT using 40-plus pancake games including testing DLSS 3 to determine overall value. Future reviews will hopefully test AMD’s upcoming 7000 series cards and we also plan to test the role of the CPU for VR performance. Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy Gaming!

Video card prices have normalized and most prices of new video cards in the USA have dropped to at or below MSRP, plus there are sales and bundles to be found. This VR review of the Hellhound RX 6650 XT is our follow-up to BTR’s original review in May. We found that the RX 6650 XT beats up on the RTX 3060 but falls short of the RTX 3060 Ti in rasterized pancake gaming. This time, we want to see how the Hellhound performs compared to its faster sibling, the RX 6700 XT, and against the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti to see if it is a good entry level VR value.

The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is currently below MSRP for $369.99 at Newegg which AMD has positioned against entry level RTX 3060s which can be found starting at $380. RX 6700 XTs can be found starting at $430 and the RTX 3060 Ti can be found starting at $470. We have found the RX 6650 XT to be faster than than the RTX 3060 in rasterized pancake games but outclassed by the Ti which is in turn is slightly slower than the RX 6700 XT. For this VR value showdown, we will use the Valve Index and 10 VR games to compare the performance of the RX 6650 XT and the RX 6700 XT versus the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti.

We want to see if the RX 6650 XT is adequate as an entry level mainstream card to power a Valve Index. Although a fast CPU is important for geometry and other processing, smooth VR delivery depends primarily on the video card. An underpowered video card can even cause reprojecting and artifacting for a substandard playing experience that may even lead to VR sickness.We currently benchmark ten VR games using the Valve Index that features 2880×1600 resolution (1440×1600 pixels per eye), and we have changed our benching suite and added three new VR games: F1 2022, Kayak Mirage, and Sniper Elite VR.

BTR’s testing platform is an Intel Core i9-12900K, an ASUS ROG Maximus Apex Z690 motherboard, and 32 GB of T-Force DDR5 at 6400MHz on a recent clean install of Windows 11 Pro Edition.

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience unpleasant. It’s also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. But before we benchmark our VR games, check out our Test Configuration below.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-12900KF (HyperThreading and Turbo boost at stock settings)..
• ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Apex LGA 1700 motherboard (Intel Z690 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 5.0, DDR5)
• T-FORCE DELTA RGB PC5-51200 6400MHz DDR5 CL40 2x16GB kit, supplied by TeamGroup
• Valve Index, 90Hz
• Hellhound RX 6650 XT 8GB, factory clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• Red Devil RX 6700 XT 12GB, factory clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• RTX 3060 Black 12GB, factory clocks, on loan from EVGA
• RTX 3060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• T-FORCE CARDEA Ceramic C440 2 x 2TB PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSD (one for AMD/one for NVIDIA)
• T-FORCE DELTA MAX White 1TBSATA III SSD (Storage), supplied by TeamGroup
• Super Flower LedEx, 1200W Platinum 80+ power supply unit
• MSI MAG Series CORELIQUID 360R (AIO) 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Corsair 5000D ATX mid-tower (plus 1 x 140mm fan; 2 x 120mm Noctua fans)
• Samsung G7 27? 1440P HDR600, 240Hz FreeSync/Gsync monitor

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 516.79 drivers – Stock settings in the NVIDIA control panel
• Adrenalin 22.6.1 drivers. Stock settings in the AMD control panel
• Windows 11 latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All 10 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT VR Capture (non-public) Beta
• FCAT VR Beta 18 (non-public)
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution

10 VR Game benchmark suite

SteamVR Games

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• F1 2022
• Kayak Mirage
• Myst
• No Man’s Sky
• Skyrim
• Sniper Elite VR
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our ten VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution as we benchmark the Hellhound RX 6650 XT to see how it compares with the EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black and against the Red Devil RTX 6700 XT and RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition.

First up, Assetto Corsa Competizione.

F1 2022

Codemasters has captured the entire Formula 1 2021 season racing in F1 2022, and the VR immersion is good. The graphics are customizeable and solid, handling and physics are good, the AI is acceptable, the scenery is outstanding, and the experience ticks many of the necessary boxes for a racing sim. Best of all, it runs well on the cards we tested.

Here is the frametime plot for F1 2022.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 3060 struggled with 97.37 unconstrained FPS with 10 dropped frames and 10 Warp misses plus 4565 (46%) synthetic frames generated.

The RX 6650 XT managed to deliver 108.63 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 50 (1%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti 131.63 delivered unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses plus 14 synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6700 XT achieved 141.20 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses and no synthetic frames were generated.

The RTX 3060 really struggled with the F1 2022 VR Medium preset unlike the RX 6650 XT, and the RX 6700 XT edged out the RTX 3060 Ti with a bit more performance headroom.

Next we check out Kayak VR: Mirage.

All cards deliver an identical vanilla Skyrim VR experience with a little bit of extra performance headroom for the RX 6650 XT, unlike with the RTX 3060, and a ton of extra headroom to add mods or to Supersample for the two faster cards.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Although The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an older first generation VR game built on the Unreal 4 engine, it still boasts amazing visuals even on entry-level cards. Although it is considered by some to be a walking simulator, it is also an excellent detective game with great puzzles. However, be aware that its style of locomotion tends to make some of its players VR sick.

There are only a few in-game graphics options available, so we picked the highest 130% resolution with TAA.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 3060 managed 219.82 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss but no synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6650 XT achieved 258.13 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, and no frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti produced 270.97 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss, but no synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6700 XT delivered 304.39 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, and no synthetic frames were generated.

The experience playing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on our medium VR settings is identical for all cards. The RX 6600 XT is faster than the RTX 3060 as the RX 6700 XT is faster than RTX 3060 Ti, which means there is a lot of performance headroom to increase the SteamVR render resolution.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 10 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are very good and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its High preset and we left the Pixel Density at 100%. Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 3060 managed 108.22 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses. In addition, 2565 (33%) synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6650 XT provided 128.54 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, and but 324 (4%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 152.75 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss and 55 (1%) synthetic frames were generated.

The RX 6700 XT achieved 155.17 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 9 synthetic frames were generated.

Playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game High preset and 100% Pixel Density is too optimistic for both of our lower end cards and some individual setting should be lowered. However, the RX 6700 XT and the RTX 3060 Ti deliver a decent and similar High preset experience.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

It is great to see AMD and NVIDIA delivering two mainstream cards that are both again priced below $400 that are adequate for entry level VR using a Valve Index (or Vive Pro). AMD appears to have addressed the micro stutter VR driver issues we found when we tested the RTX 6600 XT versus the RTX 3060 last August, and the Radeon is now a faster card that offers slightly more VR performance headroom.

Both the RTX 3060 and the RX 6650 XT can max several VR games in our benching suite if the resolution is left at 100% or slightly subsampled, or if the in-game settings are lowered. But if a VR enthusiast is going to spend $1000 for a premium HMD, it makes sense to pair it with a faster video card like the RTX 3060 Ti or the RX 6700 XT. However, one cannot pair a high resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2 with any of our four tested cards without lowering the resolution or settings.

To recap pricing: The Hellhound RX 6650 XT is currently below MSRP for $370 at Newegg versus entry level RTX 3060s which can be found starting at $380. The RX 6700 XT can be found starting at $430 and the RTX 3060 Ti can be found starting at $470. Make sure to check for new game bundles, sales, and promotions as both AMD’s and Nvidia’s promos recently ended. Video card pricing changes almost daily.

The RX 6650 XT offers a stronger VR performance at a slightly lower price than the RTX 3060 while the RTX 3060 Ti offers a similar VR experience to the RX 6700 XT. The advantage the GeForce cards hold over the Radeons is that they offer more DLSS supported VR games.

We did not test DLSS in VR nor did we use FSR and will leave that comparison for future reviews. We are going to take a break this week to play Spiderman: Remastered for PC and will be back with more great reviews next week.

Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!

BTR received the RTX 3050 XC Black Edition 8GB video card from EVGA and we have tested its VR performance by benchmarking nine virtual reality games using the Vive Pro. Although it’s a gaming card, we have added synthetic gaming and workstation benches. We will see if the RTX 3050 is a better entry level card for VR and an improvement over the GTX 1660 Super.

The RTX 3050 XC Black is a $249.99 MSRP EVGA card, but because of supply/demand issues, all suggested pricing is meaningless as only a very lucky few gamers will get them at or close to MSRP/SEP. It is out of stock at most retailers and can mostly be found on eBay starting around $450. The RTX 3050 is generally priced lower than the GTX 1660 Super which sells for around $500 currently.

There is hope in sight as the end of the COVID-19 pandemic may be in view, Etherium is transitioning to Proof of Stake from Proof of Work, and we may see lower prices and better availability before end of this year. Plus it is possible to buy video cards at close to retail if buyers exercise patience by signing up for EVGA’s queue, watch for Best Buy stock to come in, and participate in Newegg’s Shuffle.

Specifications

The RTX 3050 is a solid step up over the GTX 1650 which it replaces. The RTX 3050 is NVIDIA’s 1080P entry level gaming card. The RTX 3050 has also been equipped with Tensor and RT cores for ray tracing and DLSS. It’s also an upgrade over the GTX 1660, 1660 Super, and 1660 Ti which do not have these specialized cores. DLSS is now available on over 145 games and applications and it is also available in some VR games. We will specifically test No Man’s Sky to see if the RTX 3050’s DLSS VR performance is better than the GTX 1660 Super which cannot use DLSS.

We benchmark using Windows 11 Pro Edition with an Intel Core i9-12900KF at 5.3GHz/5.1 GHz and 32GB of T-FORCE Delta 6400MHz DDR5 on a ASUS ROG Maximum Apex Z690 motherboard. All games and benchmarks use the latest versions and the most recent drivers.

Let’s first look at the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black before we check out the test configuration.

A Close-up of the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black Edition

The 8GB XC Black Edition is EVGA’s entry level 2-slot dual-fan RTX 3050 which is rather small at 4.33 inches high by 7.94 inches long.

The back of the card is a bare PCB.

The RTX 3050 Black uses a single 8-pin connector and a 550W PSU is recommended as minimum.

The IO panel has four connectors. Three DisplayPort 1.4a connectors are included, and the HDMI port 2.1 allows for 4K/120Hz over a single HDMI cable and variable refresh rate (VRR) is supported.

As a small two-slot card, the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black will fit into most cases and it looks good installed inside our Corsair 5000D.

Let’s check out our test configuration.

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-12900KF (Overclocked to 5.3GHz, Cores 1-2; 5.1GHz, Cores 3-8)
• ASUS ROG Maximus Apex motherboard (Intel Z690 chipset, latest BIOS with Resizable BAR enabled, PCIe 5.0/4.0/3.1/3.1 – USB 4.0 Type-C specification)
• T-FORCE DELTA 2x16GB DDR5 6400MHz CL40, supplied by TeamGroup
• GeForce RTX 3050 XC Black 8GB, supplied by EVGA
• ASUS GTX 1660 OC Super 6GB, supplied by ASUS
• T-FORCE CARDEA A440 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, supplied by TeamGroup as primary storage for games and benchmarks
• T-FORCE CARDEA Ceramic C440 2TB PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe SSD, C: drive
• Super Flower LedEx, 1200W Platinum 80+ power supply unit
• MSI MAG Series CORELIQUID 360R (AIO) 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Corsair 5000D ATX mid-tower (plus 1 x 140mm fan; 2 x 120mm Noctua fans)
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz FreeSync monitor

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 511.65 drivers
• Windows 11 Professional edition; latest updates/build
• Latest DirectX
• All benchmarking programs are updated to their latest versions
• All 9 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication.
• FCAT-VR Capture v0.9.3202.0 UAC
• FCAT-VR Beta 17

VR Games

• Elite Dangerous
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Myst 2021
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Skyrim
• The Walking Dead; Saints & Sinners
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• Zombieland

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• VRMark – Orange & Cyan Benchmarks
• OpenVR Benchmark
• Superposition
• Blender 2.93.1 benchmark
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperf 2020
• OctaneBench

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings.

Let’s look at the RTX 3050 and GTX 1660 Super VR gaming using the Vive Pro and FCAT VR.

Next up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are outstanding and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its lowest preset and we left the Pixel Density at 100%.

Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The GTX 1660 Super produced 154.16 unconstrained FPS with no dropped or synthesized frames.

The RTX 3050 gave 165.65 unconstrained FPS with no dropped or synthesized frames.

Playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is similar for both of our cards on the Low Preset although the RTX 3050 has a little extra performance headroom. Unfortunately, neither card can manage to deliver a steady 90 FPS on the Medium Preset, so we would suggest that a gamer experiment with the individual setting to give the best balance of performance to visuals.

Last up, Zombieland.

Zombieland

Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever is a fun arcade style light gun wave shooter that adds split-second racing mechanics while featuring just one mechanic – headshots that slow down time.

Here is the frametime chart using the Medium Preset.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The GTX 1660 Super produced 257.52 unconstrained FPS.

The RTX 3050 managed 252.52 unconstrained FPS. Neither card could deliver a steady minimum of at least 90 FPS using the High Preset because it boosts the resolution from 100% to 140%. We would again suggest that the player experiment with raising individual settings and adjusting the SteamVR resolution to deliver the best balance of performance to visuals

We see that overall the RTX 3050 is a stronger VR card than the GTX 1660 Super and it also has the advantage of being able to use DLSS.

Myst (2021), by Cyan Worlds Inc, is the latest remake of the iconic 1990s puzzle-adventure game. Myst was rebuilt to play in PC VR and for flatscreen gamers. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, the pancake game features gorgeous advanced ray traced graphics and support for both AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technologies to boost performance. Unfortunately, the VR edition does not support ray tracing or FSR, so we will focus on DLSS as the game is especially demanding on the Epic Preset with a Vive Pro/Valve Index class VR headset and much more so with a Pro 2.

We offer a review of Myst‘s PC VR graphics performance using the latest AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.9.2 driver with the RX 6800 XT/RX 6800/6700 XT/RX 6600 XT, and the latest GeForce Game-Ready 472.12 driver with the RTX 3080/3080 Ti/3070/3060 Ti/3060. We will also make suggestions for setting the best balance of visuals to performance for each card.

BTR received a Steam Myst key from NVIDIA. It is available as a $29.99 Steam game that is playable as a pancake game or in VR on multiple HMDs including the Valve Index, Vive HMDs, and Oculus Rift HMDs, but not for WMR like the Reverb G2. This isn’t a game review, but rather we are concentrating on its performance as measured by FCAT-VR using nine video cards on their latest drivers at factory settings.

Here are the cards that we benchmarked Myst with the very latest drivers from NVIDIA (472.12) and from AMD (21.9.2):

• RTX 3080 Ti (12GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3080 (8GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3070 (8GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3060 Ti (8GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RTX 3060 (12GB Founders Edition, on loan from NVIDIA)
• RX 6800 XT (16GB Reference Edition, on loan from AMD)
• RX 6800 (16GB Reference Edition, on loan from AMD)
• RX 6700 XT (12GB Red Devil, on loan from PowerColor)
• RX 6600 XT (8GB Red Devil, on loan from PowerColor)

BTR’s testing platform is an Intel Core i9-10900K at 5.0/5.1GHz, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard and 16GB of T-Force XTREEM DDR4 at 3866MHz on Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition. We benchmark using a Vive Pro which gives identical results to the Valve Index as well as using the Pro 2 for our top cards.

Settings

Myst has 4 basic in-game user settings: Low, Medium, High, and Epic Presets. There aren’t a lot of visual differences between Epic and High, but dropping to Medium is noticeable, and Low is rather low.

The Supersampling Method in the pancake version allows for either FSR or DLSS, but DLSS is the only option available in the VR game. And there are four levels of DLSS choices: Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance.

• Quality DLSS is upscaled the least and it offers the highest image quality above the Balanced mode and is indistinguishable from the native resolution.
• Balanced offers higher performance than Quality and offers a great balance of visuals to performance.
• The Performance mode offers higher performance than the Balanced mode with only slight visual differences in motion.
• The Ultra Performance mode offers the highest performance increase but it is upscaled the most.

There are also multiple individual settings that may be changed by the user although we are just concentrating on preset performance.

DLSS versus FSR

AMD does not have a direct competitor to DLSS although they offer FSR which also improves performance.

FSR improves performance by first rendering frames at a lower resolution and then by using an open-source spatial upscaling algorithm with a sharpening filter in an attempt to make the game look nearly as good as at native resolution. NVIDIA’s DLSS is a more mature temporal upscaling solution that uses AI/Deep Learning. With DLSS, data is accumulated from multiple frames and combined into a final image with AI reconstruction running on RTX Tensor cores.

In contrast, FSR is a post-process shader which also makes it easy for game developers to implement across all graphics cards. So far, there are about a dozen pancake games that use it and we have tested three games that use FSR. Although Ultra FSR is not the equal of DLSS – and especially not of DLSS 2.0 Quality which rivals and sometimes improves on the native image – it is still a very solid non-AI/temporal upscaler that provides good performance improvements.

Ultra FSR is more than a standard Lanczos implementation plus sharpening and it brings good value to Radeons and for all video cards for higher “free” performance with a minimal hit to visuals. The issue is that FSR has not been implemented into any VR game yet. We hope that AMD and the Cyan developers will bring native FSR to Myst as they have done for the pancake version since using the OpenVR_FSR mod brings very inconsistent results.

The maximum meaningful resolution for VR is approximately one and a half times the native display resolution of the headset since the runtime warps the image to correct for optics’ warping, and a 1.5x rendered resolution results in pixels matching the native headset resolution at the center of the headset’s viewing area. But for complex games played on demanding headsets (especially like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2), the render resolution should probably be set lower than 1.5x.

Generally, the render resolution has the biggest impact on a game’s performance so it can consistently render frames at least as fast as the refresh rate of the headset which is usually 90 FPS. The render resolution should be selected to ensure consistently delivered framerates above 90 FPS, and it’s independent of the headset resolution. Of course, a minimum render resolution is needed to deliver a quality VR experience that varies from headset to headset.

DLSS Scaling

There are two scaling stages in the VR pipeline. When both are enabled, they work together to produce the final frame. When NVIDIA DLSS is enabled, it reduces a game’s render resolution by a predetermined scaling factor. Afterward, the driver uses AI to scale the rendered resolution to the original requested runtime. From an example NVIDIA gives, if the requested render resolution is 1848 x 1872 per eye, and DLSS is running in Performance mode, the game will render to 924 x 936 per eye, and DLSS will scale it back to 1848 x 1872.

The VR runtime takes the frame rendered by either the game or generated by DLSS and scales it to approximately 1.5x the native headset resolution to compensate for optics and image warping. This scaling is usually part of the lens distortion compensation. So when DLSS is supported in VR you want to maximize the scaling done by DLSS and minimize the scaling done by the runtime to maximize performance.

Whenever you enable DLSS you change the render resolution of the game and its performance. It’s important to keep this in mind when finding the ideal configuration. NVIDIA gives another example that a configuration that can maintain 90 fps at 982 x 1000 with DLSS off will likely maintain 90 fps at 1424 x 1408 with Quality DLSS, 1720 x 1774 with Balanced DLSS, 1960 x 1984 with Performance DLSS, and 2704 x 2736 with Ultra-performance DLSS. It is up to the end user to determine the best balance of visuals to performance, remembering that 90 FPS is the minimum target framerate.

Performance

Myst has very good to excellent VR visuals, and it generally runs well on BTR’s flagship i9-10900K with a variety of video cards depending on the settings. The map where we had universal issues was in Channelwood where there was considerable microstutter for all cards, and we have concluded that it is not currently representative of the game’s VR performance.

Unfortunately, Myst is very challenging to benchmark in VR because the maps are relatively small requiring a lot of turns, so we use a 60 second benchmark run over one of the more visually demanding maps in the game in the Selentic age.

Myst should not be played with constant reprojection, synthetic frame synthesis, or with Motion Smoothing applied. Continually delivering frames at half the HMD’s optimum rate refresh by using Motion Smoothing tends to cause artifacting and it may even cause some upset or even VR sickness for the gamer.

All nine video cards were tested by FCAT-VR using the in-game presets which include Ultra, High, Medium, and Low. Of course, we did not test a RTX 3080 Ti on Low settings nor did we test a RX 6600 XT on Epic settings, but we tried to keep the settings realistic and close to optimal for each card with a goal of a steady 90 FPS being delivered to the headset without requiring synthetically generated frames.

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which show what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to 90 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures one important performance metric, faster is better. Also, please note that FCAT-VR does not differentiate between dropped and synthesized frames for cards tested with the Pro 2 as it does not use SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing.

Vive Pro at 100% SteamVR render resolution (2016×2240)

Lets start by testing the video cards that appear to run best at Low or Medium settings using the Vive Pro at 100% SteamVR render resolution.

Low/Medium Settings

The first card we test is an RX 6600 XT and is the only card we tested that requires the Low preset. Unfortunately, from our earlier testing, we discovered it is a relatively weak card for VR – unlike the rest of the RX 6000 series. We originally tested Myst with Adrenalin Software 21.8.2 but found that the latest driver, 21.9.2, improves performance so we retested all AMD cards using it.

RX 6600 XT 8GB

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6600 XT comparing Medium with Low settings.

Here are the details.

The RX 6600 XT really struggles at Medium settings delivering 102.60 unconstrained frames, and it requires 1344 (25%) frames to be synthesized while dropping 17 frames and delivering 17 Warp misses.

It does better on Low settings by delivering 112.05 unconstrained frames, dropping 6 frames with 6 Warp misses, and requiring 248 (5%) to be synthesized. However, at even the Low setting, microstutter is still noticeable. It may be a driver issue exacerbated by the RX 6600 XT’s limited bandwidth when used with a non-Ryzen PC.

Next up we test the RX 6700 XT.

RX 6700 XT

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6700 XT tested at the High and Low preset.

The RX 6700 XT cannot handle either the High or Medium preset without synthesizing frames. Here are the details.

On the High preset, the RX 6700 XT delivers 98.45 unconstrained frames, but it drops 13 frames and delivers 13 Warp misses. In addition, it requires 1540 (28%) frames to be synthesized, and microstutter is evident while playing.

It does better with the Medium preset but our goal is an absolute minimum of delivering 90 FPS, so we had to drop to the Low Preset. On Low it delivered 154.70 unconstrained frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses and it only required 11 frames to be synthesized for a good VR experience. Playing on the Medium preset is a possibility for players who can tolerate synthetically generated frames.

Next we test the cards that can mostly handle High settings.

High Settings

The first High preset card we test is an RTX 3060.

RTX 3060

The RTX 3060 can handle High setting only if DLSS is used. Otherwise it would require using the Low/Medium preset. Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details.

On the High preset without DLSS, the RTX 3060 delivers 69.54 unconstrained frames, and although it drops no frames nor delivers any Warp misses, it requires 2631 (50%) of its frames be synthesized. However, even without DLSS, microstutter is not evident while playing, unlike with the RX 6600 XT.

The RTX 3060 does much better with 105.61 unconstrained frames on the High preset with Balanced DLSS – with no dropped frames or Warp misses but with 219 (4%) synthetic frames. It is very playable and the Balanced DLSS image quality is very good.

However, since our goal is a minimum of delivering 90 FPS without synthetic frames, we also tested Performance DLSS. On the High preset it delivered 116.22 unconstrained frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses and it only required 2 frames to be synthesized for a very good VR experience.

It should be noted that Performance DLSS compromises VR visuals very slightly, so High/Balanced DLSS is a real possibility for players who don’t mind if some frames are synthesized or if they are willing to drop some individual settings.

Next we check the performance of the RX 6800.

RX 6800

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6800 run at the Epic and High preset.

Here are the details.

The RX 6800 cannot handle the Epic preset as it delivers 92.55 unconstrained frames but it drops 17 frames and delivers 17 Warp misses and it requires 2222 (41%) of its frames to be synthesized, and microstutter is evident.

Myst gameplay becomes smooth using a RX 6800 at the High preset, delivering 127.81 unconstrained frames with no Warp misses or any frames dropped, but it requires 15 synthetic frames.

Next we test the performance of video cards that can play at the High to Epic Preset

High/Epic settings

The first card we test is a RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition.

RTX 3060 Ti

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3060 Ti run at the Epic preset with no DLSS, Quality DLSS, and with Balanced DLSS.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3060 Ti struggles at the Epic preset with 82.73 unconstrained FPS, and although it doesn’t drop frames or deliver any Warp misses, it requires 2562 (49%) of its frames to be synthesized. It does much better with Quality DLSS and doesn’t compromise image quality with 108.36 unconstrained FPS, dropping no frames or having any Warp misses, but it still requires 149 frames (8%) to be synthesized.

Using Balanced DLSS on the Epic Preset, the RTX 3060 easily hits its target of a locked-on 90 FPS with 122.61 FPS with one dropped frame, one Warp miss, and 3 synthetic frames. The ‘Balanced’ visuals are still very good although some players may prefer to play on the High preset with Quality DLSS with some synthesized frames.

The next card we test is a RX 6800 XT.

RX 6800 XT

Here is the frametime plot of the RX 6800 XT run at the Epic and High preset.

Here are the details.

Using the Epic preset, the RX 6800 XT delivers 107.42 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses but it requires 314 (6%) of the frames to be synthesized.

Using the High preset, it delivers 154.15 unconstrained FPS, dropping no frames nor having Warp misses but requiring 7 frames to be synthesized. It would be acceptable to play with a mix of mostly Epic settings with a few High settings if the goal is a minimum of 90 FPS with zero synthetic frames.

Next up, the RTX 3070.

RTX 3070

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3070 run at the Epic preset.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3070 cannot meet our goal of 90 FPS without synthetic frames by using the Epic preset without DLSS. It delivers 99.17 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but it requires 1353 (26%) frames to be synthesized.

Using Epic with Quality DLSS, the RTX 3070 delivers 124.39 unconstrained frames with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but it requires 7 frames to be synthesized. There is no reason not to use Quality DLSS as the image quality is the equivalent of playing without it and the VR experience is excellent.

The next Epic preset card we test is an RTX 3080. But this time, using Quality DLSS, we attempt using the Epic preset with 150% SteamVR render resolution.

The Epic Preset with 150% SteamVR Render Resolution

RTX 3080

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 run at the Epic preset at 100% SteamVR render resolution, first with no DLSS and then at 150% render resolution with Quality DLSS.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3080 is suitable for using with the Epic preset with no DLSS, delivering 117.72 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but it requires 10 frames to be synthesized.

It is not playable without synthesizing mass frames on the Epic preset with 150% render resolution without DLSS but it does great using Quality DLSS. It delivers 119.48 unconstrained FPS only requiring 8 frames to be synthesized and it neither drops frames nor has Warp misses. However, the visuals and clarity become noticeably better using SteamVR’s 150% render resolution with Epic/Quality DLSS than by using Epic at 100% without DLSS.

Next up, the RTX 3080 Ti.

RTX 3080 Ti

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 Ti run on the Epic preset comparing 100% with 150% SteamVR render resolutions with Quality DLSS on versus off.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3080 Ti can easily handle the Epic preset without DLSS at 100% SteamVR render resolution delivering 138.07 unconstrained FPS with no Warp misses or dropped frames, although 4 frames were synthesized. However, increasing the SteamVR render resolution to 150% drops the unconstrained framerate to 100.23 FPS, and without DLSS, it requires 942 (18%) of its frames to be synthesized although again, no frames are dropped.

Using Quality DLSS at 150% render resolution, the RTX 3080 Ti delivers 135.71 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, and only 1 frame was synthesized. There is no reason not to use Quality DLSS at 150% render resolution as its Epic preset visuals are far superior to not using DLSS at 100%.

Next we test our two fastest cards, the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3080 Ti with a much more demanding headset, the Vive Pro 2. Please note that FCAT-VR does not distinguish between synthesized and dropped frames using the Pro 2 since it uses the Vive Console’s Motion Compensation (which we do not use) instead of SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing.

Vive Pro at 100% SteamVR render resolution (3184×3184)

High/Epic Presets

RTX 3080

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 using the Epic preset with the Vive Pro 2. This time we test the Epic and High presets but find that we cannot use Quality DLSS without requiring synthetic frames as the Pro 2’s render resolution is so high.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3080 on Epic without DLSS delivers 51.97 unconstrained FPS with 1 Warp miss, and it drops or requires 1914 (43%) frames to be synthesized. Using Performance DLSS which compromises visuals slightly using the same settings, it manages 95.78 unconstrained frames with only 8 dropped or synthesized frames.

Without using DLSS, the RTX 3080 performs better on the High preset over Epic, delivering 83.72 unconstrained FPS, while dropping or synthesizing 1952 (39%) frames and suffering 1 Warp miss. Using the same settings with Balanced DLSS, it gives 97.86 unconstrained FPS with 1 Warp miss, and dropping or synthesizing 10 frames.

It is a toss up between using Epic/Performance DLSS and High/Balanced DLSS. Next we check the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti.

RTX 3080 Ti

Here is the frametime plot of the RTX 3080 Ti using the Pro 2 at 100% SteamVR render resolution.

Here are the details.

Although NVIDIA’s top gaming card produces no Warp misses, the RTX 3080 Ti cannot handle the Epic preset without DLSS as it delivers 55.08 unconstrained FPS, and it drops or requires 2049 (45%) frames to be synthesized. Using Quality DLSS, it still falls short of our 90 FPS minimum goal, delivering 91.71 unconstrained FPS but it still drops or synthesizes 656 (13%) frames.

Using the same settings but with Balanced DLSS, the 3080 Ti delivers 98.54 frames with only 8 dropped or synthesized frames. We would suggest playing either Epic/Balanced DLSS or with Quality DLSS and a mix of Epic and High settings to stay above 90 FPS for an awesome visual experience on the Pro 2.

Conclusion

After spending many hours playing and benchmarking Myst 2021 in VR with nine video cards, we have concluded that it is a decently-optimized game that delivers reasonably good performance with very good VR visuals that really draws the player into its world. The map where we had universal issues was in Channelwood where there was considerable microstutter and we have concluded that it’s not representative of the game.

The Radeons that are normally equivalent to their GeForce counterparts in pancake gaming are somewhat held back by microstutter, but far more so by not having a DLSS competitor for VR. All of the competing GeForce cards were able to deliver similar visuals but with much higher performance by using Quality or Balanced DLSS. And using DLSS is the only way to play Myst at 100% SteamVR render resolution with a Pro 2 without synthesizing frames. DLSS works great for the three VR games that we have tested, and we highly recommend its use.

We hope that AMD and the Cyan devs will bring native FSR support to Myst as they have done for the pancake version since using the OpenVR_FSR mod brings inconsistent results. We are still holding out hope since AMD told us, “FSR is not supported with VR in Myst at this time.”

Next up, expect Rodrigo to deliver a brand new 472.12 driver performance analysis shortly. And he is also working on a Myst pancake game performance review while we are working on a budget TeamGroup SATA SSD evaluation. Stay tuned to BTR.

Happy VR Gaming!

The RX 6600 XT is priced starting at $379 while the factory overclocked Red Devil is priced higher than the $399 RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, yet AMD has positioned its newest mainstream video card against the entry level $329 RTX 3060. We have found the Red Devil RX 6600 XT to be a bit faster than than the RTX 3060 in rasterized pancake games but outclassed by the Ti. For this VR showdown, we will use the Valve Index and 10 VR games to compare the performance of the RX 6600 XT with the RTX 3060.

We want to see if the RX 6600 XT is worthy of AMD’s claim of VR premium and how it compares with the RTX 3060 which is adequate as an entry level mainstream card to power a Valve Index. Although a fast CPU is important for geometry and other processing, smooth VR delivery depends mostly on the video card. An underpowered video card can even cause reprojecting and artifacting for a substandard playing experience that may even lead to VR sickness.We currently benchmark ten VR games using the Valve Index that features 2880×1600 resolution (1440×1600 pixels per eye), the same as the Vive Pro and with similar performance at 90Hz/90FPS. BTR’s testing platform is an overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32 GB of Vulcan Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz on a recent clean install of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition.

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience unpleasant. It’s also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. But before we benchmark our VR games, check out our Test Configuration below.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.3 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Valve Index, 90Hz
• EVGA RTX 3060 Black 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from EVGA
• Red Devil RX 6600 XT 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• 2 x 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive (one for AMD; one for NVIDIA)
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB T-FORCE DELTA MAX SATA III SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan)

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 471.68 drivers – Stock settings in the NVIDIA control panel
• Adrenalin 21.8.1 drivers. Stock settings in the AMD control panel
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All 10 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT VR Capture (non-public) Beta
• FCAT VR Beta 18 (non-public)
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution

10 VR Game benchmark suite & 1 synthetic test

Synthetic

• OpenVR Benchmark

SteamVR Games

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Borderlands 2
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Half Life: Alyx
• No Man’s Sky
• Pavlov
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our ten VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution as we benchmark the Red Devil RX 6600 XT to see how it compares with the EVGA RTX 3060 Black.

The OpenVR benchmark ranks the RX 6600 XT and the RTX 3060 almost identically.

But we really want to see gaming benchmarks. First up, Assetto Corsa Competizione.

Half Life: Alyx

Half Life: Alyx uses an adaptive/dynamic scaling algorithm which uses a card’s performance headroom to subsample in demanding scenes and to supersample in less demanding scenes. We used its console commands to lock the SteamVR resolution to 100% so that it did not supersample or subsample and we set the graphics preset to High.

Here is the frametime plot for Half Life Alyx.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6600 XT delivered 114.87 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses, but 222 (4%) of its frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 managed 114.43 unconstrained FPS with no Warp misses but with 2 dropped frames and 399 (6%) synthetic frames.

Half Life: Alyx isn’t particularly demanding unless the Super Resolution increased in SteamVR settings, but unless console commands are used, the game will automatically subsample or supersample as needed and it will run fine with High settings on both cards. Unfortunately, while playing the game, Warp misses happened too frequently with the 6600 XT to mar an otherwise good VR experience.

Next, we will check out another demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

Here is the No Man’s Sky Frametime plot. We set the settings to Standard, but we also set the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgraded to FXAA+TAA. Although DLSS is available for RTX cards and the Quality setting improves performance without impacting image quality significantly, we did not test with it.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs.

The RX 6600 XT delivered 76.91 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but 3221 (50%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 produced 103.61 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, and it only required 191 (3%) synthetic frames.

Although, the RTX 3060 gives a better experience over the RX 6600 XT in No Man’s Sky using the Standard preset, it isn’t strong enough to play on the Enhanced setting without synthesizing frames.

Next we check out Pavlov.

Pavlov

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Pavlov in VR. Pavlov is the most popular multiplayer VR shooter with a primary focus on its community. Realistic fast-paced combat is a large part of its core experience, and even tanks have been added.

We benchmarked using the training sessions with the highest settings.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the details:

The RX 6600 XT delivered 165.97 unconstrained FPS with no dropped, synthesized frames, or Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivered 175.96 unconstrained FPS also with no dropped, synthesized frames, or Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 delivers an identical VR experience to the RX 6600 XT although it has a little more performance headroom. We recommend that it be used for increasing the SteamVR render resolution or for playing at 120Hz.

Next we will check out another demanding VR game, Project CARS 2

Project CARS 2

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding. We are disappointed with Project CARS 3, and will continue to use the older game instead for VR benching.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings and we prefer playing with SMAA Ultra.

We used maximum settings including for Motion Blur although it looks best to us on Low or Medium. For lesser cards, we would also recommend lowering grass and reflections to maximize framerate delivery as motion smoothing or reprojection tends to cause visible artifacting.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6600 XT managed 100.15 unconstrained FPS with 17 dropped frame and 17 Warp misses but 566 (6%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 achieved 77.43 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frame and with 1 Warp miss but with 4820 (50%) synthetic frames. It had no Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 on our medium VR settings is unsatisfactory for both cards and we would recommend lowering individual settings or even lower the resolution a bit as needed to stay out of reprojection. The RX 6600 XT is faster, but the VR experience is spoiled by dropped frames and Warp misses.

Let’s benchmark Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked Skyrim VR using its highest settings but we did not increase or Supersample the resolution.

Here are the frametime results.

Here are the details of our comparative runs as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6600 XT delivered 128.30 unconstrained FPS with no dropped or synthetic frames and there were no Warp misses.

The RTX 3060 managed 129.39 unconstrained FPS, also with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 26 synthetic frames were produced

Both cards deliver an identical experience with a little bit of performance headroom to add mods or to Supersample.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 10 VR game benching suite. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are outstanding and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its highest settings and we left the Pixel Density at 100%.. Here is the frametime chart. Please note that the Pixel Density is 100%.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6600 XT produced 120.55 unconstrained FPS with 7 dropped frames and 7 Warp misses, but 114 (2%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3060 managed 115.00 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses and 37 (1%) synthetic frames were generated.

Playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game maximum settings and 100% Pixel Density should be similar for both of our cards although the RX 6600 XT has too many dropped frames and Warp misses.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

It is great to see AMD and NVIDIA delivering two mainstream cards that are both priced below $400 – if they can be found at all at MSRP – that drop the entry price for VR. The EVGA RTX 3060 Black sits in a unique position as the fastest $329 MSRP video card available for VR and it offers reasonable performance for use with a Valve Index, and no doubt it would offer excellent performance for an original Vive, Rift CV1, or even for a Rift S. The Red Devil RX 6600 XT at above $400 should be slightly faster, but unfortunately it suffers from microstuttering together with excessive dropped frames and Warp misses, and we suggest that AMD’s driver team should address this.

Both the RTX 3060 and the RX 6600 XT can max multiple VR games in our benching suite if the resolution is left at 100% or slightly subsampled, or if the in-game settings are lowered. But if someone is going to spend $1000 for a premium HMD, it makes sense to pair it with a faster video card like the RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition which is MSRP/SEP priced below the Red Devil RX 6600 XT. However, one cannot pair a high resolution headset like the Reverb G2 or the Vive Pro 2 with either card.

The RTX 3060 is a good card for high/medium quality PC VR at a rather bargain price of $329 – if it can be purchased at this price – and the RTX 3060 Ti is a more solid offering for $70 more. Unfortunately, the RX 6600 XT at $379 barely matches the experience of the RX 3060 at $329 – never mind the Red Devil at above $400 – and it needs some attention from AMD’s driver team before we can give it a solid recommendation for VR. We did not test DLSS in VR nor did we use FSR and will leave that comparison for a future review.

Next up, we plan to review Myst which launches tomorrow on Steam also in VR. It features ray tracing in the pancake version and DLSS in both versions.

Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!

Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever by developer XRGames and publishers XR Games and Sony Pictures Virtual Reality, launches today on Steam. It is an arcade style light gun wave shooter that adds split-second racing mechanics while featuring just one mechanic – headshots that slow down time. As a fan of the 2009 ‘Zombieland’ film who also enjoyed the sequel because of the excellent cast, dark humor, and over-the-top zombie-killing action, it was hard to believe that any VR shooter would be able to live up to the franchise.

Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever is set in the Zombieland universe featuring Tallahassee, Wichita, Columbus and Little Rock. Little Rock is voiced by the movie’s Abigail Breslin who does most of the narration but Tallahassee is voiced by Woody Harrelson’s brother Brett. You play as a survivor who has been recruited by “some rich guy” to enter his “Zombie Invitational” tournament that is run by each of the four main characters. They teach you how to play, often commenting sarcastically when you fail. And you will fail many times until you get each course down because it cannot be played with guns blazing, but rather requires precise headshots and high accuracy to succeed.

Inside the rich guy’s mansion, there are four main areas. Little Rock handles all of the levels which are divided into Rookie, Advanced, Expert, and Pro which are further subdivided into sub-levels of increasing difficulty. By completing a level, you progress to unlock the next level finishing with the Pro Invitational.

Tallahassee controls the player’s guns and upgrades, while Wichita and Columbus handle achievements. A training range with popup targets provide more challenges.

Zombieland: Headshot Fever requires that a player complete each level as quickly as possible. Scores don’t matter. Rather, you need to double-tap zombie heads one right after the other without missing. As soon as the level starts, you must shoot a zombie head quickly so that it glows yellow, and then immediately pull off a second headshot to unlock Adrenaline mode, the equivalent of “bullet time”, that triggers its slow-motion system. Time slows down allowing the player to set up the next headshot and then the next until all the zombies in each area are eliminated. Although the actions are very repetitive, the gameplay is incredibly addictive.

Each of the levels except for the Invitational are on rails, so it is up to the player to memorize the sequence and patterns of the attacking zombies so the next run can improve on the previous one. The zombies have different patterns, strengths, and attacking abilities. Some of them energize the other zombies, while others call for reinforcements until they are taken out. Multiple zombies throw objects at the player who must shoot them in the air or he will be stunned. There are big zombie tanks that require multiple shots – but never shoot a harmless “Homer” or you will be time-penalized.

Each level features challenges to unlock new guns and upgrades. Shooting zombies also gives you toilet paper which is the game’s currency used to buy upgrades and to enter the Invitational. The player remains in one place unable to dodge or move but teleports to progress after clearing zombies from an area. It’s all about quickly scoring accurate headshots, one right after the other. If you miss, you will probably be mobbed and just one zombie swipe will end your life.

Before each level, a player may pick any loadout that is unlocked. Pistols are are the primary weapon with unlimited bullets. Secondary guns like the shotgun or automatic weapons have limited ammo that must be used sparingly, but their use instantly activates Adrenaline mode. Dual-wielding weapons while simultaneously targeting zombies on each side of the player is a zombie-killing dream come true. Remaining continuously in Adrenaline mode is absolutely necessary to get the best times on each level. Strategy is involved and there is just enough variety to keep things interesting for many hours.

There are plenty of upgrades for the weapons called Perks which include increasing the secondary weapon’s ammo capacity, but you can also unlock laser targeting and auto reload as well as modifications to the Adrenaline system which keep it varied and fun. Two Perks may be used at once. The only issue we found was occasionally with reloading the secondary weapon. You have to eject the magazine and move it into the right position to reload, and sometime the game just wouldn’t cooperate.

Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever is just a lot of fun and far more addictive than expected. Triggering Adrenaline mode and exploding one zombie head after another brings the player a big rush of excitement. It is perfectly designed to encourage the player to beat his own time over and over as well as to compare with the leaderboard of the world’s best. It is also well-suited for playing for short periods of time as each level may be completed in under a minute.

Graphics & Performance

The graphics are simple but good enough for a fast-paced shooter. The headshot animations are explosive, bloody, and well done although the blood can be turned off. The SteamVR version offers multiple settings that allow a “potato” PC to run it, to Ultra for faster graphics cards. Visual options include post processing, MSAA, anisotropic filtering, real time shadows, as well as increasing the in-game resolution (Supersampling)

Unfortunately, FCAT VR does not work with the game. However, using the SteamVR developer tab overlay we were able to track the frametimes and frame rates. Using a RTX 3080 with a Vive Pro 2, we were able to manage the Ultra Preset at 100% SteamVR’s Render Resolution (3090×3090) without any reprojection. Using a RTX 3060 we played smoothly on Ultra with a Valve Index (at SteamVR’s default 2016×2240) although we dropped the in-game Supersampling down to 120% from the preset’s 140% to make sure a steady 90 FPS was delivered.

Conclusion

Zombieland: Headshot Fever is a blast to play. At $19.95 it will make any fan of the Zombieland franchise happy as well as keep arcade light gun shooter fans occupied for many hours. Its simplicity is appealing but it takes practice to get better and better at it. It is all about making accurate headshots and using a great level design that encourages replaying it.

Zombieland: Headshot Fever is available on SteamVR starting today, Thursday, July 29, with a special ten hour live broadcast and thousands of dollars of cash prizes to give away. This SteamVR version includes two extra levels not in the Oculus version, and it also includes the most recent three new levels added to the ‘Kingpin Update’ on Quest.

Recommended! It is not just “another Zombie shooter”.

Although we received a Steam Beta key from the publisher to preview this game, we will buy it for our own permanent library whenever we feel the need for a quick zombie-killing fix. If FCAT VR is updated to work with Zombieland: Headshot Fever, we may also include it as a benchmark in BTR’s future reviews.

Next up, Rodrigo is hard at work testing the GeForce 471.41 driver which is expected by the weekend, and he is also testing the Radeon Adrenalin 21.7.2 beta driver that was released yesterday, due next week. We also plan to bring you something special in August.

Happy VR Gaming!

BTR received a Pro 2 review kit from HTC/VIVE nearly four weeks ago and we have been working to achieve the highest performance with the best visuals using a RTX 3080 Ti. The Pro 2 is a high resolution VR headset with a per eye resolution of 2448×2448 that will cause even the fastest video cards to struggle at SteamVR’s default 150% Render Resolution.

BTR has been reviewing and benchmarking VR games and hardware since 2016 when we started out with a Rift CV1 (1080×1200) and then upgraded to a Vive Pro (1440×1600) two years later, and then a Valve Index (1440×1600) especially for its wider field of vision (FoV) and higher refresh rate options 144Hz/120Hz vs. 90Hz. Recently we reviewed a Reverb G2 on loan from Hewlett Packard (HP) and also a Reverb G1 (both at 2160×2160).

The original Pro and the Index, both at 1440×1600 per eye resolution, although they are a noticeable upgrade over the Rift CV1’s 1080×1200 per eye resolution, the “screendoor” effect (the unlighted space between pixels) is still visible. However, the Reverb G2 has almost eliminated it by using improved lenses and and an LCD display at 2160×2160 resolution per eye to earn its reputation as the best headset for VR sims even if its tracking is not perfect. Now Vive uses an even higher “5K” resolution LCD for the Pro 2 with 2448×2448 per eye native resolution and with a new bespoke dual stacked Fresnel lens design .

The Reverb G2 at $599 and the Vive Pro 2 at $799 are competitors and they are both aimed at professional or prosumer consumers rather than strictly at VR gamers like the Index, Cosmos, or the Quest 2 are. Although the G2 is a complete $599 VR kit, the Pro 2 headset by itself costs $799 and it still requires two base stations ($199 each) and two controllers ($199 each) making the full Pro 2 kit considerably more expensive. The Pro 2’s gaming advantages lie primarily with its outstanding base station tracking although the G2 can also be set up in a mixed VR configuration also by using Vive Trackers and dongles with base stations and SteamVR controllers.

Since 2016, BTR has continued to focus on VR, and not only do we review select VR games, we benchmark and chart their frametimes and unconstrained framerates (the performance headroom) with multiple video cards from AMD and NVIDIA using FCAT VR. Because the Pro 2 is the newest high resolution headset, we picked the RTX 3080 Ti to test the performance of 6 representative VR games “best playable” settings. The new Ti about 10% faster than a RTX 3080 or less than 5% slower than a RTX 3090 and its performance should be in the same class as a RX 6800 or RX 6900 XT.

Let’s take a closer look at the Pro 2 which launched earlier this month and its evolution from the Pro which launched in 2018. The improvements between the original Pro and the Pro 2 lie primarily in 3 areas: (1) improved lenses, (2) wider field of view (FoV), and (3) a higher resolution LCD.

• New bespoke dual stacked lens
• Wider FoV
• New high resolution “5K” LCD panel (higher refresh rate to 120Hz, brighter, lower persistence, reduced mura, better contrast and colors)

Because they are so similar, we were able to simply switch out the original Pro and install the new Pro 2 in its place taking care only to replace the link box and update the software. Everything else except for minor cosmetic differences/colors are the same.

Unfortunately, the Pro 2 sports the same only fair headphones/audio solution and the same poor microphone, but the same basic well-constructed/well-balanced headset with the same weight, ergonomics, and layout that was introduced in 2018. We had hoped that they might have made made more improvements but HTC/Vive is concentrating on VR for industry with their completely redesigned and lighter Focus 3 so they only made the barest of necessary upgrades to an already solid headset.

We find that the screen door effect (SDE) is completely gone using the Pro 2 and its overall clarity is even better than the G2. Although god rays and even excessive brightness are still issues for many, and some OLED purists are offended by an LED display, the Pro 2’s increased clarity is impressive, and the widened FoV for those whose face fits the headset or who take the time to modify it is the difference between wearing small googles and wearing a scuba mask.

By using the Pro 2 and comparing its visuals to the older headsets, VR becomes more immersive, the colors are better, the clarity and detailing are much more impressive, and even small text can be easily read. We even feel it edges out the G2 in 3 areas: FoV, larger sweet spot, and slightly higher overall clarity. But the Pro 2’s biggest positives are for its ability to be used wirelessly and that it is a native SteamVR headset although Vive chose to pair it with their own Vive Console. Another plus is its ability to handle 120Hz/120FPS for action games. It’s big negative is its high price – $799 for just the headset (+$400 for the base stations/controllers) compared with $599 for the G2 which is a complete kit and has already been discounted substantially by some etailers.

After spending nearly a month with the Pro 2, we sent the review sample back to Vive and purchased our own headset from Newegg to use as our go-to set for VR and also for future benchmarking to compare performance with the Reverb G2 and with the Valve Index. Overall – despite its faults – it is the highest resolution headset available and it works well for VR benchmarking and gaming. However, it is a challenge to find the right game settings and the appropriate SteamVR Render Resolution to deliver an enjoyable VR experience without exceeding even the fastest video card’s capabilities.

Before we check performance, let’s get started by unboxing the Pro 2 on the following page.

Unboxing

The Vive Pro 2 review sample kit arrived in the same style box as our 2018 review sample of the original Vive Pro. Everything between the two kits are identical except for the headsets and the cable link boxes. Here is the full unboxing of the Vive Pro kit that is the same for the Pro 2.

We tested and benchmarked the Pro 2 review sample for 3 weeks and then returned it to Vive as we had received our own Pro 2 headset that we purchased from Newegg for $729 from their preorder promotion. Following is the unboxing of the retail headset. If you already have an original Vive or Pro setup, you are ready for the Pro 2 – just swap the headsets and the link boxes – and follow the software prompts.

We like Viveport for the ability to preview and play many VR games and we will take advantage of their free two month subscription included with our purchase of the Pro 2 headset.

In the box you will find the Pro 2 headset, the link box, and the necessary DisplayPort and USB 3.0 cables..

The contents of the box are below.

Below we see the Pro 2 (left) go face-to-face with the the original Pro. Only the colors have changed.

Top down view below. The ear cushions are cosmetically different but it has the same decent positional audio but it is not as good as the Index audio.

The new design does a much better job of accommodating glasses wearers. Easy adjustments for tightening the headset remain permanent until changed which makes it easy to remove or to put on the headset.

Aside from the well-worn out faceplate of the original Pro, it’s difficult to tell the headsets apart – except by looking at the lenses..

The VIVE Pro 2 uses a new bespoke dual stacked lens design paired with a “5K” LED panel. Actually, it’s “2.5K” to each eye (4896×2448 total; 2448×2448 per eye) which is a huge amount of pixels for any video card to handle. By comparison, the original Pro currently boasts 1440×1600 pixels per eye. Once the sweet spot is found, one can see that the FoV has been widened to what Vive calls 120 degrees – probably not, but slightly wider than the Index and definitely wider than the original Pro. Although we lik the deeper blacks of OLED panels, the Pro 2’s LCD is a superior panel and its blacks are deeper than the Index and good enough for Elite Dangerous.

The base station external tracking of the Pro 2 remains outstanding and it is the single factor that makes it an overall better choice over the Reverb G2. Although the G2’s positional head tracking is responsive, some rotational latency may be noticed at times, and positional controller tracking jitter is more noticeable for shooters that is not visible with the Pro 2.

Setup

The setup for the Vive Pro requires installing two base stations on opposite sides of the room with the VR gamer in the middle. Usually they are mounted high up on a wall for tracking which is much more complex and time-consuming than setting up the self-contained tracking of the Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) G2. Refer to BTR’s original review of the Pro for setup procedures. The main difference is that the Pro only needed SteamVR whereas the Pro 2 requires the new Vive Console to run alongside it.

There are currently five settings in the Vive Console to cover most capable video cards from a GTX 1070 to a RTX 3090. However, to take full advantage of the Pro 2’s high native resolution with a fast video card, only Ultra and Extreme should be considered. Unfortunately, setting Extreme for demanding VR games which requires exactly 120 FPS delivered at a strict cadence – never falling below 120 FPS – will require faster video cards than are currently available. If exactly 120 FPS cannot be delivered, then the framerate is automatically halved to 60 FPS which is not ideal and somewhat defeats the purpose of using the Extreme setting in the first place.

A reason for considering Extreme 120Hz is for visually undemanding action games or for games where the player may be satisfied with a 60 FPS delivery which is still a better option than 45 FPS (from using Ultra/90 FPS where the framerate is also halved). We tested and benchmarked the Pro 2 on Ultra and Extreme settings since we want to take advantage of the full 2448×2448 per eye native resolution of the panel and also look for some general rules for setting the SteamVR Render Resolution for the best VR experience.

Motion Smoothing & Delivering framerates at an Exact Cadence

Benchmarking VR is quite complex due to the fact that VR needs to sustain a fixed framerate target locked to 90 FPS (or 120Hz; but we will use 90Hz in our following examples). If a PC can not meet that 90 FPS target, the frame rate is halved to 45 FPS to make sure that there is no judder or it may cause a VR type of motion sickness.

A game cannot exceed 90 FPS otherwise the player will see tearing in the HMD and may also feel sick. A VR game’s delivered framerates simply cannot vary from a locked framerate or the player may get VR sick. It is essential to a great VR experience that framerates are locked to either 45 FPS or to 90 FPS.

A TV uses Motion Smoothing to create a new frame between two existing frames to smooth out and increase the framerate. Unfortunately this adds latency so it must be adapted differently for VR. Motion Smoothing is used when a VR application can’t deliver exactly 90 FPS. By examining the last two delivered frames, Motion Smoothing predicts the future motion and animation to extrapolate a new in-between frame. Synthesizing new frames keeps the current application at the full 90Hz framerate, advances motion forward properly, and avoids judder.

One may think of VR benchmarking in terms of how often the framerate meets or does not meet the 90 FPS standard for a premium VR experience. The more often performance drops below 90 FPS, the worse the VR experience becomes. SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing (or Vive’s Motion Compensation) helps to reduce potential motion sickness by dropping to 45 FPS, but it is a degraded visual experience.

Since VR is personal to each individual’s tolerances, it’s difficult to determine what is or what is not “acceptable”. When the framerates are downgraded to 45 FPS there are some artifacting and ghosting especially of objects in motion because of Motion Smoothing that may often be perceived as a blur with some temporal displacement.

Motion Smoothing does motion prediction by inserting a synthetic frame, every other frame with a cadence that looks something like this:

Frame 0: Frame created by the GPU

Frame 1: Frame synthesized by Motion Smoothing

Frame 2: Frame created by the GPU

Frame 3: Frame synthesized by Motion Smoothing

Frame 4: Frame created by the GPU … and so on.

Even though there is a downgraded visual experience with 45 FPS Motion Smoothing compared with 90 FPS, it is generally better to have Motion Smoothing than not to have it. If the framerates cannot be locked at 90 FPS and do not drop to a locked on 45 FPS, then frames will be dropped and the resulting judder may result in unease and/or VR sickness. Motion Smoothing will lock you into 45 FPS if your frame rate is anywhere between 45 and 90 FPS. The lower frame rate is in exchange for a smoother frame delivery. Motion Smoothing scaling may also synthesize two or even three frames for every frame delivered.

Why the Vive Console’s Motion Compensation is not the same as SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing

SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing comes with a cost of reduced image quality due to synthesized and extrapolated frames which are also sometimes called “reprojection” and it unfortunately is even more pronounced with Vive’s Motion Compensation. We have witnessed it cause some very strange and jarring artifacting with shimmering or bubbling and distortion on object edges that can be very distracting.

Although the Vive Console’s Motion Compensation is supposedly the same as SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing according to Vive, because the new lens and display require its own algorithms, it is visibly inferior to Steam’s solution and we hope it is a work-in-progress. Its distortion varies from game to game, being particularly bad in Elite Dangerous on higher settings and in racings sims, to barely noticeable in other VR games.

Because of its current flaws, we benchmark with Motion Compensation off and aim for a continuously delivered 90 FPS requiring a higher standard for our RTX 3080 Ti than if we left the Vive Console at default. We also recommend that a VR gamer test each game to see if Motion Compensation works properly without annoying artifacting; and if not, play with it off and lower settings or drop the SteamVR Render Resolution to ensure that 90 FPS are being constantly delivered.

A VR gamer can view delivered framerates using the SteamVR console under the “Developer” tab and check the setting to allow you to see framerates/Hz in the HMD overlay. You need to aim for all-green with maybe a few orange bars here and there for an ideal custom VR experience.

Variability with setting SteamVR’s Render Resolution why it may be lowered from its default 150%

There is variability built into SteamVR so that a custom render resolution is set each time it is started and it may vary depending on the PC’s processes that are running when it runs its test. Generally, for high end video cards (RTX 3080 through RTX 3090) it is set at 3900×3900 per eye which is SteamVR’s default 150% Render Resolution Render resolution which automatically scales to whatever it thinks is best for your system while the Vive Console handles display resolution.

Unfortunately, even a RTX 3090 cannot handle the demands of 3900×3900 per eye resolution at a minimum and steady delivery of 90 FPS for most modern visually demanding VR games so we have to find another way to improve performance without impacting visuals too badly – nor do we want to use Vive’s current implementation of Motion Compensation. This will require lowering the SteamVR Render Resolution on a per app basis.

Some may question why it appears necessary that 150% Render Resolution (3900×3900) is used in the first place when the Pro 2’s native panel resolution is only a per eye 2448×2448. This is because of lens barrel distortion and the way VR images are warped and then adjusted in software.

All VR headset lenses distort the image presented on a virtual reality screen which has to be warped by software to counteract the optical effects of the lenses. Instead of being square, the images appear curved and distorted until viewed through appropriate lenses.

VR platforms typically use a two-step process that first renders a normal image (above left) and afterward uses a post-processing pass that warps the image to the HMD’s view (right). The original Pro’s and the Index’ display resolution is 1440×1600 but the SteamVR Render Resolution is 2016×2240. The G2’s display resolution is 2160×2160 but the SteamVR Render Resolution increases to 3168×3096 whereas the Pro 2’s display resolution is 2448×2448 and the SteamVR Render Resolution is 3090×3090.

VR does not use simple upscaling like Supersampling a flat display. In VR, if you render at 150% of a panel’s native resolution, you still need to assign actual color/light values to the pixels, and assigning values from that 150% render resolution to 100% pixels isn’t straightforward. SteamVR uses complex algorithms for image scaling which may not be for only “clarity”; rather they’re methods of fitting an image rendered at one resolution to the display of a different resolution. Motion Smoothing/reprojection/frame synthesis may complicate it further as headsets apparently have to do some color correction when using it.

SteamVR has apparently decided that approximately 150% is optimum for fast video cards since the first HMD generation and it appears that they haven’t updated their formula to account for the high-resolution panels of the G2/Pro 2.

Increasing the render resolution to 150% is efficient especially for the pixels in the center of the viewing area because they are close to the ideal 1:1 native resolution after applying a 1.3x to 1.4x lens barrel distortion compensation. It’s done because the barrel distortion compensation countering the distortion caused by the lenses enlarges what is viewed in the center of the viewing area. Not all pixels in a VR HMD have the same value to the viewer because of distortion that is somewhat analogous to the human eye – the center of our vision is for detail while the periphery is better at noticing quick motion.

SteamVR’s frame buffer is about 150% of a panel’s native resolution but that extra resolution is wasted on the viewing periphery where the lens distortion compresses objects. In this case, it is rather wasteful like using pancake full screen Supersampling for anti-aliasing. Here is where NVIDIA’s Lens Matched Shading would be really helpful if the devs would implement it.

The problem is that the Pro 2’s native per eye resolution at 2448×2448 using SteamVR’s default 150% render resolution is scaled to approximately 3900×3900 per eye and no current GPU can run that resolution at a constant 90 FPS for demanding modern VR games. It is far more demanding than pancake gaming’s Ultra/4K 120 FPS goal.

It appears to us that Vive set a slightly lower base/100% value for the Pro 2 (1.3X compensation for barrel distortion, not 1.4X) but SteamVR’s default 150% render resolution still scales it too high. Actually viewing through the Pro 2’s lenses starting at 100%, at 120% Render Resolution the overall visuals seem to improve to nearly as good as at 150%. Although there are small visual differences that can be seen primarily when switching back and forth, 150% over 120% or even over 100% isn’t generally too noticeable while VR gaming.

It is interesting that Vive makes a compromise when setting Extreme/120Hz which is a much more demanding setting requiring that framerates be delivered above 120Hz in a steady cadence. For Extreme, SteamVR only scales to around 3344×3344 at 150% Render Resolution which evidently uses a lower compensation factor for lens distortion.

Either way, 150% is not practically better than 100% or native resolution for the playing experience compared with bogging down the video card by too high of a Render Resolution. In fact, the image quality of the Pro 2 set to the original Pro’s SteamVR Render Resolution of 2016×2240 is much better on the new HMD and the SDE is eliminated. On the other hand, one cannot increase the Render Resolution or Supersample the original Pro’s image to eliminate the SDE or to match the Pro 2 visuals.

Perhaps Pro 2 gamers may set their SteamVR base global resolution to the panel’s native 2448×2448 resolution and then increase the render resolution on a per app basis as far as it can so long as a constant framerate above 90 FPS (or at least above 45 FPS) is steadily delivered. And forget about Extreme (120%) unless you are simply aiming for a steady 60 FPS.

Next up we give our experiences and a comparison of the Pro 2 with the Reverb G2, Index, and Pro followed by the test configuration before we head to benchmarking. There we will focus on how to maintain the best playable settings for a steadily delivered framerate without the need for synthetic or dropped frames which are especially distressing for simmers.

The Pro 2 VR Experience & Test Configuration

Over the past 4 weeks, we have formed impressions of the similarities and differences between the Pro 2 versus the G2 and also versus the Index and the Pro. The Pro 2’s new LCD panel offer higher contrast and brightness than the original Pro while reducing pixel persistence while also offering better consistency in brightness and in color consistency from one pixel to the next. The Pro 2’s LCD panel improvements allow for better looking text and overall clarity than the older headset and it at least matches what the G2 provides.

The Pro 2 and G2 text are significantly clearer and easy to read over the Pro/Index mostly by virtue of their higher resolution. Higher resolution makes a real difference to overall clarity, and the screendoor effect (SDE) is gone. On the other hand, god rays emanating from high contrast elements are present in all high resolution HMDs that use Fresnel lenses. It is about the same as the Pro/Index. The Pro 2’s field of view appears to be slightly wider than the Index and noticeably wider than the G2 or the Pro.

Comparing simple shooter-type games created for VR, the higher resolution of the Pro 2 over the Index or Pro doesn’t make too much difference – especially since the older headsets can use Supersampling with less demands on the video card. However, games with a lot of detail or text; or even old games like Skyrim – especially when you are looking off into the distance – the Pro 2’s increased resolution makes a big improvement to realism and immersion. It is almost as if a fog lifts by playing with the Pro 2 over playing with the Pro/Index as everything becomes clearer and more detailed.

After much experimentation, we found the visual “sweet spot” for the Pro 2 is better for us than for the G2 or for the older headsets. The only advantage of the original Pro has is its deeper blacks by virtue of its OLED display. In practice, however, we didn’t have any issues playing games like Elite Dangerous and Star Wars: Squadrons where the deep black of space is required. Overall, the image quality of the Pro 2 is better than the Index, the Pro or the G2. However, the G2 wins as the most comfortable of the three headsets due to its comparative lightness although the Pro and the Pro 2 are the most balanced.

VR Gaming with the Vive Pro 2

The Vive Pro 2 is a much more demanding headset than the original Pro or the Valve Index by virtue of its higher resolution. Image resolution has been increased per eye from the Pro’s (or Valve Index’) 1440 x 1600 to 2448 x 2448. This higher resolution gives it exceptional clarity with no screen door effect, but it is also demanding on video cards. By default at the Ultra or Extreme preset, the Vive console uses 150% SteamVR Render Resolution for the Vive Pro 2 which appears to be set to 3900×3900 per eye for high end GeForce cards RTX 3080/3080 Ti/3090 at the time we benchmarked our games.

Some VR gamers prefer to lower the SteamVR Render Resolution which is set at 150% which is often used to compensate for a headset’s lens distortion instead of lowering a game’s preset or by dropping individual settings. At 50% SteamVR Render Resolution, there is a clear degradation of visuals which indicates that the SteamVR Render Resolution slider is working properly. However, at 150% Super Resolution, the frametimes go up and framerates are cut in half (which is bad introducing dropped frames and judder) but the variable way that Motion Compensation adds to visible artifacting precludes us from using it.

Ultimately we decided to test – depending on a games performance – at a SteamVR Render Resolution of 150%, 100%, and even at the panel’s native resolution to try and find the right mix of the best playable settings to remain above 90 FPS.

Please note that FCAT VR doesn’t distinguish dropped frames from synthesized (Motion Compensated/reprojected) frames using the Pro 2 (or the Reverb G2) like it properly does for the Valve Index and the Vive Pro. It is likely that FCAT VR is not fully optimized for the Pro 2 although its results appear to be accurate and in line with fpsVR and the SteamVR developer console overlay.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.3 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Vive Pro 2, on loan from HTC/Vive; the Wireless Adapter is not used for benchmarking
• RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition 12GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz FreeSync monitor
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan)

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 471.11 Game Ready drivers – High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, no optimizations, Vsync is off as set in the NVIDIA control panel
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All 6 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT-VR Capture (latest non-public Beta)
• FCAT-VR (non-public Beta 18)
• SteamVR – at variable render resolutions specified on the charts
• fpsVR

6 VR Game benchmark suite

SteamVR /Epic Platform Games

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• No Man’s Sky
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

Please Note: It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS/120 FPS or to 45 FPS/60 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Next let’s look at the Pro 2’s performance using a RTX 3080 Ti to find the best playable settings for 6 games to maintain framerates above 90 FPS.

Performance Benchmarking “Best Playable Settings” and the Conclusion

All of our games were benchmarked at the panel’s native (or just above it), 100%, or 150% SteamVR resolution or (as noted) with the Vive Console set to Ultra/90Hz or Extreme/120Hz.

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS/120 FPS or to 45 FPS/60 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Before we do our testing with the RTX 3080 Ti, we want to follow up our RTX 3070 Ti testing featuring Skyrim with Motion Compensation On vs. Off.

Motion Compensation does as expected although FCAT VR does not distinguish between dropped and synthesized frames. It increases the synthetic frames generated and inserted in-between frames instead of dropping them keeping the framerate high but at the expense of visual artifacts caused by temporal issues with prediction. It will help make some games more playable but probably should be avoided especially for sims.

Overall, we do not like nor recommend Vive’s Motion Compensation currently as it tends to introduce far more artifacts than SteamVR’s Motion Smoothing. VR gamers should test it for themselves to see which games are tolerable and which are not.

Next we are going to look for playable settings using our RTX 3080 Ti with our six test VR games.

First up, Assetto Corsa Competizione.

Assetto Corsa Competizione

BTR’s sim/racing editor, Sean Kaldahl created the replay benchmark run that we use for both the pancake game and the VR game. It is run at night with 20 cars, lots of geometry, and the lighting effects of the headlights, tail lights, and everything around the track looks spectacular.

iRacing may be more accurate or realistic, but Assetto Corsa Competizione has some appeal because it feels more real than many other racing sims. It delivers the sensation of handling a highly-tuned racing machine driven to its edge. Unfortunately, it is probably the most demanding of the racing sims and it may not yet be well-optimized for VR.

VR High

Here are the frametimes using the VR High preset which is custom set in SteamVR to just above the panel’s native per eye resolution of 2472×2472 at 90Hz/Ultra or at 2464×2464 at 120Hz/Extreme.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3080 Ti at Ultra/90Hz (2472×2472) delivered 95.10 unconstrained FPS with 460 dropped frames (5%) which means it stayed above 90 FPS 95% of the time delivering a decent VR experience but at just above the panel’s native resolution. Individual settings may be dropped to maintain a steady above 90 FPS VR High experience if this lower resolution is acceptable.

At Extreme/120Hz (2464×2464) it delivered 95.46 unconstrained FPS together with 5968 dropped (48%) frames which means almost half of the frames will be dropped (or synthesized using Motion Compensation). 120Hz may be better suited for future video flagship cards.

VR Low

Here are the frametimes using the VR Low preset at Ultra/SteamVR default 150% Render Resolution and at Extreme/150% and 100% Steam Render Resolutions.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

At 90Hz/150% SteamVR default Render Resolution (3924×3924), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 90.43 unconstrained FPS with 2481 (27%) dropped frames

At 120Hz/150% Render Resolution (3376×3376), it delivered 105.10 unconstrained FPS together with 6363 dropped (50%) frames making it unsuitable for play unless Motion Compensation can be used to deliver a steady 60 FPS at this very high default SteamVR 150% Render Resolution.

At 120Hz/100% Render Resolution (2756×2756), our RTX 3080 Ti delivered 130.88 unconstrained FPS together with 739 dropped (6%) frames making it acceptable for the VR Low setting. It suggests that Ultra/90Hz would give the best VR experience for ACC and there would be enough performance headroom to raise individual settings from the Low preset and/or the Render Resolution above 100%.

Next, we check out Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous

Elite Dangerous is a popular space sim built using the COBRA engine. It is hard to find a repeatable benchmark outside of the training missions.

A player will probably spend a lot of time piloting his space cruiser while completing a multitude of tasks as well as visiting space stations and orbiting a multitude of different planets (~400 billion). Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a very dedicated following of players.

VR High

We picked the High Preset and we set the Field of View to its maximum. Here are the Elite Dangerous 100% Render Resolution frametimes on VR High using both 120Hz and 90Hz settings.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

Using SteamVR’s 100% Ultra/90Hz (3184×3184) Render Resolution, the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 95.00 unconstrained FPS with 21 dropped frames making it acceptable for optimum play.

Using SteamVR’s 100% Extreme/120Hz (2756×2756) Render Resolution, it delivered 111.17 unconstrained FPS together with 4191 dropped (49%) frames making it largely unsuitable for play except at 60 FPS with Motion Compensation (if it works properly).

The experience playing Elite Dangerous at High settings is acceptable using the Pro 2 at 100% SteamVR Render Resolution but we may want to consider the experience of playing on VR Medium with a higher Render Resolution also.

VR Medium

Here are the frametimes testing VR Medium on 90Hz and 120Hz comparing SteamVR’s 100% Render Resolution performance with 150%.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

Using the VR Medium preset at 90Hz/100% Render Resolution (3184×3184), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 149.07 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames.

At 90Hz/150% Render Resolution (3900×3900; chart has typo), it delivered 98.92 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

At 120Hz/100% Render Resolution (2756×2756), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 159.11 unconstrained FPS with 6 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

At 90Hz/150% Render Resolution (3376×3376), it delivered 130.40 unconstrained FPS with 259 (3%) dropped frames.

This above results indicate that we can play Elite Dangerous on the Medium preset at either Ultra or Extreme settings up to the default 150% SteamVR Render Resolution, or we can use the High preset at up to 100% SteamVR Render Resolution at Ultra/90Hz in the Vive Console without needing Motion Compensation.

Let’s continue with another demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

Here is the No Man’s Sky Frametime plot. We set the settings to Enhanced which is above Low but below High, and we also set the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgraded to FXAA+TAA.

We also set the DLSS setting to Balanced which is below Quality but above Performance and Ultra Performance in an effort to maintain as much performance as possible without compromising image quality too much.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs at 90Hz/100% SteamVR Render Resolution and at 120Hz/100%.

Here are the details.

Using the Vive Console Ultra/90Hz preset at SteamVR’s 100% Render Resolution (3204×3204), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 97.03 unconstrained FPS with 256 (3%) dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

Using the Extreme/120Hz preset at SteamVR’s 100% Render Resolution (2756×2756), it delivered 114.49 unconstrained FPS with 3530 (38%) dropped frames.

We would suggest dropping a setting if necessary so the RTX 3080 Ti can deliver a constant 90 FPS at Ultra/100% Render Resolution. It has a superior image even using the Enhanced Preset with 100% Render Resolution and it plays and looks very nice using DLSS Balanced. DLSS is a lifesaver in this regard as without it, it would not be possible to play at 90 FPS even on Enhanced without dropping or synthesizing frames.

Next, we will check out another demanding VR game, Project CARS 2.

Project CARS 2

There is a real sense immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings and we prefer playing with SMAA over using MSAA.

We use all settings on Medium with everything else on. If necessary, we recommend lowering grass and reflections further to maximize framerate delivery as motion smoothing or reprojection tends to cause visible artifacting.

Here is the frametime plot where this time we benchmarked Ultra/90Hz and Extreme/120Hz with the panel’s native resolution and also at 100%.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

Using the Medium settings at 90Hz/Native Render Resolution (2472×2472), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 101.33 unconstrained FPS with 10 dropped frames.

At 90Hz/100% Render Resolution (3224×3224), it delivered 60.45 unconstrained FPS with 4602 (49%) dropped frames.

At 120Hz/Native Render Resolution (2456×2456), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 66.38 unconstrained FPS with 52 dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

At 120Hz/100% Render Resolution (2780×2780), it delivered 77.47 unconstrained FPS with 4006 (39%) dropped frames.

At either Native or at 100% Render Resolution, The Pro 2 is able to deliver 60 FPS steady using the Extreme/120Hz setting which may be an acceptable option for some. Otherwise Medium settings on the Ultra/90Hz at the panel’s native resolution may be a better option for others.

Let’s benchmark Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked Skyrim VR using its highest settings but we did not adjust in-game Supersampling.

Here are the frametime results.

Here are the details of our comparative runs as reported by FCAT-VR.

Using Skyrim’s highest settings at 90Hz/Native Render Resolution (2464×2464), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 219.58 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frame.

At 90Hz/100% Render Resolution (3184×3184), it delivered 122.85 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frame.

At 90Hz/150% (SteamVR Default) Render Resolution (3900×3900), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 97.27 unconstrained FPS with 2781 (22%) dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

At 120Hz/100% Render Resolution (2732×2732), it delivered 156.40 unconstrained FPS with 372 (2%) dropped frames and 1 Warp miss.

At 120Hz/150% Render Resolution (3344×3344), it delivered 124.32 unconstrained FPS with 4891 (29%) dropped frames.

As before, raising or lowering the SteamVR Render Resolution is a great way to adjust the performance. Skyrim VR cannot be played without dropping or synthesizing frames at maxed out in game settings at SteamVR’s default 150% Render Resolution. Fortunately, it looks like 120% is an attainable compromise for a RTX 3080 Ti and the visuals are not degraded substantially compared with 150%.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s Pro 2 VR test games. It is a first person survival horror adventure RPG with a strong emphasis on crafting. Its visuals using the Unreal 4 engine are outstanding and it makes good use of physics for interactions.

We benchmarked Saints and Sinners using its highest settings, but we left the Pixel Density at its default in game 100%. Here is the frametime chart using both Vive Console Ultra and Extreme Presets at 100% and at 150% SteamVR Render Resolution settings.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

Using Saints & Sinner’s highest settings at 90Hz/100% Render Resolution (3184×3184), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 106.30 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames.

At 90Hz/150% (SteamVR Default) Render Resolution (3900×3900), it delivered 79.05 unconstrained FPS with 2827 (47%) dropped frames.

At 120Hz/100% Render Resolution (2756×2756), the RTX 3080 Ti delivered 132.38 unconstrained FPS with 437 (5%) dropped frames.

At 120Hz/150% Render Resolution (3404×3404), it delivered 107.56 unconstrained FPS with 4133 (48%) dropped frames.

The best Pro 2 settings for The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using a RTX 3080 Ti to avoid either Motion Compensation or dropped frames are the highest in-game settings using the Vive Console at Ultra/90Hz and at 100% SteamVR Render Resolution.

Using a RTX 3090 may allow the Render Resolution to be increased while using a RTX 3080 may require dialing back settings or lowering the Render Resolution a bit. It takes experimentation coupled with checking the SteamVR developer overlay in the headset to find the best playable settings.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

The “Best” HMD

There is no such thing as the “best” HMD unless you are just talking about specs, in which case, the Pro 2 wins by virtue of its higher resolution. VR is more “alive” and immersive using the Pro 2 over the original Pro or the Index. Unfortunately, at $799 the Pro 2 – by itself without considering the base stations and controllers costs – is much more expensive than the Reverb G2 at $599. The G2 setup is also less complex and time-consuming. The advantages that the Pro 2 has over the G2 are with its more precise tracking, wider FoV, and its ability to use wireless for a completely untethered experience.

If you are a racing or flight sim enthusiast, the G2 may be a better choice over the Pro 2. However, for action games and especially for standing games or for shooters where precise tracking is critical, the Pro 2 is a better choice – if price is no object. Unfortunately, we find the Pro 2 to be overpriced at $799 as a consumer headset as Vive shifts to industry VR away from the consumer market. But if a VR gamer already has a top video card and a Vive headset/base station tracking, then the Pro 2 may be an excellent almost drop-in upgrade solution.

We wish to extend our thanks to HTC for loaning us a Pro 2, and we enjoyed testing and evaluating their new VR headset. We like it so much that we purchased a Pro 2 from Newegg for our own enjoyment as well as for future benchmarking.

Unfortunately, Vive software still appears to be a work in progress – especially in regard to Motion Smoothing – and it appears that a default SteamVR target of 150% Render Resolution is simply too high for this generation of video cards. As long as a gamer is willing to tweak his Pro 2 and per-application settings, the Pro 2 is an outstanding VR headset for gaming.

Next up we are going to review our “off grid” mostly solar-powered office followed by a 1TB SSD review before we return to VR. We will continue to benchmark the Pro 2 and will also follow-up this review with another showdown with the Reverb G2 using the top AMD and NVIDIA video cards.

Happy VR Gaming!

BTR received the RTX 3070 Ti 8GB Founders Edition (FE) from NVIDIA and we have been testing its performance by benchmarking 25 games and five VR games using the new Vive Pro 2, and also by overclocking it with an emphasis on ray tracing and DLSS. Although the RTX 3070 Ti is a gaming card, we have added workstation, SPEC, and GPGPU benches. Although we feature the Vive Pro 2 to see if a RTX 2080 Ti / RTX 3070/Ti class of card can power its extreme resolution, this is not a review of the new headset yet.

We are going to compare performance using eight top cards to see where the RTX 3070 Ti FE fits in – the RTX 3070 Ti, 3080 Ti FE, the RTX 3090 FE, the RTX 3080 FE, as well as versus the reference RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and the Red Devil RTX 6900 XT. However, because of supply/demand issues, all suggested pricing is meaningless as only a very lucky few gamers will get them at or close to MSRP/SEP.

NVIDIA indicates that the RTX 3070 Ti has been in full production and stockpiled for over a month, so they are already in the hands of retailers and have been there for weeks so they can build supply. Even so it will still sell out probably within a few minutes or less because the demand is incredibly high. Fortunately, the end of the COVID-19 and Crypto pandemics are in view and a new ‘Roaring 20s’ for gamers may soon appear on the horizon with lower prices and better availability by the Autumn.

Specifications

We have already covered Ampere’s features in depth and we have reviewed the RTX 3070, the 3080 Ti’s $499 slower brother that comes equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 vRAM. The RTX 3070 Ti is a GDDR6X upgrade over the RTX 3070. Besides its faster memory, the 3070 Ti also has more CUDA Cores and slightly higher clock speeds, as well as a flow-through cooler design similar to the RTX 3080/3080 Ti/3090.

This review will consider whether the new RTX 3070 Ti FE at $599 – $100 more than the RTX 3070 – delivers a good value. Below are the specifications comparing the RTX 3070 Ti with the RTX 2070 as well as with the RTX 3070.

Since the RTX 2080 Ti launched in 2018, there are now more than 130 games and applications supporting NVIDIA’s RTX tech including ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Since all of the vendors and console platforms now support ray tracing technology, we will focus on these newer games. NVIDIA’s Reflex latency-reducing technology is also now supported in 12 of the top 15 competitive shooters and we will follow up this review with an upcoming latency review.

We benchmark using Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and at 3840×2160 using Intel’s Core i9-10900K at 5.1/5.0 GHz and 32GB of T-FORCE DARK Z 3600MHz DDR4 on a EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard. All games and benchmarks use the latest versions, and we use the most recent drivers.

Let’s first unbox the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition before we look at our test configuration

The RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition Unboxing

The Ampere generation RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition is also a completely redesigned Founders Edition and here is the card, unboxed.

Inside the box and beneath the card are warnings, a quick start guide and warranty information, plus the 12-pin to PCIe dual 8-pin dongle that will be required to connect the RTX 3070 Ti to most PSUs.

Just like the other Ampere Founders Editions, the RTX 3070 Ti comes in a “shoebox” style box where the card inside lays flat at a slight incline for display.

The system requirements, contents, and warranty information are printed on the bottom of each box. The RTX 3070 Ti requires a minimum 750W power supply unit, and the case must have space for a 267mm (L) x 112mm (W) two-slot card.

It easily fits in our Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower as it is much smaller than the RTX 3090 and slightly smaller than the RTX 3080 Ti.

The RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition is a moderately heavy 2-slot card with dual fans. As a GDDR6X upgrade over the RTX 3070, the 3070 Ti also has more CUDA Cores and slightly higher clock speeds, as well as the flow-through cooler design similar to the RTX 3080/3080 Ti/3090.

Turning the card over, we see the similar unique design of the top Ampere FEs with the flow-through cooler. This card is designed to keep the GPU cool partly by using a short PCB, and inside the card it is mostly all heatsink fins.

There is very large surface area for cooling so the heat is readily transferred to the fin stack and the dual fans exhaust the heat out of the back of the case and also from the top of the card into the case’s airflow.

The IO panel has a very large air vent and four connectors. The connectors are similar to the Founders Edition of the RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 3080, but the VirtualLink connector for VR is no longer used. Three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors are included, and the HDMI port has been upgraded from 2.0 to 2.1 allowing for 4K/120Hz over a single HDMI cable.

Before we look at overclocking, power and noise, let’s check out our test configuration.

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.3 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock and overclocked, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition 12GB, stock and overclocked, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3090 Founders Edition 24GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3070 Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock and overclocked, on loan from NVIDIA
• Radeon RX 6800 16GB reference version, stock clocks on loan from AMD
• Radeon RX 6800 XT 16GB reference version, stock clocks on loan from AMD
• Red Devil RX 6900 XT 16GB, at Red Devil clocks, loaned by PowerColor and returned in April.
• VIVE PRO 2, on a short-term loan from HTC/VIVE
• 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• BenQ EW3270U 32″ 4K HDR 60Hz FreeSync monitor
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan) – All benchmarking and overclocking performed with the case closed

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 466.47 for (RTX 3080 Ti Press launch drivers) are used for all GeForce cards except for the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3070 which use the new card’s press launch drivers – 466.61.
• Adrenalin 21.5.2 drivers used for the RX 6800 and the RX 6800 XT and 21.3.2 is used for the RX 6900 XT.
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, set in the NVIDIA control panel.
• VSync is off in the control panel and disabled for each game
• AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games
• All games have been patched to their latest versions
• Gaming results show average frame rates in bold including minimum frame rates shown on the chart next to the averages in a smaller italics font where higher is better. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by frametimes (99th-percentile) in ms where lower numbers are better.
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates 21H1 (Build1 9043.1023). DX11 titles are run under the DX11 render path. DX12 titles are generally run under DX12, and multiple games use the Vulkan API.
• Latest DirectX
• MSI’s Afterburner, 4.6.4 beta to overclock the RTX 3070 Ti
• FCAT VR
• fpsVR
• OpenVR Benchmark

Games

Vulkan

• DOOM Eternal
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• World War Z
• Rainbow 6 Siege

DX12

• Resident Evil VIllage
• Metro Exodus – Enhanced Edition & regular edition
• Hitman 3
• Cyberpunk 2077
• DiRT 5
• Godfall
• Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War
• Assassins Creed Valhala
• Watch Dogs Legions
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• F1 2020
• Borderlands 3
• Civilization VI – Gathering Storm Expansion
• Battlefield V
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

DX11

• Days Gone
• Crysis Remastered
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep
• Total War: Three Kingdoms

VR Games

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• No Man’s Sky
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim

Synthetic

• TimeSpy (DX12)
• 3DMark FireStrike – Ultra & Extreme
• Superposition
• Heaven 4.0 benchmark
• AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks
• Blender 2.92 benchmark
• Sandra 2020/21 GPGPU Benchmarks
• SPECworkstation3
• SPECviewperf 2020
• Octane benchmark

NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Here are the NVIDIA Control Panel settings. AMD Adrenalin Control Center Settings

All AMD settings are set so that all optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings. Navi cards are quite capable of high Tessellation unlike earlier generations of Radeons.

Anisotropic Filtering is disabled by default but we always use 16X for all game benchmarks.

Let’s check out overclocking, temperatures and noise next.

Overclocking, Temperatures & Noise

All of our performance and overclocked testing are performed in a closed Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower case. Inside, the RTX 3070 Ti is a quiet card even when overclocked and we never needed to increase its fan speeds manually or change the stock fan profile. We overclocked using Afterburner without adding any extra voltage.

We used Heaven 4.0 running in a window at completely maxed-out settings at a windowed 2560×1440 to load the GPU to 98% so we could observe the running characteristics of the RTX 3070 Ti and also to be able to instantly compare our changed clock settings with their results. At completely stock settings with the GPU under full load, the card ran cool and stayed below 85C with clocks that averaged around 1850MHz.

Simply raising the Power and Temperatures to their maximums resulted in the clocks running above 1875MHz with a small rise in temperatures using the stock fan profile.

After testing multiple combinations, our RTX 3070 Ti’s final stable overclock to achieve the highest overall performance added +150MHz offset to the core and +800 MHz to the memory. to achieve a core clock above 2000MHz with a memory clock of 10300MHz. The RTX 3070 Ti FE is power-limited, and to achieve a higher overclock will require more voltage.

Although we were unable to spend a lot of time overclocking it, our review sample appears to be only a fair overclocker. If you want a higher overclock, pick a partner overclocked AIB RTX 3070 Ti. To see the performance increase from overclocking, we tested 5 games. The results are given after the main performance charts in the next section.

First, let’s check out performance on the next page.

Performance Summary Charts & Graphs

Gaming Performance Summary Charts

Here are the summary charts of 25 games and 3 synthetic tests. The highest settings were always chosen and the settings are listed on the chart. The benches were run at 1920×1080, 2560×1440 and at 3840×2160. Five cards were compared and they are listed in order starting from left to right with the RTX 3070 FE, the reference RX 6800, the RTX 3070 Ti, the RX 6800 XT, the RTX 3080 FE, the RTX 3080 Ti FE, the RTX 3090 FE, and the Red Devil RX 6900 XT (which was benchmarked in April).

Most results, except for synthetic scores, show average framerates, and higher is better. Minimum framerates are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font. Games benched with OCAT show average framerates, but the minimums are expressed by frametimes (99th-percentile) in ms where lower are better. Performance wins between the RTX 3070 Ti and the RX 6800 are given in yellow text.

Please click on each chart to open a pop-up window for its best viewing experience.

Although there is some game-dependent variability, the RTX 3070 Ti FE is only around 3-10% faster than the RTX 3070 FE but it is enough to now easily trade blows with the reference RX 6800 in rasterized games, winning more than it loses, and is much faster in most ray traced games and a lot faster when DLSS is used.

Next we look at overclocked performance.

Overclocked benchmarks

These benchmarks are run with the RTX 3070 Ti overclocked +150MHz on the core and +800MHz on the memory versus at stock clocks. The RTX 3070 Ti overclocked results are presented first and the stock results are shown in the second column.

There is a small performance increase from overclocking the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition. Unfortunately, although we did not have enough time to optimize our overclock, it’s clear that NVIDIA has locked down Ampere cards’ overclocking in an attempt to maximize performance for all Founders Edition gamers. We would also suggest that the RTX 3070 Ti FE is rather voltage constrained and if you want a higher overclock, pick a factory-overclocked partner version instead of a Founders Edition.

Let’s next look at VR gaming with the Vive Pro 2. The following is not our review of the Vive Pro 2 – the full review will follow next week. Instead we are going to focus on performance.

VR Gaming with the Vive Pro 2

The Vive Pro 2 is a much more demanding headset than the Vive Pro or the Valve Index by virtue of its higher resolution. Image resolution has been increased per eye from the Pro’s (or Valve Index’) 1440 x 1600 to 2448 x 2448. This higher resolution gives it exceptional clarity with no screen door effect, but it is also demanding on video cards. By default at the Ultra or Extreme preset, the Vive console uses 150% SteamVR Render Resolution for the Vive Pro 2 which appeared to be set to 2748×2748 per eye for high end NVIDIA cards at the time we benchmarked our games.

Here is the OpenVR benchmark result which requires 100% SteamVR Render Resolution for its default run. We used the Vive Console Ultra setting at native resolution and 90Hz. We did not test the Extreme setting which allows up to 120Hz.

Although SteamVR sets the same resolution for the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3070 Ti, it uses a lower resolution for AMD cards at either 100% (2244×2244) or at 150%. In fact, yesterday’s Vive software update lowered the default SteamVR resolution slightly for NVIDIA cards which suggests that it is still a work in progress and is being fine-tuned. The 100% SteamVR render resolution was lowered from 2556×2556 to 2532×2532 yesterday. Our results reflect the higher render setting.Some VR gamers prefer to lower the SteamVR Render Resolution which is set at 150% and is mostly used to compensate for the lens’ distortion instead of lowering a game’s preset or by dropping individual settings. We decided to initially test at 100% which is what we test the Reverb G2, the Vive Pro, and the Valve Index. Our follow up review will also benchmark at the default 150% resolution.

Yesterday, in response to our questions, Vive suggested that the SteamVR default Render Resolution should be left at 150%. Vive told BTR:

“Motion Compensation is the same as Motion Smoothing. The new lens and display requires our own motion compensation, and VIVE Console is the software that is driving the displays, so motion compensation is built into that.

For VIVE Pro 2, we set Steam’s supersampling setting as 150% by default, which makes up for the lens distortion. We found this to be the best value for SteamVR’s automatic performance scaling to scale and still reach 90 or 120 Hz on the majority of PCs we expect to be used to run VIVE Pro 2. However, users can still go into SteamVR to manually adjust their supersampling settings.

If we had set it to 100%, a lot of PCs would struggle under automatic settings. Render resolution is set by SteamVR and automatically scales to what it thinks is best for your system, VIVE Console handles display resolution.”

Motion Smoothing is disabled in SteamVR, but we actually didn’t see any FPS performance difference disabling or enabling Motion Compensation in the Vive console using fpsVR although the frametimes suffered. We see relatively minor visual differences between 100% and 150% SteamVR Render Resolution but even at the higher setting, lens distortion is still slightly visible to us particularly at the edges of the display.

At 50% SteamVR Render Resolution, there is a clear degradation of visuals which indicates that the SteamVR Render Resolution is working properly. However, at 150% Super Resolution, the frametime rates go up (which is bad) for several games that we tested although the FPS remain at 45 FPS which suggested to us that Vive’s Motion Compensation may still be on although Vive assures us it can be switched off in their console. We noticed that Motion Compensation artifacting became prominent and even disturbing if settings are pushed too high as we found with Elite Dangerous.

Please note that FCAT VR doesn’t distinguish dropped frames from synthesized frames using the Pro 2 (or the Reverb G2) like it properly does for the Valve Index and the Vive Pro. We suggest that the vast majority of the frames reported as dropped are actually synthetically generated (reprojected) frames. It is likely that FCAT VR is not yet optimized for the Pro 2.

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our five VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution.

First up, Assetto Corsa Competizione.

Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC)

BTR’s sim/racing editor, Sean Kaldahl created the replay benchmark run that we use for both the pancake game and the VR game. It is run at night with 20 cars, lots of geometry, and the lighting effects of the headlights, tail lights, and everything around the track looks spectacular.

Just like with Project CARS, you can save a replay after a race. Fortunately, the CPU usage is the same between a race and its replay so it is a reasonably accurate benchmark using the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.

iRacing may be more accurate or realistic, but Assetto Corsa Competizione has some appeal because it feels more real than many other racing sims. It delivers the sensation of handling a highly-tuned racing machine driven to its edge. We test using the VR Low preset.

VR Low

Here are the ACC frametimes using VR Low.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3070 Ti delivered 102.85 unconstrained FPS with 15 dropped or synthesized frames and no Warp misses.

The RTX 3070 Ti has a little performance headroom and it is possible to play it using enhanced individual settings with minimal reprojected or synthesized frames but it is best suited for playing ACC on VR Low. VR High is unplayable.

Next, we check out Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous (ED)

Elite Dangerous is a popular space sim built using the COBRA engine. It is hard to find a repeatable benchmark outside of the training missions.

A player will probably spend a lot of time piloting his space cruiser while completing a multitude of tasks as well as visiting space stations and orbiting a multitude of different planets (~400 billion). Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a very dedicated following of players.

We picked the Ultra Preset with the maximum FoV originally but the shimmering and artifacting from reprojection/Motion Compensation was awful, so we set everything to Medium leaving the FoV at maximum. Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3070 Ti delivered 128.79 unconstrained FPS with no Warp Misses nor any dropped or synthetic frames.

The experience playing Elite Dangerous at Ultra settings is awful but Medium seems perfect with some performance headroom to increase individual settings.

Next, we will check out a really demanding VR game, No Man’s Sky.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival single and multiplayer game that emphasizes survival, exploration, fighting, and trading. It is set in a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion unique planets using its own custom game engine.

The player takes the role of a Traveller in an uncharted universe by starting on a random planet with a damaged spacecraft equipped with only a jetpack-equipped exosuit and a versatile multi-tool that can also be used for defense. The player is encouraged to find resources to repair his spacecraft allowing for intra- and inter-planetary travel, and to interact with other players.

We set the settings to Enhanced which is above Low and below High, but we also set the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgraded to FXAA+TAA. The game has recently implemented DLSS 2.1 and we used the highest visual quality preset, Quality which gives a much smaller performance boost than the others DLSS settings.

Here is the No Man’s Sky Frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details of our comparative runs.

The RTX 3070 Ti produced 85.37 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but it required 3200 (50%) synthetic frames.

The Low Preset may be better suited for play with the RTX 3070 Ti, or else individual setting may be lowered to maintain a balance of performance to visuals. However, it may be best to use DLSS Performance instead and accept a slight artifacting. We were very impressed with the Enhanced preset using DLSS Quality, and the high resolution screen of the Vive Pro 2 makes playing this game an even more extraordinary experience where the game comes more alive.

Let’s continue with another demanding VR game, Project CARS 2, that we still like better than its successor.

Project CARS 2 (PC2)

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding. We are disappointed with Project CARS 3, and will continue to use the older game instead for VR benching.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings and we prefer playing with SMAA rather than to use MSAA.

We originally tried maximum settings including for Motion Blur but that wasn’t possible so we set everything to Medium.

Here is the frametime plot.Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 3070 Ti delivered 77.49 unconstrained FPS with 4802 (50%) synthesized or dropped frames and with no Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 on the Medium preset requires that we would recommend lowering individual settings or even lower the resolution a as needed to stay out of reprojection. However, even on Medium, the game looks great using the Vive Pro 2.

Let’s benchmark Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is no longer supported by Bethesda, but fortunately the modding community has adopted it. It is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is still very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine.

We benchmarked Skyrim VR using its highest settings, but we did not increase its in game supersampling.

Here are the frametime results.

The RTX 3070 Ti managed 130.68 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames, no synthetic frames, and no Warp misses.

The RTX 3070 Ti can play Skyrim at its maxed out in-game settings although we did not benchmark in-game Supersampling since we saw reprojecting or synthesized frames. Since there is some performance headroom, it suggests to us that mods may be used with the Vive Pro 2 and a RTX 3070 Ti class of video card.

These benchmarks results bring up more questions than answers that we hope to cover in a follow up review dedicated to the Vive Pro 2 next week. However, we love the Pro 2 and have ordered our own headset and will keep it for future VR benchmarking.

To see if the RTX 3070 Ti is a good upgrade from the other video cards we test workstation, creative, and GPGPU benchmarks starting with Blender.

Blender 2.92 Benchmark

Blender is a very popular open source 3D content creation suite. It supports every aspect of 3D development with a complete range of tools for professional 3D creation.

We benchmarked three Blender 2.92 benchmarks which measure GPU performance by timing how long it takes to render production files. We tested seven of our comparison cards with both CUDA and Optix running on the GPU instead of using the CPU. We benchmarked the RX 6800 XT and the RTX 3080 using OpenCL because Radeons do not support CUDA.

Here are the RTX 3070 Ti’s CUDA and OPTIX scores.

For the following chart, lower is better as the benchmark renders a scene multiple times and gives the results in minutes and seconds.

Blender’s benchmark performance is slower using the RTX 3070 Ti compared with the RTX 3080 and slightly faster than te RTX 3070.

Next we look at the OctaneBench.

Octane Bench

OctaneBench allows you to benchmark your GPU using OctaneRender. The hardware and software requirements to run OctaneBench are the same as for OctaneRender Standalone.

We run OctaneBench 2020.1.5 for Windows and here are the RTX 3070 Ti’s complete results with an overall score of 454.87.

Here is the summary chart comparing our five GeForce cards. Radeons cannot run the Octane benchmark.

The RTX 3070 Ti is a decent card when used for rendering but closer to the RTX 3070 in performance than the RTX 3080.

Next, we move on to AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks.

AIDA64 v6.33

AIDA64 is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. Its GPGPU benchmarks measure performance and give scores to compare against other popular video cards.

AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are well-optimized for every popular AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and VIA processor by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s full version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days.

Here are the RTX 3070 Ti AIDA64 GPGPU results.

Here is the chart summary of the AIDA64 GPGPU benchmarks with seven of our competing cards side-by-side.

The RTX 3070 Ti is a fast GPGPU card that is slightly faster than the RTX 3070. So let’s look at Sandra 2020 next.

SiSoft Sandra 2020/21

To see where the CPU, GPU, and motherboard performance results differ, there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2020. SiSoftware SANDRA (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a excellent information & diagnostic utility in a complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software, and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking. Sandra is derived from a Greek name that implies “defender” or “helper”.

There are several versions of Sandra, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. Sandra 2021 R2 is the latest version, and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. Sandra 2020/21 features continuous multiple monthly incremental improvements over earlier versions of Sandra. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC while giving recommendations for improvement.

We ran Sandra’s intensive GPGPU benchmarks and charted the results summarizing them. There was a bug in one Processing benchmark that affected the Red Devil RX 6800 XT with OpenCL that was addressed by SiSoft by the time we tested the RX 6800.

In Sandra GPGPU benchmarks, the RTX 3070 Ti is similar in performance to the RTX 3070. Interestingly, the RTX 3070 Ti (and RTX 3080 Ti’s) Hashing bandwidth is much lower than the RTX 3080/RTX 3070 and even the RX 6800 XT as NVIDIA has limited its cryptocurrency mining ability. However, since the architectures are different, each card exhibits different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses.

SPECworkstation3 Benchmarks

All the SPECworkstation3 benchmarks are based on professional applications, most of which are in the CAD/CAM or media and entertainment fields. All of these benchmarks are free except for vendors of computer-related products and/or services.

The most comprehensive workstation benchmark is SPECworkstation3. It’s a free-standing benchmark which does not require ancillary software. It measures GPU, CPU, storage and all other major aspects of workstation performance based on actual applications and representative workloads. We only tested the GPU-related workstation performance as checked in the image above.

Here are our raw SPECworkstation 3.0.4.summary and raw scores for the RTX 3070 Ti.

Here are the SPECworkstation3 results summarized in a chart along with six competing cards. Higher is better.

Using SPEC benchmarks, the RTX 3070 Ti is closer in performance to the RTX 3070 than it is to the RTX 3080. However, since the architectures are different, the cards each exhibit different characteristics with different strengths and weaknesses.

SPECviewperf 2020 GPU Benches

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released a 2020 version of its SPECviewperf benchmark that features updated viewsets, new models, support for both 2K and 4K display resolutions, and improved set-up and results management.

We benchmarked at 4K and here is the summary for the RTX 3070 Ti.

Here are SPECviewperf 2020 GPU benchmarks summarized in a chart together with six other cards.

Again the RTX 3070 Ti is slightly faster than the RTX 3070 but not close to RTX 3080 performance.

After seeing these benches, some creative users may wish to upgrade their existing systems with a new RTX 30X0 series card based on the performance increases and the associated increases in productivity that they require. The question to buy an RTX 3070 Ti should be based on the workflow and requirements of each user as well as their budget. Time is money depending on how these apps are used. However, the target demographic for the RTX 3070 Ti is primarily gaming for gamers, especially at 1440P and at 1080P.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

Final Thoughts

The $599 RTX 3070 Ti FE performed well performance-wise compared to the RX 6800. However at only around 3-10% faster than the $100 less expensive RTX 3070 it is not priced particularly well based on its value to performance. It does have faster GDDR6X memory, slightly more cores and a mini-clockspeed bump together with a much better cooling system

If a gaming enthusiast wants a very fast card upper-midrange card, the RTX 3070 Ti is an excellent card for ultra 1080P or 1440P gaming. It can also be used for 4K gaming if settings are lowered.

The Founders Edition of the RTX 3070 Ti is well-built, solid, and good-looking, and it stays cool and quiet even when overclocked. The RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition will offer a solid upgrade for first generation Turing owners of the RTX 2070 or any earlier generation cards. However, it is not really an upgrade from a $499 RTX 3070 FE which has a higher value to price ratio – if it can be found at MSRP.

Pros

• The RTX 3070 Ti is fast enough for VR gaming with the Vive Pro 2 at 100% SteamVR render resolution
• The RTX 3070 Ti is perfect for 1440P or 1080P gaming although settings have to be lowered for 4K; and it’s also very useful for intensive creative, SPEC, or GPGPU apps
• Ray tracing is a game changer in every way and the RTX 3070 Ti is much faster than the RX 6800 XT or RX 6800 XT when DLSS 2.0 or ray tracing features are enabled. DLSS 2.0 has been rightly called “a miracle” for gamers including for VR gamers
• Reflex and Broadcast are important features for competitive gamers and broadcasters
• Ampere improves over Turing with AI/deep learning and ray tracing to improve visuals while also increasing performance with DLSS 2.0 and Ultra Performance DLSS
• The RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition design cooling is quiet and efficient and its upgraded flow-through design is a real upgrade over the RTX 3070 FE. The GPU in a well-ventilated case stays cool even when overclocked and it remains quiet using the stock fan profile
• The industrial design is eye-catching and it is solidly built

Cons

• High Price
• Lack of availability

The Verdict

If you are a gamer who plays at maxed-out 1080P, 1440P, or even at 4K with lesser settings, you may want to upgrade to a RTX 3070 Ti. The Founders Edition offers good performance value as an upgrade from previous generations with the additional benefit of being able to handle ray tracing much better. It is much faster in ray traced games than any Radeon, and DLSS 2.0 is a true game changer that brings extra performance without any compromise in visuals.

The RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition is available starting tomorrow for $699 from NVIDIA’s online store, and USA customers can purchase these cards also directly from Best Buy both online and in person. Only a relatively few lucky gamers will be able to buy one at SEP, but we believe the supply issue will ease and pricing will return to normal by the Autumn and this review will be even more useful in making a high end card selection then.

Stay tuned, there is a lot more on the way from BTR. Next week, we will test multiple cards in VR using the brand new Vive Pro 2. We are in touch with HTC/Vive and hope to have answers and solid performance results by then. Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy Gaming!

This review features a follow up VR performance showdown focusing on sims between the Red Devil RX 6900 XT and the RTX 3090 Founders Edition (FE) using the Reverb G2 and FCAT VR. On a short-term loan from PowerColor, we recently received a Red Devil “Ultimate” Edition which is an unlocked card that is built for overclocking by allowing for higher voltage.

Although we had originally planned to overclock the Red Devil RX 6900 XT Ultimate versus the overclocked RTX 3090 FE, we had issues with our ANTEC/Seasonic 1000W power supply and the card’s protection circuitry so we had to abort overclocked benchmarking after we lost our favorite 1TB CARDEA Ceramic PCIe Gen 4 x4 SSD to a transient power surge. However, we will compare stock benchmarks also since we found that both NVIDIA and AMD have each improved performance since January.

Our main focus for this review is on using the HP Reverb G2 with three popular sims: Elite Dangerous, Assetto Corsa: Competizione, and Project CARS 2. BTR’s testing platform is an overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32 GB of Vulcan Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz on a clean install of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition using NVIDIA’s GeForce Game Ready Driver, 466.11, and AMD’s Adrenalin Software 21.3.2 drivers.

After we received the Red Devil RX 6900 XT on a short-term loan in January, we tested 35 pancake games to validate its performance versus the NVIDIA flagship, the RTX 3090 FE and also overclocked them. The two cards traded blows and the performance was close in multiple rasterized games, but the GeForce was the faster card as well as being more expensive at MSRP. Although we will update our results using 14 pancake games today, this review will focus on VR sim performance using arguably the best headset for sims – the very demanding Reverb G2.

The Red Devil RX 6900 XT “Ultimate” Edition.

The Red Devil RX 6900 XT “Ultimate” edition is the same as the regular edition and performs identically out of the box with stock clocks. The Ultimate Edition is unlocked and aimed at more extreme overclocking with pre-selected and binned GPUs. It features a 303W ‘Unleash BIOS’ vs the 289W on the regular Red Devil.

Here is what comes in the Ultimate box.

The Ultimate edition is very similar to the regular Red Devil RX 6900 XT edition, the only differences being that the card is binned and unlocked. It’s a shame we were unable to overclock it, but we are glad to be able to retest it in VR and with regular games before we had to send this one back to PowerColor also.

Up next is our test configuration which are the same for PC games as PC VR games.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.3 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Reverb G2, on loan from HP/Reverb
• Red Devil RX 6900 XT Ultimate edition 16GB, stock clocks, on loan from PowerColor.
• RTX 3090 Founders Edition 24GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• BenQ EW3270U 32? 4K HDR 60Hz FreeSync monitor
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan)

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 466.11 Game Ready drivers – High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, no optimizations, Vsync is off as set in the NVIDIA control panel
• Adrenalin Software 21.3.2 – All optimizations are off, Vsync is forced off, Texture filtering is set to High, and Tessellation uses application settings
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates v2004.
• Latest DirectX
• All games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT-VR Capture (latest non public Beta 04/21)
• FCAT-VR Beta 18 (non public)
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution unless specified

3 VR Sim Game, 14 Pancake benchmark suite & 1 synthetic test

Synthetic

• Unigine Superposition VR Benchmark
• 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy

VR Sim Games

• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Elite Dangerous
• Project CARS 2

Pancake Games

• DiRT 5
• Godfall
• Death Stranding
• Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Borderlands 3
• Wolfenstein Youngblood
• World War Z
• Strange Brigade
• Rainbow 6 Siege
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Metro Exodus
• Total War: Three Kingdoms
• Far Cry New Dawn

First we are going to check the performance of 14 pancake games

14 PC Games

Most gaming results show average framerates in bold text, and higher is better. Minimum framerates are next to the averages in italics and in a slightly smaller font. The games benched with OCAT show average framerates but the minimums are expressed by frametimes in ms where lower numbers are better. Column one represents the stock RTX 3090 FE performance next to the stock Red Devil RX 6900 XT Ultimate edition performance results in the second column.

Compared with our last benchmarks between the Red Devil RX 6900 XT and the RTX 3090 FE, there has been a general performance increase for both cards. The Red Devil wins three games outright and it ties or trades blows in six others depending on the resolution although the RX 3090 still maintains the overall lead. So let’s look at our three featured VR sim games next.

VR Sims

The Reverb G2 is a much more demanding headset than the Vive Pro or the Valve Index by virtue of its higher resolution. This higher resolution gives it exceptional clarity with no screen door effect, but its tracking isn’t as perfect as lighthouse tracking for many action games. The G2 is considered one of the best headsets for racing and flight sims and we are going to compare the performance of the RX 6900 XT versus the RX 3090 – first at each game’s Ultra settings and also, if necessary, at more “playable” settings to minimize reprojection.

Some VR gamers prefer to lower the SteamVR render resolution for the G2 which is extremely high and mostly used to compensate for the lens’ distortion instead of lowering the preset or by dropping individual settings. It is a viable option but we prefer to test at SteamVR’s 100% resolution for benchmarking purposes.

Also, please note that FCAT VR doesn’t distinguish dropped frames from synthesized frames using the G2 like it properly does for the Valve Index and the Vive Pro. We suggest that the vast majority of the frames reported as dropped are actually synthetically generated (reprojected) frames.

It is important to remember that BTR’s charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS or to 45 FPS by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our 3 sim VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution as we compare the stock-clocked Red Devil RX 6900 XT with the stock RTX 3090 FE using the Reverb G2 and FCAT VR.

First up, Assetto Corsa Competizione.

BTR’s sim/racing editor, Sean Kaldahl created the replay benchmark run that we use for both the pancake game and the VR game. It is run at night with 20 cars, lots of geometry, and the lighting effects of the headlights, tail lights, and everything around the track looks spectacular.

VR High

Here are the ACC FCAT VR frametimes using VR High.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 6900 XT delivered 72.12 unconstrained FPS with 5802 (49%) dropped or synthesized frames but no Warp misses.

The RTX 3090 delivered 86.48 unconstrained FPS together with 1623 (17%) dropped or synthetic frames along with no Warp misses.

The ACC racing experience is better with the RTX 3090 since less than 20% of its frames need to be synthesized compared with nearly 50% using the RX 6900 XT. However, there is no way that either of these cards can play on VR Epic without lowering the resolution, and it is best to have no synthesized frames, so we will try VR Low next – unfortunately there is no VR Medium.

VR Low

Here are the ACC frametimes using VR Low.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 6900 XT delivered 126.27 unconstrained FPS with 6 dropped or synthesized frames and no Warp misses.

The RTX 3090 delivered 136.11 unconstrained FPS with no dropped, synthesized frames, or Warp misses.

FIXED TEXT – 04/19/2021 9:45 AM PDT

Both cards play ACC similarly on VR Low. The RTX 3090 has more performance headroom and it is possible to play it on VR High with minimal reprojected or synthesized frames by lowering a few settings. The RX 6900 XT is best suited for playing ACC on VR Low.

Project CARS 2 (PC2)

There is a real sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its in-house Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding. We are disappointed with Project CARS 3, and will continue to use the older game instead for VR benching.

Project CARS 2 offers many performance options and settings and we prefer playing with SMAA Ultra rather than to use MSAA.

We used maximum settings including for Motion Blur although it looks best to us with on Low or Medium. For lesser cards, we would also recommend lowering grass and reflections to maximize framerate delivery as motion smoothing or reprojection tends to cause visible artifacting.

Ultra

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The Red Devil RX 6900 XT delivered 78.68 unconstrained FPS, with 1 warp miss and 5802 of its frames (49%) had to be synthesized.

The RTX 3090 delivered 82.77 unconstrained FPS with 1913 (20%) dropped or synthesized frames but with no warp misses

The VR experience playing Project CARS 2 on our maximum settings is better on the RTX 3090 since the RX 6900 XT requires almost 50% of its frames to be synthesized whereas the RTX 3090 only requires 20%. If you want maximum settings without reprojection, the only other acceptable option is to lower the SteamVR render resolution.

Next up the PC2 Medium preset.

Medium

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The Red Devil RX 6900 XT delivered 104.51 unconstrained FPS, with 226 (2%) dropped or synthesized frames but no Warp misses.

The RTX 3090 delivered 100.81 unconstrained FPS with 314 (3%) synthesized or dropped frames and with no Warp misses.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 on the Medium preset is similar using either card.

Let’s look at our overall Unconstrained Framerates Chart.

Unconstrained Framerates

The following chart summarizes the overall Unconstrained Framerates (the performance headroom) of our two cards using our 3 sim VR test games. The preset is listed on the chart and higher is better.

The RX 3090 FE delivers higher unconstrained frames in three out of five sim benchmarks over the Red Devil RX 6900 XT in this one important performance metric. But unconstrained framerates are just one metric that has to be taken together with the frametime plots to have any meaning.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

It is great to see AMD delivering a card that is performance competitive with the RX 3090 in VR as well as in rasterized PC games. Several of the FCAT VR frametime plots indicate the RTX 3090 delivers a smoother VR experience at higher settings. However, the RX 6900 XT distinguishes itself from the RX 6800 XT as a faster card for playing at our demanding VR settings better than it does with pancake games, and the Red Devil is a fine RX 6900 XT indeed.

The Ultimate edition of the Red Devil RX 6900 XT is for overclockers who want a 3-year factory warranty for a card that can be potentially overclocked higher than the regular edition although it won’t give higher performance at stock compared to the regular Red Devil. We can only hope that the dual pandemics – crypto mining and COVID-19 – will end soon and that pricing and availability will return to normal – there is hope on the horizon.

Next week, we are going to review new software and will afterward return to VR by continuing to benchmark the Red Devil RX 6700 XT versus the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3060 Ti. We have added Borderlands 2 to our VR benching suite and may also add Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.

Happy VR Gaming!

Into the Radius by indie developer and publisher, CM Games (Creative Mobile) of Estonia, is one of the first VR games to use DLSS 2.0. It is a single player stealth survival adventure/exploration game which is set in the dangerous world of the Pechorsk Exclusion Zone that is basically “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. VR” with an incredible atmosphere and unforgiving gameplay.

BTR has been benchmarking Into the Radius since November 2020 as its performance demands on a video card are relatively high since is set in a huge open world with a decent draw distance, and the minimum recommended video card is a GTX 1070. For this review, we are going to max out its in-game settings and use FCAT VR to compare DLSS performance On versus DLSS Off using a Valve Index (Quality DLSS) at 90Hz and 120Hz as well as the much more demanding Reverb G2 (Quality and Balanced DLSS versus Off) at 90Hz.

BTR’s testing platform is an overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32GB of Vulcan Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz on a recent install of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition using NVIDIA’s latest GeForce Game Ready Driver, 465.89.

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience unpleasant. It’s also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. But before we benchmark Into the Radius, check out our Test Configuration below.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i9-10900K (HyperThreading/Turbo boost On; All cores overclocked to 5.1GHz/5.0Ghz. Comet Lake DX11 CPU graphics)
• EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard (Intel Z490 chipset, v1.3 BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1/3.2 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-FORCE DARK Z 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, dual channel at 3600MHz), supplied by Team Group
• Reverb G2, on loan from HP
• Vive Pro, on loan from HTC/Vive
• RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition 11GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3080 Founders Edition 10GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• 1TB Team Group MP33 NVMe2 PCIe SSD for C: drive
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SATA III SSD (storage)
• 2TB Micron 1100 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 1TB Team Group GX2 SATA III SSD (storage)
• 500GB T-FORCE Vulcan SSD (storage), supplied by Team Group
• ANTEC HCG1000 Extreme, 1000W gold power supply unit
• Samsung G7 Odyssey (LC27G75TQSNXZA) 27? 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor
• DEEPCOOL Castle 360EX AIO 360mm liquid CPU cooler
• Phanteks Eclipse P400 ATX mid-tower (plus 1 Noctua 140mm fan)

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce 465.89 Game Ready drivers – no optimizations in the NVIDIA control panel
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; latest updates v10.0.19042 Build 19042
• Latest DirectX
• Into the Radius is patched to it’s latest version at time of publication
• FCAT VR Capture (latest non-public Beta 04/02/21)
• FCATVR Analyzer (non-public Beta 18)
• SteamVR – latest non beta version at 100% resolution
• WMR – latest version at default

DLSS 2.0, Graphics Settings & IQ – Benchmarking the RTX 3080 Ti & RTX 2080 Ti with FCAT VR

Originally, there were no user options for changing individual graphics settings other than High, Medium, and Low presets. There is also a slider to drop or subsample the resolution down to 65%, or to increase the resolution to 110%. We picked High plus 110% resolution for the Valve Index (90Hz/120Hz) and 100% resolution for the more demanding Reverb G2 (90Hz).

DLSS 2.0 settings were added in last week’s patch and they now have options for Off, Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance.

DLSS 2.0

NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.0 creates sharper and higher resolution images using dedicated AI processors on GeForce RTX GPUs called Tensor Cores. The original DLSS 1.0 required more work on the part of game developers and resulted in image quality approximately equal to TAA. DLSS 2.0 uses an improved deep learning neural network that boosts frame rates while generating crisper game images with extra performance headroom to maximize settings and increase output resolutions.

NVIDIA claims that DLSS 2.0 offers IQ comparable to native resolution while rendering only one quarter to one half of the pixels by employing new temporal feedback techniques. Its goal is to achieve the same (or better) IQ (image quality) as a natively rendered frame of the same resolution more efficiently which allows the game’s framerate to increase. A pancake DLSS 2.0 game may internally render at 1080P and then use DLSS to upscale the image to 4K with a similar IQ/level of detail but render it much more quickly.

DLSS 2.0 generally offers RTX gamers four IQ modes: Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance. These settings control a game’s internal rendering resolution with Quality DLSS using the highest internal resolution and the best image quality (IQ), and Ultra Performance delivering a lesser IQ by using a lower internal resolution.

For example, the pancake game, Death Stranding, has implemented Performance DLSS 2.0, 1080p ? 4K; and Quality DLSS 2.0, 1440p ? 4K. However, we do not know exactly how DLSS 2.0 is implemented for VR. Last week, we asked NVIDIA for details and will update this review if/when we hear from them.

In our opinion, the Quality DLSS 2.0 Into the Radius implementation looks as good as without DLSS, and it’s somewhat better than Performance DLSS which appears a bit more blurry to us. We think that Quality DLSS 2.0’s larger hit to the frame rate is worth it over using Performance DLSS 2.0. We would prefer to lower other settings before we drop DLSS 2.0 from Quality to Performance. However, the in-between Balanced DLSS also looks very good to us – especially on the Reverb G2 – and we would not hesitate to recommend that VR gamers check it out and decide for themselves.

FCAT VR Performance Benchmarking the RTX 2080 Ti & RTX 3080 with FCAT VR

It is important to remember that BTR’s Frametime Plot charts use frametimes in ms where lower is better, but we also compare “unconstrained framerates” which shows what a video card could deliver (headroom) if it wasn’t locked to either 90 FPS (or 120 FPS/Index) or to 45 FPS (or 60 FPS/Index) by the HMD. In the case of unconstrained FPS which measures just one important performance metric, faster is better.

Valve Index Performance – 90Hz & 120Hz at High/110% Resolution – Quality DLSS vs. Off

The RTX 3080 – High/110%, Refresh Rate at 90Hz

Here is the Frametime plot of the RTX 3080 run at High, 90Hz, and at 110% resolution.

Here are the FCAT VR details.

The RTX 3080 averages 209.47 Unconstrained FPS on High settings/110% resolution delivering the ideal 90 FPS cadence without DLSS and there were no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but it did require 4 synthetic frames with DLSS Off. It delivered 198.73 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses and 3 synthetic frames with Quality DLSS On.

There is no difference in IQ or performance in playing with DLSS On or Off, but the Unconstrained FPS with DLSS On seems strangely low compared with Off. So let’s increase the Index refresh rate from 90Hz to 120Hz which puts more of a demand on a video card.

The RTX 3080 – High/110%, Refresh Rate at 120Hz

Here is the Frametime plot of the RTX 3080 run at High, 120Hz, and at 110% resolution.

Here are the performance details.

At 120Hz, the RTX 3080 averages 194.39 Unconstrained FPS on high settings/110% resolution without DLSS and there were no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but it did require 10 synthetic frames with DLSS Off. It delivered 243.61 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses and 4 synthetic frames with Quality DLSS On.

There is no difference in performance even at 120Hz and we would try 144Hz except that Into the Radius is not an action game that requires it, so we tested next with a weaker video card, the RTX 2080 Ti flagship of the last generation.

The RTX 2080 Ti – High/110% Refresh Rate at 90Hz

Here is the Frametime plot of the RTX 2080 Ti run at High, 90Hz and at 110% resolution.

Here are the details.

At 90Hz, the RTX 2080 Ti averages 155.90 Unconstrained FPS on high settings/110% resolution delivering the ideal 90 FPS cadence without DLSS and there were no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but it did require 2 synthetic frames with DLSS Off. It delivered 191.84 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses and 2 synthetic frames with Quality DLSS On.

Again, there is no difference in IQ or performance in playing with DLSS On or Off so we increase the Index refresh rate from 90Hz to 120Hz.

The RTX 2080 Ti – High/110% Refresh Rate at 120Hz

Here is the Frametime plot of the RTX 2080 Ti run at High, 120Hz and at 110% resolution.

Here are the FCAT VR performance details.

At 120Hz, the RTX 2080 Ti averages 144.58 Unconstrained FPS on high settings/110% resolution delivering less than the ideal 120 FPS cadence without DLSS although there were no dropped frames nor Warp misses. However, without DLSS it required 938 synthetic frames (11%). It delivered 150.32 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses and only 96 synthetic frames were needed (1%) with Quality DLSS On.

Now we see a noticeable performance improvement using DLSS Quality using a RTX 2080 Ti when the Index panels’ refresh rate are increased to 120Hz with High settings at 110% resolution. So let’s see how these same two cards fare using the Reverb G2 at High 90Hz/100% resolution – and this time, we also add Balanced DLSS performance comparisons.

Reverb G2 Performance – High/100% Resolution (90Hz) – Quality & Balanced DLSS vs. Off

The RTX 3080 – High/100% (90Hz)

This time we leave our settings on high but drop the resolution from 110% used with the Index to 100%. The G2 refreshes natively at 90Hz with no higher option. We also benchmark the DLSS Balanced setting in addition to Quality and without DLSS (native).

Here is the G2 Frametime plot of the RTX 3080 run at High, 90Hz and at 100% resolution. Please note that synthetic frames are (most likely) reported as dropped frames by FCAT VR.

Here are the FCAT VR performance details.

The RTX 3080 averages 97.11 Unconstrained FPS on high settings/100% resolution without DLSS and there were no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but it did require 431 synthetic frames (6%) with DLSS Off. It delivered 99.29 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses but required 180 synthetic frames (3%) with Quality DLSS On. Using Balanced DLSS, the RTX 3080 averaged 102.90 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped, synthetic, or Warp misses, and only 26 frames needed to be synthesized.

We can see that DLSS provides a needed performance uplift for the Reverb G2 even with the RTX 3080. So next let’s see how the RTX 2080 Ti fares with the G2 at the same settings.

The RTX 2080 Ti – G2 High/100% (90Hz)

Here is the Frametime plot of the RTX 2080 Ti run at High, 90Hz and at 110% resolution.

Here are the FCAT VR details.

The RTX 2080 Ti averages 90.92 Unconstrained FPS on high settings/100% resolution without DLSS and there were no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but it did require 695 synthetic frames (9%) with DLSS Off. It delivered 96.69 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses but required 200 synthetic frames (3%) with Quality DLSS On. Using Balanced DLSS, the RTX 2080 Ti averaged 103.72 Unconstrained FPS with no dropped, synthetic, or Warm misses, and only 2 frames needed to be synthesized.

There is some inconsistency between runs performed at different times between the two video cards as the time of day quickly and constantly changes inside the Into the Radius game world, but the runs using the same card may be considered much more reliable and representative of relative performance. No matter how you look at it, DLSS improves performance without noticeably impacting visuals while playing.

Let’s head to our conclusion.

Conclusion: DLSS is Recommended!

Into the Radius is not a AAA game with a large studio behind it. It’s a huge open world indie game with a lot of content that is continually being improved by very passionate devs who appear to be responsive to their community. When it first released, Into the Radius had issues with bugs and physical interactions but the developers have continued to enthusiastically support it and optimize it for performance, and they promise to continue to develop it with an ambitious roadmap through Q2 2021.

Into the Radius will not appeal to everyone as it is a difficult and slow-paced stealth adventure exploration survival game where you will never be able to run through the zone with your guns blazing. It’s hardcore and very unforgiving, and it absolutely does not hold your hand. If you like adventure, love depth and physical realism, and don’t mind waiting for the devs to address any remaining performance and interaction issues, this game is a gem. For example, the latest DLSS patch broke WMR controllers settings and we had to use a community made set of bindings to interact with the G2 controllers properly.

We are pleased to see that the Into the Radius devs have chosen to implement DLSS 2.0 into their game. DLSS 2.0 is a miracle for pancake games and it appears that it also gives a solid performance uplift with VR in this game. Using Quality DLSS versus DLSS Off, it is very hard to see any IQ difference, and Balanced DLSS only appears to give the visuals a very slight blur. If you play Into the Radius and would like more performance, we recommend that you first try all four levels of DLSS for yourself instead of lowering settings or the in-game resolution.

Next up, Sean is hard at work on his ‘Sim Side: 2021 Test Suite Overview, Part 2’ (iRacing), and Rodrigo will also bring you a NVIDIA Resizable BAR performance analysis later this week! For the week after, we will bring you a very special unlocked video card overclocking review.

Happy Gaming!

UPDATED 04/09/2021 10:15 AM

We just got information from a CM Games Developer on how DLSS 2.1 is implemented:

“The presets and everything else is inside the DLSS plugin and we don’t have much control over it so it should be basically same parameters as for pancake games. Ultra performance takes something like 30% resolution, and goes upwards from there.”