On a budget VR

ocelot20

Ok so I recently got a PSVR for my PS4 and I love it. So sometime in 2018 I want to get a PC headset. Now my current PC I have is more than enough for VR (GTX 1080ti, i7 4790K, 16GB RAM ect)

However, I am going to want to make full use of PC VR (room scale). Where my PC is now I will only have the room for a seated experience. I don't want to move my PC to my bedroom to be honest. I keep a lot of scrap components and after digging through some old stuff. I found an LGA1155 motherboard. As well as a few sticks off RAM (1x 4GB and 2x 2GB 1333mhz). As well as a few PSU's and a G1610 CPU. Now I did hook the CPU and motherboard and ram up to see if it's all powers up and they do all seem to be appearing in the bios.

I know for a fact the G1610 CPU won't be powerful enough for VR. Looking at both the Rift and Windows Mixed Reality. Both recommend at least the Intel i5 4590 CPU. I believe that is a LGA1150 chipset which won't work with this motherboard I have. So I had a look and the 4590 only seems to be around 6% faster than a i5 3550. The i5 3550 is cheap to buy these days (around £40).

So am thinking of buying a i5 3550 and using it with the spare motherboard and ram I had lying around. I just need a GPU and possibly another PSU (best one I have is only 350w). If I was to track down a cheap GTX 970 or a R9 290 will this give me a decent VR experience on PC?

GMC79

I use a 970 with my rift and it is fine (at close to 1500mhz) mostly play assetto corsa and pcars2 suprisingly good results just cant use too much supersampling and mixture of medium settings etc, but ideally you do need more power and i will likely upgrade at somepoint so when u get a rift or vive why not flog the psvr and get a 1060 or 1070/ti.

Edit

And also depends what you are playing, sometimes can obviously just use the vr on your main pc for seated games anyway.

ocelot20

Thanks for the suggestion. Am actually thinking of using the PSVR with PC via Trinus VR. You can also use the Xbox Kinect to get the move controllers and near full room experience working. Might have to play around with that and see what the results are.

d0x360

The thing with VR on PC is even if your above the min spec games might not look great (tons of jaggies) or they might not run great.

Even with an i7 5820k @ 4.6ghz on all 6 cores, 32 gigs ddr4 in quad channel and a GTX 1080 I found many games couldn't run with enough super sampling to look good.  They looked ok...but the jaggies were awful.

Then I upgraded to a 2080ti and all problems were solved EXCEPT for most Unity based games and the reason for that is far too many Unity devs don't actually have a clue on how to properly make a game outside of using stuff from the asset store.

Of course performance issues wouldn't be an issue at all if every game was using vulkan or dx12 but even ue4 is a dx11 engine with some dx12 function calls thrown on top.  We won't see proper adoption until the new consoles are out for a few months.

Still..if you don't mind lots of jaggies then a mid range PC is just fine plus not all devs are terrible lol and there are some excellent looking and running games that don't require anything more than mid range.

GMC79

Think I would have to disagree slightly, mayb in more heavy games but when I was on my gtx970 on assetto Corsa with 100% ss and mix of medium settings etc 2x aa it looked great and ran fine at average of 60fps it was awesome. when I got my 2080 and cranked everything up it to max with 200% ss it really didn't look much different. Bit sharper yeah but quality wise pretty much the same. Difference between medium and max settings is nowhere near the same as it is in VR compared to on a monitor as it doesn't have the resolution to show it.
I have no issue in turning stuff down in VR to get good fps as it really doesn't matter too much.

aoaaron

yeah just get a rift s and activate asw and use any 970  card for now.