[SOLVED] Will upgrading GPU give me a good VR experience?

vmwarerig

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May 3, 2017
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Hello All,

I would like to know whether upgrading the GPU in my workstation would give me a good VR experience. I have a 7049A-T workstation from Supermicro (https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/7049/SYS-7049A-T.cfm) configured with the below.

I have a big budget for upgrading the GPU, but I'm wondering if any of my other components would still be a bottleneck preventing me from getting a good VR experience. If all I need to do is upgrade the GPU, then are there any that would work best specifically for this system or can I just use one that is highly recommended for all systems?

Also, should I consider overclocking the CPU's? The Intel specs say:
Processor Base Frequency - 2.20 GHz
Max Turbo Frequency - 3.00 GHz

Windows Task Manager shows them running at 2.5 GHz.


2 x Intel Xeon Silver 4114 CPU (10 cores each)
12 x 16 GB DDR4-2666 ECC RDIMM
2 x NVIDIA PNY QuadroP2000 5GB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0-Active Cooling
1 x Intel DC P3520 1.2TB,NVMePCIe 3.0x4,3D MLC HHHL AIC0.6DW
Win 10 Pro 64bit, 2CPUs/512GB Mem

When I ran the SteamVR Performance Test, it said the OS and CPU were "Ready" in green text, but the GPU was "Capable" in yellow text. It also said:

Average Quality: 3.1 (Medium)
Frames Tested: 9669
Frames Below 90 fps: 23 (0.2%)
Frames CPU Bound: 0 (0%)

Thanks,
Jeremy
 
Solution
cringes You have the best of hardware and the worst of hardware at the same time.

Let me explain:
You have a number crunching machine. It's designed for workstation type work. It is also designed for stability over sheer speed. What you have is a dump truck. It's useful for getting work done, but it isn't the fastest. The quadro isn't the fastest either. It comes with special drivers for specialized applications like Adobe, Autodesk, and encoding/decoding multiple video streams at the same time. But it's also clocked lower for stability.

What you have isn't designed for VR gaming. For VR Gaming you really need the fastest 6 or 8 core system you can get your hands on. (ie: 3800X oc to 4.3Ghz, or 9700K oc to 5Ghz+)...
cringes You have the best of hardware and the worst of hardware at the same time.

Let me explain:
You have a number crunching machine. It's designed for workstation type work. It is also designed for stability over sheer speed. What you have is a dump truck. It's useful for getting work done, but it isn't the fastest. The quadro isn't the fastest either. It comes with special drivers for specialized applications like Adobe, Autodesk, and encoding/decoding multiple video streams at the same time. But it's also clocked lower for stability.

What you have isn't designed for VR gaming. For VR Gaming you really need the fastest 6 or 8 core system you can get your hands on. (ie: 3800X oc to 4.3Ghz, or 9700K oc to 5Ghz+) This is basically a Ferrari.

Buying a new video card now is NOT recommended. New ones are right around the corner, and it looks like AMD and NVIDIA will both have a highly competitive product line up with each other. That means we should get into better pricing soon along with much improved performance.

If you must have something now, get a 2080ti. But the new cards may be up to 50 to 75% faster. With hi-res VR that can make a huge difference in terms of render quality.

That valve VR test came out about 5 years ago? It's really a poor poor metric to gauge how well modern day games will do. Like all games the complexity of VR games is going up, not down. Thus you need more horsepower.
 
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