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 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!

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.”

The RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition (FE) has arrived at $399 and we want to see how this upper midrange video card performs in VR compared with the new Ampere and Navi 2 cards. This review presents a VR performance showdown featuring the RTX 3060 Ti FE, the reference RX 6800 versus the RTX 3070 FE, and the reference RX 6800 XT versus the RTX 3080 FE using the Vive Pro and FCAT VR.

In pancake games, the $399 RTX 3060 Ti is faster than the Turing GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER which launched originally at $699, and on average 40% faster than its predecessor, the GeForce RTX 2060 Super, the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is the brand new addition to the GeForce RTX 30 Series. It delivers 16.2 shader TFLOPs,31.6 RT TFLOPs, and 129.6 Tensor TFLOPs over a 256-bit memory interface using 8GB of GDDR6 and it is based on the same GA104 chip used in the $499 RTX 3070 but with less processing units.

We want to first see where the RTX 3060 Ti fits regarding VR performance and if it is a worthy upgrade from an older video card. 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 can even lead to VR sickness.

Since we posted our original review, we have benchmarked more than 20 VR games for our follow-up reviews over the past nearly four years. We have also compared FCAT-VR with our own video benchmarks using a camera to capture images directly from our HMD’s lenses. For BTR’s VR testing methodology, please refer to this evaluation.

We currently benchmark fifteen VR games using the Vive Pro that features 2880×1600 resolution (1440×1600 pixels per eye), the same as the Valve Index. 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 GeForce Game Ready Driver, 457.51, and Adrenalin Software 20.11.3 drivers.

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
• Vive Pro, on loan from HTC/Vive; the Wireless Adapter is not used for benchmarking
• RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3070 Founders Edition 10GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 3080 Founders Edition 10GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RX 6800 Reference Edition 16GB, stock clocks, on loan from AMD.
• RX 6800 XT Reference Edition 16GB, stock clocks, on loan from AMD.
• 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 457.30 (RTX 3080) and 457.51 (RTX 3070/RTX 3060 Ti) Game Ready drivers – High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, no optimizations, Vsync is off as set in the NVIDIA control panel
• Adrenalin Software 20.11.2 (RX 6800 XT) and 20.11.3 (RX 6800) – 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
• MSI’s Afterburner, 4.6.3 beta to set the cards’ power and temperature limits to their maximums
• All 15 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT-VR Capture (latest Beta 03/04/20)
• FCAT-VR Beta 18
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution unless specified

15 VR Game benchmark suite & 4 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• VRMark Cyan Room
• VRMark Blue Room
• Unigine Superposition VR Benchmark
• OpenVR Benchmark

SteamVR /Epic Platform Games

• ARK: Park
• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Half Life: Alyx
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Into the Radius
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Unreal 4 engine is a very popular engine for VR development, and seven of our fifteen test games are created with it. The Creation and Unity engines are each used for two games, while the COBRA, No Man’s Sky, Source, and Madness engines are each represented by one game.

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 fifteen VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution or higher (as noted), although some games were also set in-game to a higher resolution or increased pixel density as described for each game, as we benchmark the RTX 3060 Ti to see where it stands in relation to the other 4 new video cards.

First up, ARK Park.

BTR’s sim/racing editor, Sean Kaldahl created the replay benchmark run used for both the pancake game and the VR game. It is run at night with lots of geometry, and the lighting effects of the headlights, tail lights, and everything around the track adds to the feel of racing.

The race was cut short on the RTX 3070 at 71 seconds instead of the usual 107 seconds. Here are the VR High frametimes.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3060 Ti managed to deliver 92.67 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frame or Warp misses, but 3597 (37%) frames were synthesized.

In runs accidentally cut short, the RTX 3070 achieved 103.85 unconstrained FPS with 7 dropped and 668 (10%) synthetic frames together with 7 Warp misses. If the runs were completed, the unconstrained FPS may have been higher as the first part of the course is more demanding.

The RX 6800 delivered 102.45 unconstrained FPS with 17 dropped frames and 743 (8%) frames were synthesized. It suffered 17 Warp misses.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 126.67 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses but 125 frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3080 achieved 139.01 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped and 181 synthetic frames together with 2 warp misses.

The RTX 3060 Ti would perform better using lowered settings as 37% synthesized frames are unacceptable for a high quality VR sim experience. The RTX 3070 and the RX 6800 also suffer many Warp misses so these three cards are next tested on VR Low.

Here are the VR Low details as reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 157.08 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses, but only 2 frames were synthesized using the lower preset.

In runs accidentally cut short, the RTX 3070 achieved 175.89 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped and 4 synthetic frames together with 1 Warp miss. If the runs were completed, the unconstrained FPS would probably have been higher.

The RX 6800 delivered 186.66 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped frames and no frames were synthesized. It suffered no Warp misses on the lower preset.

VR Low shows a noticeable drop in visuals from VR High, and we would suggest lowering individual settings instead of dropping from the High to Low preset to stay out of reprojection. Unfortunately, there is no “VR Medium” preset.

Here are the details at highest settings/150%.

The RTX 3060 Ti produced 81.41 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped frames and 3 Warp misses, but 3186 (50%) frames were still being synthesized. We would suggest dropping the resolution to around 130% or experiment with the in-game settings to achieve a steady 90 FPS smooth framerate delivery to the HMD.

The RTX 3070 managed 93.86 unconstrained FPS with 5 dropped frames and 5 Warp misses, but 2238 (35%) frames were synthesized. Drop the resolution by 10% or experiment with lowered in-game settings.

The RX 6800 delivered 100.30 unconstrained FPS with 15 dropped frames and no Warp misses or synthesized frames.

Next we look at Into the Radius.

Into the Radius

Into the Radius is a hardcore single player stealth survival adventure/exploration game, and it pays homage to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series by being set in the dangerous large open world of the Pechorsk Exclusion Zone.

Into the Radius has decent visuals using Unreal Engine 4 that really add to its spooky and intense atmosphere, and its performance demands on the video card are also higher since its a huge open world game with a decent draw distance.

There are 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 benchmarked our cards at High Quality and with 110% resolution.

Here is the frametime plot for Into the Radius.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 3060 Ti managed 102.27 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses, but 665 (8%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3070 produced 147.67 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames and no Warp misses nor synthetic frames.

The RX 6800 delivered 104.25 unconstrained FPS with 15 dropped frames and 15 Warp misses, but with 601 (7%) synthesized frames.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 135.89 unconstrained FPS with 11 dropped frames, but no warp misses were reported and no synthetic frames needed to be synthesized.

The RTX 3080 achieved 151.01 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped and 7 synthetic frames. However, it suffered 3 Warp Misses.

The RTX 3060 Ti provided a similar VR experience playing Into the Radius as using a RX 6800 whereas the RTX 3070 offers more performance headroom over the RX 6800 XT. Surprisingly, the RTX 3080 is just slightly faster than the RTX 3070.

Into the Radius becomes demanding on the High preset when the resolution is set at 100% or 110%.

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 High which is above Enhanced but below Ultra, and we also set the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgraded to FXAA+TAA.

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

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 83.06 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses, but 3202 (50%) frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3070 produced 93.83 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor any Warp misses, but it required 2678 (42%) synthetic frames.

The RX 6800 managed 91.57 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames nor Warp misses, but with 3215 (50%) synthesized frames.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 108.90 unconstrained FPS with 4 warp misses and 187 (3%) dropped frames probably because none of its frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3080 achieved 126.48 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames and no warp misses, and it only required 39 synthetic frames.

The RTX 3080 edges out the RX 6800 XT and delivers more performance headroom and a smoother experience. We do not recommend using Ultra settings for either card, however, and the Enhanced Preset may be better suited for the 3 lesser cards.

Next, we will check out another VR game, Obduction.

Obduction

Obduction is considered to be the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven. It is an adventure game developed by Cyan Worlds using the Unreal 4 engine and it has very good visuals. There is an emphasis on puzzle solving which get more and more difficult as a player progresses.

Obduction’s visuals are both graphically impressive and relatively intensive. There are adjustable menu sliders that will allow the player to dial down the settings but we picked Epic and increased the in-game resolution to 140% plus 75% texture memory. Lowering the settings means the world textures are less detailed and the player will see them pop into view rather suddenly, breaking VR immersion.

Here is Obduction’s frametime plot.

Here are the details.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 92.22 unconstrained FPS with 5 dropped frames and 5 Warp misses, but 2591 (40%) frames were synthesized. Dropping the resolution to 100% or 110% should keep it from needing Motion Smoothing.

The RTX 3070 delivered 107.61 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped frames and 4 Warp misses but 617 (10%) synthetic frames were generated. Again, lower the in-game resolution down from 140%.

The RX 6800 delivered 93.67 unconstrained FPS with 634 (10%) dropped instead of synthesized frames and 8 Warp misses. Lowering the resolution to 120% or 130% would probably be a good starting choice to avoid reprojected, synthesized, or dropped frames.

The RX 6800 XT produced 112.83 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped frames, 191 synthetic frames (3%), and 3 warp misses.

The RTX 308 0 delivered 130.54 unconstrained FPS and with 3 dropped frames, 10 synthetic frames and 3 warp misses.

Next we will check out another demanding VR game, Project CARS 2 that we like better than Project CARS 3.

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 RTX 3060 Ti managed 77.45 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames but 4814 (50%) frames were synthesized. It suffered no Warp Misses.

The RTX 3070 achieved 87.61 unconstrained FPS with 4 dropped and 4581 (47%) synthetic frames together with 4 Warp misses.

The RX 6800 delivered 106.35 unconstrained FPS with 19 dropped frames and 498 (5%) frames were synthesized. It suffered 19 Warp misses.

The RX 6800 XT produced 123.10 unconstrained FPS, with 5 dropped frames, 5 warp misses but 210 of its frames (2%) had to be synthesized.

The RTX 3080 delivered 117.70 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames, 2 warp misses, but it only required 18 synthetic frames.

The experience playing Project CARS 2 on our maximum VR settings is similar on the top three cards, but we would recommend lowering settings for the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti.

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, and we also increased the resolution to its in-game maximum.

Here are the frametime results.

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

The RTX 3060 Ti delivered 124.01 unconstrained FPS with 8 dropped frames and 8 Warp misses, and 57 frames were synthesized.

The RTX 3070 managed 131.56 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped frames, 19 synthetic frames, and 3 Warp misses.

The RX 6800 achieved 118.83 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or synthesized frames and no Warp misses.

The RX 6800 XT produced 134.93 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames, no synthetic frames, and no warp misses.

This review presents a fifteen-game VR performance showdown between the RX 6800 XT and the RTX 3080 using the Vive Pro and FCAT VR. We have also added Assetto Corsa Competizione and Into the Radius for this review.

Since we posted our original review, we have benchmarked more than 20 VR games for our follow-up reviews over the past nearly four years. We have also compared FCAT-VR with our own video benchmarks using a camera to capture images directly from our HMD’s lenses. For BTR’s VR testing methodology, please refer to this evaluation.

We currently benchmark fifteen VR games using the Vive Pro. 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 latest GeForce Game Ready Driver, 457.30, and AMD’s Adrenalin Software 20.11.2 public launch drivers for the RX 6800 XT.

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 fifteen VR games, check out our Test Configuration below.

Since we received our RX 6800 XT after it launched, we tested 9 pancake games to validate its performance and we present it below in advance of our full review versus a PowerColor Red Devil RX 6800 XT using 35+ games next week.

The two cards are fairly evenly matched and the performance is close in many cases even though we only had time to test 9 games. However, this review will focus on VR performance. 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
• Vive Pro, on loan from HTC/Vive; the Wireless Adapter is not used for benchmarking
• RX 6800 XT Reference Edition 16GB, stock clocks.
• 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
• 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 457.30 Game Ready drivers – High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, no optimizations, Vsync is off as set in the NVIDIA control panel
• Adrenalin Software 20.11.2 – 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
• MSI’s Afterburner, 4.6.3 beta to set both cards’ power and temperature limits to their maximums
• All 15 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT-VR Capture (latest Beta 03/04/20)
• FCAT-VR Beta 18
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution unless specified

15 VR Game benchmark suite & 4 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• VRMark Cyan Room
• VRMark Blue Room
• Unigine Superposition VR Benchmark
• OpenVR Benchmark

SteamVR /Epic Platform Games

• ARK: Park
• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Half Life: Alyx
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• Into the Radius
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Unreal 4 engine is a very popular engine for VR development, and seven of our thirteen test games are created with it. The Creation and Unity engines are each used for two games, while the COBRA, No Man’s Sky, Source, and Madness engines are each represented by one game.

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 fifteen VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution or higher (as noted), although some games were also set in-game to a higher resolution or increased pixel density as described for each game, as we compare the RX 6800 XT with the RTX 3080.

First up, ARK Park.

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

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RX 6800 XT delivered 126.49 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses but it needed 125 synthetic frames.

The RTX 3080 delivered 138.97 unconstrained FPS together with 2 dropped and 181 synthetic frames along with 2 Warp misses.

The experience is similar for both cards although the RTX 3080 has about 10% more performance headroom for potentially increasing individual in-game visual settings.

Next, we look at Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a visually impressive game using the Unreal 4 engine. It is a dark and disturbing game that is far more intense in VR than the pancake version. We benchmark at its very highest settings and with TAA, and we also increased the resolution to 170% in-game.

Here is the frametime plot for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 96.83 unconstrained FPS with 33 dropped and 1559 synthetic frames (24%) along with 33 Warp Misses as it could not deliver 90 FPS to the HMD at 170% resolution.

The RTX 3080 delivered 109.56 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped and 94 synthetic frames (1%). It also suffered 3 Warp Misses.

Hellblade only becomes demanding after the in-game resolution is set to above 150% although it looks great. Unfortunately, 170% Super Resolution is too demanding for the RX 6800 XT and it suffered Warp Misses and dropped frames.

Next we look at Into the Radius.

Into the Radius

Into the Radius is a hardcore single player stealth survival adventure/exploration game, and it pays homage to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series by being set in the dangerous large open world of the Pechorsk Exclusion Zone.

Into the Radius has decent visuals using Unreal Engine 4 that really add to its spooky and intense atmosphere, and its performance demands on the video card are also higher since its a huge open world game with a decent draw distance.

There are 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 benchmarked our two cards at High Quality and with 110% resolution.

Here is the frametime plot for Into the Radius.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 135.64 unconstrained FPS with 11 dropped frames, but no warp misses were reported and no synthetic frames needed to be synthesized.

The RTX 3080 delivered 151.01 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped and 7 synthetic frames. However, it suffered 3 Warp Misses. Both video cards delivered a similar experience although the RTX 3080 has more performance headroom.

Into the Radius becomes demanding after the resolution is set above 100%.

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 High which is above Enhanced but below Ultra, and we also set the anisotropic filtering to 16X and upgraded to FXAA+TAA.

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

The RX 6800 XT delivered 108.90 unconstrained FPS with 4 warp misses and 187 (3%) dropped frames, although none of its frames had to be synthesized.

The RTX 3080 delivered 126.48 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames and no warp misses, and it only required 39 (1%) synthetic frames.

The RTX 3080 edges out the RX 6800 XT and delivers more performance headroom and a smoother experience. We do not recommend using Ultra settings for either card, however.

Next, we will check out another VR game, Obduction.

Obduction

Obduction is considered to be the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven. It is an adventure game developed by Cyan Worlds using the Unreal 4 engine and it has very good visuals. There is an emphasis on puzzle solving which get more and more difficult as a player progresses.

Obduction’s visuals are both graphically impressive and relatively intensive. There are adjustable menu sliders that will allow the player to dial down the settings but we picked Epic and increased the in-game resolution to 140% plus 75% texture memory. Lowering the settings means the world textures are less detailed and the player will see them pop into view rather suddenly, breaking VR immersion.

Here is Obduction’s frametime plot.

Here are the details.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 112.83 unconstrained FPS with 3 dropped frames, 191 synthetic frames (3%), and 3 warp misses.

The RTX 308 0 delivered 130.54 unconstrained FPS and with 3 dropped frames, 10 synthetic frames and 3 warp misses. The experience playing Obduction is similar on both cards.

Next we will check out another demanding VR game, Project CARS 2 that we like better than Project CARS 3.

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. 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 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.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 123.10 unconstrained FPS, with 5 dropped frames, 5 warp misses but 210 of its frames (2%) had to be synthesized.

The RTX 3080 delivered 117.70 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames, 2 warp misses, but it only required 18 synthetic frames. The experience playing Project CARS 2 on our maximum settings is similar on both cards although the RX 6800 XT requires more frames to be synthesized.

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, and we also increased the resolution to its in-game maximum.

Here are the frametime results.

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

The RX 6800 XT delivered 134.93 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames, no synthetic frames, and no warp misses.

The RTX 3080 delivered 158.87 unconstrained FPS with 5 dropped frames, 5 synthetic frames, and 5 warp misses. Of course, many players would prefer adding more mods to the game rather than increasing the resolution, and the RTX 3080 gives a bit more performance headroom than the RX 6800 XT.

Let’s check out Subnautica next.

Subnautica

Subnautica uses the Unity engine. As the sole survivor of a crash landing, the player ventures into the depths of a visually impressive alien underwater world. Here you can explore, craft equipment and build bases, pilot underwater craft, and solve mysteries all while attempting to survive a hostile environment. It is an unoptimized mess, but the VR experience is well worth it.

We benchmarked Subnautica using its highest settings plus TAA, but we left its resolution at 100%, and here are the frametime results.

Here are the details.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 110.88 unconstrained FPS with no Warp Misses, and although it required no synthetic frames, it reported 2001 dropped frames instead.

The RTX 3080 delivered 102.13 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames, no warp misses, but 37% (2380) of its frames had to be synthesized.

The experience playing Subnautica using its highest settings is not ideal as it doesn’t appear to be very well optimized and there are obvious stutters at times which may also be driver related. However, the experience using the RX 3080 is smoother as the RX 6800 XT dropped frames instead of synthesizing them.

Next up, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an older game which is built on the Unreal 4 engine and it still boasts amazing visuals although it is not demanding. Although it is considered by some to be a walking simulator, it is also an excellent detective game with great puzzles. But be aware that its style of locomotion tends to make some of its players VR sick.

There are just a few in-game graphics options available, so we set 100% resolution in-game with TAA and then set SteamVR’s resolution to 200%.

Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 250.76 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames, no warp misses and no synthetic frames.

The RTX 3080 delivered 258.67 unconstrained FPS with 8 dropped frames, 8 warp misses, and 8 synthetic frames.

Although it is a beautiful game visually, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter isn’t particularly demanding even after the Super Resolution is increased to 200% using SteamVR. The experience playing on both cards is similar although the Warp Misses and dropped frames did impact the experience using the RTX 3080.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 15 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, but this time we increased the Pixel Density to 150% in game. Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RX 6800 XT delivered 116.32 unconstrained FPS with 18 dropped frames and 18 warp misses, and 213 (3%) of its frames had to be synthesized.

The RTX 3080 delivered 120.28 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp Misses, and it required 46 (1%) synthetic frames.

The experience playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game maximum settings and highest Pixel Density is similar between both video cards although the RTX 3080 delivers a smoother experience.

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 fifteen test games and four synthetic benches: Superposition, VRMark’s Cyan and Blue Rooms, and the OpenVR benchmark. Higher is better.

Synthetic benchmarks are only useful for ranking cards. They don’t predict how any game will actually play in VR on any particular video card.

The RX 3080 delivers higher unconstrained frames in 11 out of 15 games over the RX 6800 XT in this one important performance metric. We don’t give percentages of change or percentages of increase between competing cards since unconstrained framerates are just one metric of performance headroom that is useless without the accompanying frametime charts.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

It is great to see AMD delivering a card that is performance competitive with the RTX 3080. However, the RX 6800 XT only delivers higher unconstrained framerates in 4 of the 15 games we benchmarked. In addition, several of the FCAT VR frametime plots indicate the RTX 3080 delivers a smoother experience. From our preliminary PC gaming benchmarks using just 9 games, so far, the RX 6800 XT appears to be faster in pancake gaming than in VR relative to RTX 3080 performance.

We will continue to follow up VR performance between the RX 6800 XT and the RX 3080 and will add other cards into the mix as we check back to see if future drivers address performance and stability issues.

The next review will compare the performance of the RTX 3080 versus the RX 6800 XT reference version in 35+ games, and will also compare ray tracing performance and features to help determine value. In addition, we will introduce PowerColor’s Red Devil RX 6800 XT and also compare its performance and features next week. The reference RX 6800 XT has sold out worldwide and Radeon gamers are eagerly anticipating AMD’s partner launches.

In addition, we will have another new hardware review the following week that no one will want to miss!

Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!

This VR performance evaluation is the follow-up to the RTX 3070 pancake game and application performance launch review. We now present a thirteen-game VR performance showdown between the RTX 3070 and the RTX 2080 Ti using the Vive Pro and FCAT VR.

Since we posted our original VR review, we have benchmarked many VR games for our follow-up reviews for more than three years. We have also compared FCAT VR with our own video benchmarks using a camera to capture images directly from our HMD’s lenses. For BTR’s VR testing methodology, please refer to this evaluation.

We currently benchmark thirteen VR games using the Vive Pro, and we have recently added Half-Life: Alyx, Boneworks, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. BTR’s testing platform is an overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K at 5.1/5.0GHz, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32 GB of Vulcan Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz on a clean installation of Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition. Here are the thirteen VR games that we benchmark:

• ARK: Park
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Half-Life: Alyx
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames will make a VR experience very unpleasant. It is also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. Before we benchmark the performance of thirteen VR games, check out our 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 TeamGroup
• Vive Pro, on loan from HTC/Vive; the Wireless Adapter is not used for benchmarking
• RTX 3070 Founders Edition 8GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition 11GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• 1TB TeamGroup 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 TeamGroup
• 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 457.09 drivers
• High Quality, prefer maximum performance, single display, as set in the NVIDIA control panel
• Windows 10 64-bit Pro edition; Clean Installation, latest updates v20H2 (October 2020 Update)
• Latest DirectX
• MSI’s Afterburner, 4.6.3 beta to set both cards’ power and temperature limits to their maximums
• All 13 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT VR Capture (latest Beta 03/04/20)
• FCAT VR Beta 18
• SteamVR – at 100% resolution unless specified

13 VR Game benchmark suite & 3 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• VRMark Cyan Room
• VRMarK Blue Room
• Unigine Superposition VR Benchmark
• OpenVR Benchmark

SteamVR /Epic Platform Games

• ARK: Park
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Half Life: Alyx
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Unreal 4 engine is a very popular engine for VR development, and five of our thirteen test games are created with it. The Creation and Unity engines are each used for two games, while the COBRA, No Man’s Sky, Source, and Madness engines are each represented by one game.

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 (performance 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 one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our thirteen VR games’ performance using FCAT-VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution, although some games were set in-game to a higher resolution or increased pixel density, as we compare the RTX 2080 Ti versus the RTX 3070.

First up, ARK Park.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 100.59 unconstrained FPS with 5 Warp misses and 5 dropped frame, but 35% (2208) of its frames had to be synthesized. It isn’t a great experience and we would recommend playing it on Enhanced instead of High.

In contrast, the RTX 3070 delivered 100.86 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 Warp misses, and it required 1107 (17%) synthetic frames.

The experience playing No Man’s Sky using Ultra settings is better on the RTX 3070 on High settings than it is playing with the RTX 2080 Ti even though the Unconstrained FPS are almost identical.

Next we will check out another VR game, Obduction.

Obduction

Obduction is considered the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven. It is an adventure game developed by Cyan Worlds using the Unreal 4 engine. There is an emphasis on puzzle solving which get more and more difficult as a player progresses.

Obduction’s visuals are both graphically impressive and relatively intensive. There are adjustable menu sliders that will allow the player to dial down the settings but we picked Epic together with 100% resolution. Lowering the settings means the world textures are far less detailed, and the player will see them pop into view rather suddenly, breaking immersion.

Here is Obduction’s frametime plot.

Here are the details.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 103.12 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames, 2 Warp misses and 2166 (34%) synthetic frames.

The RTX 3070 delivered 113.97 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames or Warp misses and with 98 (2%) synthetic frames. The experience playing Obduction on Epic is better on the RTX 3070.

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

Project CARS 2

There is no way to convey the incredible sense of immersion that comes from playing Project CARS 2 in VR using a wheel and pedals. It uses its own Madness engine, and the physics implementation is outstanding. We are disappointed with Project CARS 3, and may continue to use the older game for VR benching.

For this performance review, we have created a longer and more demanding benchmark than our previous one. We race the California coast and stay up with the pack this time making it more representative than before.

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

We used maximum settings and here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

For VR gamers that use Turing or Ampere GeForce video cards, an excellent option for improving the visuals of a game without impacting performance is by using NVIDIA’s VRSS which is implemented at the driver level for DX11 Forward Rendered MSAA-enabled games. So far, over 30 games are supported including Boneworks and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

We have also welcomed a new BTR VR reviewer, Sean, a racing and flight sim specialist who will follow-up his first SPS iRacing VRS performance review later this week using an even more demanding track and conditions also using a Turing video card.

We are also going to follow-up on our Vive Pro Wireless Adapter review to compare performance using an overclocked i7-8700K versus an i9-10900K. However, first we plan to follow up with a Reflex Analyzer kit review which features the ASUS ROG Swift 360Hz G-SYNC Gaming Monitor PG259QNR and the ASUS ROG Chakram Core Gaming Mouse. We will compare our Samsung G7 Odyssey 27″ 2560×1440/240Hz/1ms/G-SYNC/HDR600 monitor with the new 360Hz/1ms ROG Swift 24″ display.

Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!

This review is a follow-up to the RTX 3080 pancake game and application performance launch review. We now present a thirteen-game VR performance showdown between the RTX 3080 versus the RTX 2080 Ti using the highest settings with the Vive Pro using FCAT VR.

Since we posted our original review, we have benchmarked up to 20 VR games for our follow-up reviews over the past three years. We have also compared FCAT-VR with our own video benchmarks using a camera to capture images directly from our HMD’s lenses. For BTR’s VR testing methodology, please refer to this evaluation.

We currently benchmark thirteen VR games using the Vive Pro, and we have recently added Half-Life: Alyx, Boneworks, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. BTR’s testing platform is an overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K at 5.1/5.0GHz, an EVGA Z490 FTW motherboard, and 32 GB of Vulcan Dark Z DDR4 at 3600MHz on Windows 10 64-bit Pro Edition. Here are the thirteen VR games that we benchmark:

• ARK: Park
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Half-Life: Alyx
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience very unpleasant. It is also important to understand how we accurately benchmark VR games using FCAT-VR as explained here. But before we benchmark our thirteen VR games, check out our 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
• Vive Pro, on loan from HTC/Vive; the Wireless Adapter is not used for benchmarking
• RTX 3080 Founders Edition 10GB, stock clocks, on loan from NVIDIA
• RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition 11GB, 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)
• All 13 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication
• FCAT-VR Capture (latest Beta 03/04/20)
• FCAT-VR Beta 18
• SteamVR

12 VR Game benchmark suite & 2 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• VRMark Cyan Room
• VRMaRK Blue Room
• Unigine Superposition VR Benchmark
• OpenVR Benchmark

SteamVR /Epic Platform Games

• ARK: Park
• Boneworks
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Half Life: Alyx
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Unreal 4 engine is a very popular engine for VR development, and five of our thirteen test games are created with it. The Creation and Unity engines are each used for two games, while the COBRA, No Man’s Sky, Source, and Madness engines are each represented by one game.

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 one important performance metric, faster is better.

Let’s individually look at our thirteen VR games’ performance using FCAT VR. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% SteamVR resolution, although some games were set in-game to a higher resolution or increased pixel density, as we compare the RTX 2080 Ti versus the RTX 3080.

First up, ARK Park.

ARK Park

ARK Park is a single or multiplayer VR adventure game set in a dinosaur theme park, and it allows gamers to interact with a few of the dinosaurs in ARK: Survival Evolved. The idea is to explore your own “Jurassic Park” with opportunities to study genetics, raise baby dinosaurs from eggs, ride and paint them, and even defend the park against attacking dinosaurs in a wave shooter segment.

ARK: Park has very few adjustable settings so we benchmark using its highest preset setting.

Here are the performance results of our two competing cards using FCAT VR’s generated chart.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 241.24 unconstrained FPS with 2 dropped frames and 2 frames were synthesized. In addition, it suffered 2 Warp Misses.

The RTX 3080 achieved 272.58 unconstrained FPS with no dropped or synthetic frames. There isn’t any difference playing on either card at our chosen settings as ARK Park is built on the Unreal Engine, and is not demanding. We would recommending increasing the Super Resolution in SteamVR’s settings

Next we look at Boneworks.

Boneworks

Boneworks is a rare game that couples a fair single player campaign with an incredible sandbox and next generation VR physics interactive tour de force.

Boneworks made on the Unity engine has average to very good visuals and it particularly benefits by allowing for high levels of MSAA up to 8X which we use for benching. We also enable ambient occlusion and use the highest settings, but setting max shadows will just default back to Medium.

Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 214.23 unconstrained FPS with no dropped or synthetic frames.

The RTX 3080 delivered 252.76 unconstrained FPS and with no dropped or synthetic frames either. As with ARK Park, there isn’t any difference playing on either card at our chosen settings as the game is not very demanding and we would also recommending increasing the Super Resolution in SteamVR settings as well as use NVIDIA’s VRSS for maximum visuals.

Let’s check out Elite Dangerous next.

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. Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a dedicated following of players.

We picked the Ultra Preset. Here are the frametimes.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 95.99 unconstrained FPS with 2 Warp Misses and 2 dropped frames, but 39% (2515) of its frames had to be synthesized.

In contrast, the RTX 3080 delivered 136.99 unconstrained FPS with 1 Warp Miss and 1 dropped frame, but it only required 4 synthetic frames. The experience playing Elite Dangerous at Ultra settings is far superior on the RTX 3080 than it is playing on the RTX 2080 Ti.

Let’s continue with Fallout 4.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 uses the Creation Engine. We benchmark at its highest settings and with TAA.

Fallout 4 had some issues on both cards with stuttering and slowdowns that we suspect are driver-related. Here is the frametime plot for Fallout 4.

Here are the details are reported by FCAT-VR:

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 121.25 unconstrained FPS with 8 Warp Misses and 8 dropped frames, but 2% (122) of its frames had to be synthesized.

In contrast, the RTX 3080 delivered 154.89 unconstrained FPS with 4 Warp Misses and 4 dropped frames, but it only required 22 synthetic frames. The experience playing Fallout 4 on the highest settings would be superior on the RTX 3080 over playing on the RTX 2080 Ti if the driver issues or performance were solved.

Next we look at Half Life: Alyx:

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 console commands to lock the SteamVR resolution to 100% so that it did not supersample or subsample.

Here is the frametime plot for Half Life Alyx.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 181.07 unconstrained FPS with no dropped or synthetic frames.

The RTX 3080 delivered 218.13 unconstrained FPS and with no dropped or synthetic frames either. Half Life Alyx isn’t particularly demanding and there isn’t any difference playing on either card at our chosen settings so we would also recommending increasing the Super Resolution to 130% in SteamVR settings using the RTX 2080 Ti and higher for the RTX 3080, and let the game subsample or supersample further.

We are able to increase the Super Resolution to beyond 140% for the RTX 3080 for even better visuals.

Next we look at Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a visually impressive game using the Unreal 4 engine. It is a dark and disturbing game that is far more intense in VR than playing the regular version. We benchmark at the Very Highest settings and with TAA, and we also increased the resolution to 130% in-game.

Here is the frametime plot for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 102.50 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped and 14 synthetic frames along with a Warp Miss.

The RTX 3080 delivered 139.34 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped and 3 synthetic frames. It also suffered a Warp Miss.

Hellblade isn’t particularly demanding until the Resolution is increased to 130% in-game, and then the RTX 2080 Ti runs out of headroom – unlike with the RTX 3080 that may benefit from increasing the SteamVR Super Resolution even further.

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 only with 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 “Ultra” which is above Enhanced and we set the anisotropic filtering to 16x, and also upgraded from FXAA to FXAA+TAA.

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

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 82.30 unconstrained FPS with 1 Warp Miss and 1 dropped frame, but 50% (3162) of its frames had to be synthesized. It wasn’t a great experience and we would recommend playing it on Enhanced instead of Ultra.

In contrast, the RTX 3080 delivered 115.07 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames, and it only required 403 (6%) synthetic frames. The experience playing No Man’s Sky using Ultra settings is much better on the RTX 3080 than it is playing with the RTX 2080 Ti.

Next we will check out another VR game, Obduction.

Obduction

Obduction is considered the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven. It is an adventure game developed by Cyan Worlds using the Unreal 4 engine. There is an emphasis on puzzle solving which get more and more difficult as a player progresses.

Obduction’s visuals are both graphically impressive and relatively intensive. There are adjustable menu sliders that will allow the player to dial down the settings but we picked Epic together with 120% resolution. Lowering the settings means the world textures are far less detailed, and the player will see them pop into view rather suddenly, breaking immersion.

Here is Obduction’s frametime plot.

Here are the details.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 116.83 unconstrained FPS with 4 synthetic frames.

The RTX 3080 delivered 129.45 unconstrained FPS and with 5 synthetic frames. You may be able to increase RTX 3080’s Super Resolution slightly beyond the 120% we set in-game for both cards, but the experience playing Obduction is very similar on both cards.

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

Project CARS 2

There is no way to convey the incredible 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 a bit disappointed with Project CARS 3, and may 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 except for Motion Blur which look best to us on Low. We would also recommend lowering grass and reflections to maximize framerate delivery if necessary as motion smoothing or reprojection tends to cause visible artifacting. Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 99.36 unconstrained FPS, and 21% (1596) of its frames had to be synthesized. It isn’t a great experience playing with Motion Smoothing on, and we would recommend lowering settings instead.

In contrast, the RTX 3080 delivered 121.99 unconstrained FPS with no dropped frames, and it didn’t require any synthetic frames either. The experience playing Project CARS 2 on our chosen near-maximum settings is significantly better on the RTX 3080 than it is on the RTX 2080 Ti.

Let’s benchmark Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that 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 also increased the resolution to its in-game maximum. Here are the frametime results.

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

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 126.02 unconstrained FPS yet 60 of its frames had to be synthesized.

In contrast, the RTX 3080 delivered 159.30 unconstrained FPS and it didn’t require any synthetic frames. The RTX 3080 can also benefit visually from increasing the Super Resolution further, but not the RTX 2080 Ti. Of course, many players would prefer adding more mods to the game rather than increasing the resolution.

Let’s check out Subnautica next.

Subnautica

Subnautica uses the Unity engine. As the sole survivor of a crash landing, the player ventures into the depths of a visually impressive alien underwater world. Here you can explore, craft equipment and build bases, pilot underwater craft, and solve mysteries all while attempting to survive a hostile environment.

We benchmarked Subnautica using its highest settings plus TAA, but we left its resolution at 100%, and here are the frametime results.

Here are the details.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 84.66 unconstrained FPS, but 48% (2792) of its frames had to be synthesized.

In contrast, the RTX 3080 delivered 102.07 unconstrained FPS with 1 Warp Misses and 4 dropped frames, but it only required 28% (1722) synthetic frames. The experience playing Subnautica using its highest settings is not ideal as it doesn’t appear to be very well optimized and there are obvious stutters at times which may also be driver related.

Next up, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is built on the Unreal 4 engine and it boasts amazing visuals although it is not demanding. Although it is considered by some to be a walking simulator, it is also an excellent detective game with great puzzles. Be aware that its style of locomotion tends to make some of its players VR sick.

There are just a few in-game graphics options available, so we set 130% resolution in-game with TAA. Here is the frametime plot.

Here are the FCAT-VR details.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 260.08 unconstrained FPS and the RTX 3080 delivered 356.19 unconstrained FPS. Neither card dropped any frames.

Although it is a beautiful game visually, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter isn’t particularly demanding even after the Super Resolution is increased to 130% in-game, and then both cards may benefit further by increasing the Super Resolution in SteamVR.

Last up, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinner is the last of BTR’s 13 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, but this time we increased the Pixel Density to 150% in game. Here is the frametime chart.

Here are the details as reported by FCAT-VR.

The RTX 2080 Ti delivered 94.34 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frame and 1 Warp Miss, and 33% (2101) of its frames had to be synthesized. It’s an awful experience playing this game with Motion Smoothing on, and we would recommend dropping the Pixel Density instead.

In contrast, the RTX 3080 delivered 120.75 unconstrained FPS with 1 dropped frames and 1 Warp Miss, but it didn’t require any synthetic frames. The experience playing The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners using the in-game maximum settings and highest Pixel Density is much better on the RTX 3080 than it is on the RTX 2080 Ti.

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 thirteen test games and four synthetic benches: Superposition, VRMark’s Cyan and Blue Rooms, and the OpenVR benchmark.

Synthetic benchmarks are only useful for ranking cards. They don’t predict how any game will actually play in VR on any particular video card.

Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

We are surprised that the RTX 3080 – although Ampere has no VR optimizations over Turing – is able to give a superior VR experience at more demanding settings than the RTX 2080 Ti. We think that the RTX 3080 is a good upgrade over the RTX 2080 Ti for VR, even more so than for pancake gaming.

For VR gamers that use Turing or Ampere GeForce video cards, an excellent option for improving the visuals of a game without impacting performance is by using NVIDIA’s VRSS which is implemented at the driver level for DX11 Forward Rendered MSAA-enabled games. So far, over 30 games are supported including Boneworks and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

We will follow up this review next with a Star Wars Squadron VR performance review before we benchmark the RTX 3090 versus the RTX 3080 as we plan to add it to our VR benching suite. For that review, we will focus on Super Resolution at the most demanding settings to see if the 24GB of vRAM that NVIDIA’s flagship card is equipped with will give us any significant advantage in VR that may justify its $1500 price tag over the $699 RTX 3080. We will recommend the Ampere RTX 3080 just by using brute force alone as giving a better VR experience than the Turing RTX 2080 Ti.

We have also welcomed a new VR reviewer, Sean. He is a racing and flight sim specialist who also will join us in benching VR for this large and growing community.

We are also going to follow-up on our Vive Pro Wireless Adapter review to compare performance using an overclocked i7-8700K versus an i9-10900K. We love the freedom of being untethered by a cable to our PC! And we will also review the ASUS Chakram mouse shortly before we prepare for the arrival of the RTX 3070. Stay tuned to BTR!

Happy VR Gaming!

This review follows up the evaluation where we compared VR performance of a RTX 2080 Ti versus a RTX 2080 SUPER with a Vive Pro using 10 VR games. We now present an entry-level VR performance showdown between the RX 590 versus the GTX 1660 SUPER and also versus the GTX 1660 Ti. We measure frametimes and unconstrained performance using the Vive Pro with FCAT VR.

The GTX 1660 SUPER released at $229 and immediately made redundant the identically priced but slower GTX 1660 and also the 1-3% faster GTX 1660 Ti now starting at $259. The only AMD card in a similar price range is the Red Devil RX 590 although some RX 590s are now priced below $200. We particularly want to compare the (new) $229.99 ASUS DUAL GTX 1660 SUPER EVO versus the (open box) $206.99 Red Devil RX 590 since they are in a similar price range, and we also want to see if the EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XC is worth the extra $30 (after rebate) over the SUPER for VR.

Since we posted our original review nearly three years ago, we have benchmarked many VR games for our follow-up reviews over the past thirty-three months using the Oculus Rift CV-1 and now we are using a more demanding HMD, the Vive Pro. We have also compared FCAT-VR with our own video benchmarks using a camera to capture images directly from our HMDs’ lenses. For BTR’s VR testing methodology, please refer to this evaluation.

We currently benchmark ten VR games at maxed-out settings using the Vive Pro. BTR’s testing platform is an Intel Core i7-8700K at 4.8GHz, an EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard and 16 GB of T-Force XTREEM DDR4 at 3866MHz on Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition. Here are the ten VR games that we benchmark:

• ARK: Park
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames can make a VR experience unpleasant, even leading to VR sickness. It is also very important to understand how to accurately benchmark VR games as explained here. Before we benchmark our ten VR games, check out our Test Configuration.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7-8700K (HyperThreading and Turbo boost is on to 4.8GHz for all cores; Coffee Lake DX11 CPU graphics).
• EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard (Intel Z370 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 3.0/3.1 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by EVGA
• T-Force XTREEM 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB, dual channel at 3866MHz), supplied by Team Group
• ASUS GTX 1660 DUAL SUPER EVO OC 6GB Founders Edition, Asus Factory clocks, on loan from ASUS
• Red Devil RX 590 8GB, at Red Devil factory clocks, on loan from PowerColor
• EVGA GTX 1660 Ti XOC 6GB, at EVGA factory clocks, on loan from EVGA
• 480GB L5 LTE Team Group SSD
• 1.92TB San Disk enterprise class SSD
• 2TB Micron 1100 enterprise class SSD
• T-FORCE Vulcan 500GB SSD, supplied by Team Group
• EVGA 1000G 1000W Gold power supply unit
• Cooler Master 240mm CPU water cooler
• EVGA Nu Audio stereo PCIe sound card, supplied by EVGA
• Edifier R1280T active desktop speakers
• EVGA DG-77, mid-tower case supplied by EVGA
• Monoprice Crystal Pro 4K
• Vive Pro, on loan from HTC/Vive

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce Game Ready 441.20 WHQL drivers.
• Adrenalin Software Edition 19.11.2 drivers
• Unconstrained framerate results show average frame rates where higher is better; Frametime plots show frametimes where lower is better
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 10 64-bit Home edition v1903.
• Latest DirectX
• All 10 VR games are patched to their latest versions at time of publication.
• FCAT-VR Capture v0.9.3202.0 UAC
• FCAT-VR Beta 17

10 VR Game benchmark suite & 2 synthetic tests

Synthetic

• VRMark Cyan Room
• Unigine Superposition VR Benchmark

SteamVR/Viveport*/Epic** Platform Games

• ARK: Park
• Elite Dangerous
• Fallout 4
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
• No Man’s Sky
• Obduction*
• Project CARS 2
• Skyrim
• Subnautica**
• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

The Unreal 4 engine is one of the most popular engines for VR development, and four of our ten benchmarked games are built with it. The Creation engine is used for two games while the COBRA, No Man’s Sky, Unity, and Madness engines are each represented by one game. All of the engines are identified under each game’s description.

It is important to remember that the 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 one important performance metric, faster is better. When available, we also note dropped frames in FPS and reprojected synthetic frames in percentages.

Please note that these charts only feature frametimes without the interval plots because of an issue with the way FCAT-VR still incorrectly reports synthetic frames as dropped frames using the Vive Pro. All of our games were benchmarked at 100% resolution.

Let’s individually look at our ten VR games’ performance using FCAT-VR. First up, ARK Park.

ARK Park

ARK Park is a single or multiplayer VR adventure game set in a dinosaur theme park, and it allows gamers to interact with a few of the dinosaurs in ARK: Survival Evolved. The idea is to explore your own “Jurassic Park” with opportunities to study genetics, raise baby dinosaurs from eggs, ride and paint them, and even defend the park against attacking dinosaurs in a wave shooter segment.

ARK: Park has very few adjustable settings so we benchmark using its highest preset setting.

Here are the performance results of our three competing cards using FCAT-VR’s generated chart.

The unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 100.7 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 111.7 FPS. There were 17 dropped frames but no need for production of synthetic frames reported by FCAT-VR for the GTX 1660 Ti, but the GTX 1660 SUPER synthesized or dropped 3% of the frames. In contrast, the RX 590 only managed 52.1 unconstrained FPS which meant that half of the frames were synthetically generated.

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. Elite Dangerous is also co-op and multiplayer with a dedicated following of players.

We picked the Medium Preset. Here are the frametimes.

Elite Dangerous refused to launch using the RX 590. It may have had to do with an update or it may be a problem with drivers. The unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 90.8 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 92.9 FPS. FCAT-VR showed a combined total of 8% synthetic (including dropped) frames using the GTX 1660 Ti while the GTX 1660 SUPER reported only 2%.

Let’s check out another demanding VR game, Fallout 4.

Fallout 4 VR

Fallout 4 uses the Creation Engine. We benchmark at its highest settings and with TAA.

Here are the frametimes for Fallout 4.

In Fallout 4, the unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 57.0 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 57.7 FPS, making the game an acceptable experience on highest settings using reprojection. Although FCAT-VR reported a combined total of 50% synthetic (including dropped) frames using both GeForce cards, the RX 590 synthesized or reprojected 55% as it only managed 46.2 unconstrained FPS. It was somewhat unpleasant to play Fallout 4 at the highest settings even using reprojection with a RX 590, and we would recommend dropping them down a bit.

Next we benchmark Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a visually impressive game using the Unreal 4 engine. It is a dark and disturbing game that is far more intense in VR than playing the regular version. We benchmark at the Very Highest settings and with TAA even though all three of our entry level cards will use reprojected frames.

Here is the frametime plot for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice on its highest settings at 100%.

The unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 71.4 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 70.1 FPS. The RX 590 followed closely with 69.9 unconstrained frames. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a beautiful game on highest setting and it is generally playable with all three of our video cards at a locked 45Hz/FPS framerate using reprojection.

Next we will check out another very 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 only with 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 their 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 just above Low and raised the anisotropic filtering from 2x to 16x.

In No Man’s Sky, the unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 57.3 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 58.1 FPS, making it an acceptable experience on Enhanced settings using reprojection. Although FCAT-VR reported a combined total of 50% synthetic (including dropped) frames using both GeForce cards, the RX 590 synthesized or reprojected 55% as it only managed 45.6 unconstrained FPS. Again, it was somewhat unsettling to play No Man’s Sky at Enhanced settings using a RX 590 and we would recommend dropping them to Low.

Next up is another demanding VR game, Obduction.

Obduction

Obduction is considered the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven. It is an adventure game developed by Cyan Worlds using the Unreal 4 engine. There is an emphasis on puzzle solving which get more and more difficult as a player progresses.

Here is Obduction’s frametime plot.

Obduction’s unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 111.8 FPS with 7 dropped frames and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 112.3 FPS with 6 dropped frames; and no frames were synthesized by either GeForce card. On the other hand, FCAT-VR reported a combined total of 47% synthetic (including dropped) frames using the RX 590 as it managed to deliver 74.8 unconstrained FPS.

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

Project CARS 2

There is no way outside of the virtual reality experience to convey the incredible 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 our three cards using Medium settings (also using SMAA Medium) but with Motion Blur set to Low.

Here are the results of our FCAT-VR benching.

Project CARS 2’s unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 57.6 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 58.7 FPS with both cards each reporting a combined total of 50% synthetic (including dropped) frames. The RX 590 delivered 49.7 unconstrained FPS and 51% of its frames were synthetic (or dropped). The game is playable on Medium settings at 45Hz/45 FPS using reprojection although it is not ideal.

Let’s benchmark Skyrim VR.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim VR is an older game that is not as demanding as many of the newer VR ports so its performance is very good on maxed-out settings using its Creation engine. We played for over 40 hours to complete the main quest in VR with a much higher sense of immersion than playing the pancake game. Casting fireballs from ones fingertips and feeling the thunk of arrows into one’s shield is a great experience unique to Skyrim VR.

We benchmarked Skyrim VR using its highest settings.

Skyrim’s unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 94.7 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 97.0 FPS. FCAT-VR showed a combined total of 10% synthetic (including dropped) frames using the GTX 1660 Ti while the GTX 1660 SUPER reported 7%. The RX 590 delivered 72.6 unconstrained frames per second and 47% of its frames were synthetic.

Subnautica

Subnautica uses a heavily modded version of the Unity engine. As the sole survivor of a crash landing, the player ventures into the depths of a visually impressive alien underwater world. Here you can explore, craft equipment and build bases, pilot underwater craft, and solve mysteries while attempting to survive a very hostile environment.

We benchmarked Subnautica using its Lowest settings. There is a lot less detail playing on low, and textures pop into view rather suddenly.

Subnautica’s unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 66.8 FPS and the GTX 1660 Ti gave 65.3 FPS, making the game a somewhat acceptable VR experience on Low settings using reprojection. Although FCAT-VR reported a combined total of 53% synthetic (including dropped) frames using both GeForce cards, the RX 590 synthesized or reprojected 55% as it managed 51.8 unconstrained FPS.

Subnautica is a very demanding game even at the lowest settings. We would recommend adding Steam VR’s Motion Smoothing – or dropping the resolution multiplier – in addition to using reprojection for satisfactory play without tempting VR sickness using entry level cards with a demanding HMD such as the Vive Pro.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is built on the Unreal 4 engine and it 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. Be aware that its style of locomotion tends to make some of its players VR sick.

There are just a few in-game graphics options available, so we picked 100% resolution with TAA.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’s unconstrained framerate of the GTX 1660 SUPER was 167.3 FPS, the GTX 1660 Ti gave 171.3 FPS, and the RX 590 produced 126.7 FPS. No synthetic or dropped frames were reported by any of our cards.

When there is performance headroom, we recommend increasing the resolution multiplier as far as a player’s card can handle without needing to generate synthetic frames. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is the last of our ten tested games, so let’s look at the summary charts.

Unconstrained Framerates

The following chart summarizes the overall Unconstrained Framerates of our three test games. Included are two synthetic benchmarks, Superposition (given in average and minimum FPS) and VRMark’s Cyan Room (score). An ‘X’ means the game was not run.

The GTX 1660 Ti barely edges the GTX 1660 SUPER in eight out of ten games. It loses slightly in one game, but in ARK: Park it is about 10% faster which may be attributed to drivers or perhaps to architectural differences. In nine out of ten games, the RX 590 trails well behind its main rival in VR, the GTX 1660 SUPER.

The VR Big Picture

We also compare the RX 5700 XT, the RTX 2060 SUPER, the RTX 2070 SUPER, the RTX 2080 SUPER and the RTX 2080 Ti on recent drivers using the Vive Pro. Please note that settings have been lowered for the three entry level cards as noted in the smaller chart above. An ‘X’ means the game was not run at that setting. Open the chart in a separate window or tab for best viewing.

Only the RTX 2080 Ti is able to deliver at least 90 FPS/90Hz in 9 of our 10 of our tested games, and the results have been ranked in order from the weakest card (RX 590) to the strongest (RTX 2080 Ti). We note that Navi as represented by the RX 5700 XT doesn’t have the same weaknesses that Polaris represented by the RX 590 exhibits in VR. Let’s check out our conclusion.

Conclusion

The GTX 1660 SUPER and the GTX 1660 Ti are in approximately the same class when it comes to VR performance and in only one game does the Ti beat the SUPER by about 10%. The other nine games give almost identical VR experiences, and in one game, the SUPER is even a bit faster than the Ti. However, the RX 590 sits in a lower performance class and it cannot be recommended for Vive Pro PC-VR since it is in a similar price range to the faster GTX 1660 SUPER.

Although the RX 590 is sufficient for playing on a less demanding HMD like the Oculus Rift CV-1 or the original Vive, it struggles to give sufficient performance using the Vive Pro. It can only manage to keep one out of our ten test games at 90 FPS and the other nine require using reprojection to even maintain a locked 45 FPS whereas the SUPER can keep 5 games above 90 FPS without resorting to synthesizing frames. We even felt a bit of unease playing several games with the RX 590 at our mostly medium and even low settings that we did not experience using the GTX 1660 SUPER.

We would like to make it crystal clear that a drop to 45Hz down from 90Hz is very noticeable and any irregularities in framerate delivery are magnified. This reviewer would absolutely not recommend an entry-level card for high-quality VR. If someone is going to spend hundreds of dollars on a HMD they should not cheap out on their graphics card.

We have recently transitioned from VR performance benchmarking using the Oculus Rift CV-1 to the Vive Pro, and from benching Oculus Store games to benchmarking SteamVR and Viveport games. BTR’s 10-game VR game benchmark suite is a beginning and we would appreciate it if our readers would tell us what games they would like us to add using Disqus comments below.

Next up, we are reviewing the SHIELD TV before we return to VR to test performance headroom using an RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 SUPER. Stay tuned!

Happy VR gaming!