VR PC upgrade advices needed

Emerick_H · March 27, 2020

Hello,

I need some advice to upgrade my desktop PC:

My actual config:

CPU: i5-6600
Motherboard: MSI H110M-pro VD (Micro-ATX, only 2 RAM slots)
GPU: GTX1060 6G (Asus Turbo version)
RAM: 2x4Gb 2133MHz (HyperX Fury)
DD: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB with Windows and my games on it + a 500GB mechanical drive
Oculus Rift CV1 (3 sensors setup)

It's been a long time since I'm playing some demanding Desktop games and some quite GPU/CPU intensive software (compiling software,Unity...), but it has always been sufficient for me (I can run Fallout 4 in Ultra+shaders at decent framerates for example)

But recently I bought a second hand Rift (btw if your searching a cheap solution to play VR you can find complete 2nd hand CV1 kits for less than 300$ on eBay)

I'm playing mostly Beat Saber in but also some others games (Fallout 4 VR, probably Alyx when the price is going to be more acceptable,...), and I really start to see the limit of my PC:

mostly in Beat Saber, I'm now starting to play Expert+ maps and especially when they are a lots of blocks I'm experiencing a lot of framerate drops/freezes which are really limiting my progression because I just can't play some maps!

I tried to overclock my GTX1060, and I won some FPS while staying very stable and at 60°C, but I still have a lot of freezes.

I'm thinking of upgrading to 16Gb RAM anyway because my 8Gb are always full when I'm starting any game or Unity.

But I still have some questions:

Is it normal that I have such bad performances on Beat Saber with this config?
What do you think is the worst bottleneck in my config? My budget will not allow me to change both CPU and GPU anywa

Thank you,

Emerick

AndreiArgeanu · March 27, 2020

Have you tried monitoring GPU and CPU usage, that way you could potentially see what is holding you back. Also looking at the video Linus recently posted on Half Life Alyx it seems that a 1060 can do pretty well, so I'd imagine it could be that your CPU and potentially RAM is holding you back, but again, you might just want to monitor CPU and GPU usage using something like MSI AfterBurner just to make sure.

Jon Jon · March 27, 2020

I would recommend upgrading the 2070S.

I think that would be the best bang / buck for VR upgrade.

a 1060 can still do VR, but the RX 580 / GTX 1060 have always been the bare minimum for a serviceable experience.

Oculus also has a custom SDK for the Turing NVENC to do more believable ASR:

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asw-and-passthrough-with-nvidia-optical-flow/?locale=en_US

I think that'll be your night and day difference.

RAM is cheap now too, so I would recommend you pursue that as well with faster memory that can carry over to your next system.

Emerick_H · March 27, 2020

Here are my results during a Beat saber game:

So I guess RAM is already a limiting factor (even if it's not 100% full I can see that Windows is caching almost 1Gb on my hard drive)

Are 100% spikes on the CPU enough to conclude that it's my problem?

I've seen Linus video on Alyx, but I'm not sure Beat Saber is exactly demanding the same kind of resources as Alyx.

A 2070S would probably very nice for VR I agree but it's clearly not in my budget (especially because I live in Europe and every product costs 20% more than in the US+importation fees)

Faster RAM would also mean new CPU because 2133Mhz is the fastest that the i5-6600 can handle...

Emerick_H · April 11, 2020

I finally bought and installed in my PC an i5-9600K and 16Go (4x4Go) of 2666 Mhz memory,

and in more than 5 hours of playing VR since, I never experienced any kind of freeze or lag: in 1 hour of Beat Saber I exploded all my previous Expert+ scores!

The general performances of my PC is way better, I've won 10-30 FPS in every game!

So I guess my problem is solved, thank you for your help!