Which card to go with

[bowser]

I'm not sure which way to go. I've just got a Rift S and I'm getting an Samsung Odyssey G7 for my birthday. I've not got hold of a new GPU yet, so stuck with my RX580 8GB at the moment. Would a RTX 3070 be a good fit for both, or would I see much improvement for either going to a RTX 3080 (top of my budget - and only the FE or the EVGA XC3 fit in my case). I looked at the 6800 (6800 XT wouldn't fit) and I'm interested in the ray tracing and DLSS.

In terms of games I play; I've got Red Dead Redemption, Control and Horizon Zero Dawn on my backlog after I've upgraded. Currently mostly playing Halo (and Minecraft with the kids). Also interested in Cyberpunk, but I don't want to buy a card just for performance on one unoptimized game.

[Pob255]

if you're interested in ray tracing and dlss then nvidia RTX is your best option atm (dlss is nvidia only)
Although I do question how good DLSS is over just CAS, Both are doing basically the same thing, rendering the image at a lower resolution then just scaling it up to the target resolution, DLSS is also applying some sharpening after to cover up the upscaling, it's what consoles have been doing for a while.
What it is not doing is SuperSampling which is the opposite, rendering the image larger and then scaling down, it should be called DLUS, although I'm not sure deep learning is being used correctly ether.

We really need a "anti-marketing terms" law when any marketing found abusing existing terminology or word definitions should be fined at a fixed rate of 3 times the total budget for the involved campaign.

CAS is Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, which again is just upscaling and sharpening

[kalniel]

By the time you can get a card they might have finished Cyberpunk

Rift S is what, 1440p@80hz? G7 is 1440p but up to 240hz. The games you list aren't ones that really benefit from FPS > 90 so you're looking for a card that can do 1440p and get up to 90fps. That's probably 3070 level.

[bowser]

By the time you can get a card they might have finished Cyberpunk

Rift S is what, 1440p@80hz? G7 is 1440p but up to 240hz. The games you list aren't ones that really benefit from FPS > 90 so you're looking for a card that can do 1440p and get up to 90fps. That's probably 3070 level.

I seemed to remember the Witcher 3 getting better with time, hopefully same will happen with Cyberpunk by the time I get to play it.

I was leaning to the 3070 (if I can ever get it), wasn't sure if the extra was justified to the 3080.

[bowser]

if you're interested in ray tracing and dlss then nvidia RTX is your best option atm (dlss is nvidia only)
Although I do question how good DLSS is over just CAS, Both are doing basically the same thing, rendering the image at a lower resolution then just scaling it up to the target resolution, DLSS is also applying some sharpening after to cover up the upscaling, it's what consoles have been doing for a while.
What it is not doing is SuperSampling which is the opposite, rendering the image larger and then scaling down, it should be called DLUS, although I'm not sure deep learning is being used correctly ether.

We really need a "anti-marketing terms" law when any marketing found abusing existing terminology or word definitions should be fined at a fixed rate of 3 times the total budget for the involved campaign.

CAS is Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, which again is just upscaling and sharpening

I've not seen many good comparisons of CAS against DLSS. I would go AMD and sacrifice DLSS, but the ray tracing is worse and the only card that will fit is the 6800 which didn't think was great value. I can only fit a 2.2 height card in my case.

I do agree with the marketing terms and abusing them.

[Padcontrol]

From what I've seen. AMD isn't doing too well when it comes to VR performance. So in that regard an nVidia 3070/3080 would be better. Ray traying is better on nVidia 3000 series, and DLSS which was a meme is actually pretty good now. Only problem with both these is the short list of games that support these features (of course its growing). AMD is in working on an DLSS competitor but still not heard much about it. Now the bigger issue is the price on all these gpus. You are more easily going to find an nVidia 3080/3070 FE at MSRP. They come into stock weekly/fortnightly but you have to be SUPER quick, as they go out of stock VERY quickly.

So in short. VR performance - Nvidia
RT + DLSS - Nvidia
Pure performance - 3080 ~ 6800 XT (depending on game) >> 6800 > 3070.
Power Draw/Efficiency - AMD

[bowser]

I’ve sign up to part alert, but they seem to go out of stock in less than a minute. I’m thinking towards a 3070 now, although I see the FE isn’t listed on nvidia’s page now and the aib cards have much lower delta between the 3070 and 3080.

Really enjoying VR, but not got my monitor yet (my wife has learnt her lesson to never buy from Argos online).

[DanceswithUnix]

AMD isn't doing too well when it comes to VR performance.

VR benchmarks seem pretty rare still, do you have a source for that?

From a practical perspective, I played Alyx through on an 8GB RX570. More performance is always nice, but I struggle to see how any of these newer cards will give a poor game experience.

[beebub]

Buy a 3060ti over a 3070 since bang for buck its far better value, and not that much worse performance. If you are lucky enough to get one, the next step up or best thing would be a founders edition 3080. That's where I am right now anyway after months of thinking about it

[Zhaoman]

VR benchmarks seem pretty rare still, do you have a source for that?

From a practical perspective, I played Alyx through on an 8GB RX570. More performance is always nice, but I struggle to see how any of these newer cards will give a poor game experience.

Rather than framerate performance, could Padcontrol be referring to the inferior GPU renderer in AMD cards? This is often brought up when talking about VR.

[DanceswithUnix]

Rather than framerate performance, could Padcontrol be referring to the inferior GPU renderer in AMD cards? This is often brought up when talking about VR.

Possibly, though as I have no idea what you are talking about I couldn't say

[Zhaoman]

Possibly, though as I have no idea what you are talking about I couldn't say

https://youtu.be/oUzCn-ITJ_o?t=561
9:21 onwards - this is what gets mentioned when it comes to VR but it only affects Oculus Link.

[Pob255]

umm no, 9:21 onwards is talking about video capture/on chip video encoding, amd relive (amd's version of nvidia's shadowplay) suffers from far worse quality compaired to shadowplay which has improved a lot.
it seems that the new amd architecture is designed to be better at pushing raw geometry data where nvidia is going for a more broad approach so it's better at a larger range of fancy features, because of this the performance lists are a bit all over the place.
nvidia doing better in some amd doing better in others, there's no one clear leader.

as to vr . . . I've not seen any benchmarks sorry

as to CAS vs DLSS I've not seen any comparisons (interesting side note CAS works on nvidia cards even non-RTX ones(game dependent)) but again not many games have CAS and it never seems to get mentioned in reviews unlike dlss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MLr1nijHIo here's a vid about CAS although some of the info is a bit out of date (eg cp2077 supports CAS on any card including nvidia, in dx11)

[Zhaoman]

The on chip video encoder is required for Oculus Link because it is a compressed stream over usb

[DanceswithUnix]

The on chip video encoder is required for Oculus Link because it is a compressed stream over usb

I've been using Link, and I did get hit by the last few AMD drivers having a performance issue that stopped Link from working which I guess is caused by AMD trying to fix quality. It was pretty annoying to have to downgrade drivers to get Link to work.
I believe this week AMD released new drivers that are supposed to work, but I haven't bothered trying yet.

I don't currently have any Nvidia cards to compare against, but in isolation the AMD cards seem perfectly playable. I have played quite a way through Alyx on the Quest 2, including wireless where the wifi can get a bit janky but cable free is so nice.

[hammy434]

I'd go for a 3080 FE - if you can get it that is! The AIB models are generally very overpriced IMO, and the FE design looks really nice.

The 3070 and 3060 Ti are also good options, it really depends how much you're willing to spend and what performance you're after. Again I'd probably go for an FE card unless you can get an AIB one at a decent price. Hardware Unboxed on YouTube has done lots of videos testing the new GPUs.

The AMD GPUs are also good but they lack some of the features that Nvidia has - like DLSS and ray tracing. But they do have more VRAM if that's important to you.