Will this build bottle-neck a possible upgrade to 1070 or 980?

[Danny314]

Hello,

A couple years back I built my friend a gaming pc. It came equipped with i5 4690k, 16GB Corsair Vengeance memory and an EVGA 760 FTW Edition. It's been starting to have trouble playing next generation games (mostly being forced to medium or low).

Recently, he's been very interested to venture into VR. He recently took the SteamVR Benchmark and scored in the "Not Ready" score. I told him the 980ti isn't worth the price to performance compared to the 1070 (obviously lol).

Here is the benchmark:

The reason he doesn't want to upgrade to the new generation i7, motherboard and ram is due to how much it would cost especially when you factor in the price of the HTC Vive. You can also recommend any other cards that would work well with his processor to run VR to its fullest!

Thanks for your help!

 

[Supernova1138]

The GTX 1070 is probably the best choice for VR right now if he doesn't want to splash out for a 1080. The 980Ti is okay if you can get it cheap, outside of VR it performs similarly to the 1070, but in VR it can be considerably slower as it lacks some VR optimizations that were added in Pascal. Unfortunately there aren't really any AMD options at that performance level right now, closest thing would be the R9 Fury X, which is slower than the 1070 in everything except certain DirectX 12 titles and is limited to 4GB of VRAM which might be an issue in the long term or if he wants to play at resolutions above 1080p.

Stepping down to the lower budget space eg. $250 or so, there is the GTX 1060 6GB and RX 480, but they are considered to be the entry level VR cards, and VR games are likely to pare back visual quality more on these cards to maintain 90 FPS. There isn't really any point in looking at anything less than the GTX 1060 6GB or RX 480 when it comes to VR, a used GTX 970 or 980 or R9 390 could do in a pinch if he really needs to save some money, but it wouldn't be the greatest for VR.

CPU wise, he will be okay with the i5 4690k, though if he hasn't overclocked it, he may want to do so depending on how CPU heavy the VR games get, right now they don't seem to be all that CPU heavy for the most part so a stock clocked 4690k should be fine.

 

[Danny314]

The GTX 1070 is probably the best choice for VR right now if he doesn't want to splash out for a 1080. The 980Ti is okay if you can get it cheap, outside of VR it performs similarly to the 1070, but in VR it can be considerably slower as it lacks some VR optimizations that were added in Pascal. Unfortunately there aren't really any AMD options at that performance level right now, closest thing would be the R9 Fury X, which is slower than the 1070 in everything except certain DirectX 12 titles and is limited to 4GB of VRAM which might be an issue in the long term or if he wants to play at resolutions above 1080p.

Stepping down to the lower budget space eg. $250 or so, there is the GTX 1060 6GB and RX 480, but they are considered to be the entry level VR cards, and VR games are likely to pare back visual quality more on these cards to maintain 90 FPS. There isn't really any point in looking at anything less than the GTX 1060 6GB or RX 480 when it comes to VR, a used GTX 970 or 980 or R9 390 could do in a pinch if he really needs to save some money, but it wouldn't be the greatest for VR.

CPU wise, he will be okay with the i5 4690k, though if he hasn't overclocked it, he may want to do so depending on how CPU heavy the VR games get, right now they don't seem to be all that CPU heavy for the most part so a stock clocked 4690k should be fine.

Thanks so much for your help!