Intro

15 Premium VR Oculus Rift benchmarks

BTR benchmarked 10 VR games in late August and we concluded that AMD has delivered on its promise for entry-level VR with Polaris, but that the RX Vega 64 needed serious driver improvement before its performance could be called “premium”. Four months later, we now have another premium AMD VR card to test – the PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 – along with our liquid-cooled edition of the RX Vega 64, AMD’s top card. This time, we are benchmarking 15 VR games on the Oculus Rift including Fallout 4 VR using FCAT-VR, pitting the RX Vega 56 and 64 versus the GTX 1070 Ti, the GTX 1080, and the GTX 1080 Ti.

We have been playing more than 50 VR Oculus Rift games using midrange and high-end NVIDIA and AMD video cards last year. Since we posted our original VR evaluation last January, we then benchmarked 6 VR games in our follow-up using FCAT VR, followed by 3 more VR games. We have favorably compared FCAT VR with our own video benchmarks which use a camera to capture images directly from a Rift HMD lens. For BTR’s VR testing methodology, please refer to this evaluation. Currently, we are benching 15 VR games, and will continue to expand our VR benchmarking suite for 2018.

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We are going to test 15 VR games using the GTX 1080 Ti FE, the GTX 1080 FE, the GTX 1070 Ti FE, a PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56, and a Gigabyte RX Vega 64 liquid cooled edition on a Core i7-8700K where all 6 cores turbo to 4.6GHz, an EVGA Z370 FTW motherboard and 16GB of HyperX DDR4 at 3333MHz on Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition. Here are the fifteen VR games we are benchmarking:

Alice VR

Batman VR

Battlezone

Chronos

DiRT: Rally

EVE: Valkyrie

Fallout 4

Landfall

The Mage’s Tale

Obduction

Project CARS 2

Robinson: The Journey

Serious Sam: The Last Hope

The Unspoken

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Until FCAT VR was released in March, there was no universally acknowledged way to accurately benchmark the Oculus Rift as there are no SDK logging tools available. To compound the difficulties of benchmarking the Rift, there are additional complexities because of the way it uses a type of frame reprojection called asynchronous space warp (ASW) to keep framerates steady at either 90 FPS or at 45 FPS. It is important to be aware of VR performance since poorly delivered frames will actually make a VR experience quite unpleasant and the user can even become VR sick.

It is very important to understand how NVIDIA’s VRWorks and AMD’s LiquidVR each work to deliver a premium VR experience, and it is also important to understand how we can accurately benchmark VR as explained here. And before we benchmark our 15 VR games, let’s take a look at our Test Configuration on the next page.