Intro

Less than two weeks ago, AMD released its new $699 RX Vega 64 liquid-cooled video card which basically trades blows with the $499 GTX 1080, but completely failed to take the performance crown from NVIDIA’s $699 GTX 1080 Ti in our benchmark suite of 27 modern PC games. Since the RX Vega 64 is advertised for a “premium” VR experience, we are following up with a ten VR game performance comparison measuring frametimes and unconstrained performance with FCAT VR.

We have been playing more than 30 VR Oculus Rift games using 4 top NVIDIA and 3 top AMD video cards this year including the RX Vega 64. Since we posted our original evaluation in January, we have benchmarked 6 VR games in our follow-up using FCAT VR and then 3 more 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.

We are going to test 10 Oculus Rift VR games using the GTX 1080 Ti FE, the GTX 1080 FE, and a Gigabyte RX Vega 64 liquid cooled edition on a Core i7-6700K at 4.0GHz where all 4 cores turbo to 4.6GHz, an ASRock Z170 motherboard and 16GB of Kingston HyperX DDR4 at 3333MHz on Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition. Here are the ten VR games we are benchmarking:

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Alice VR

Batman VR

Chronos

DiRT: Rally

EVE: Valkyrie

Obduction

Robinson: The Journey

Robo Recall

Serious Sam: The Last Hope

The Unspoken

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 10 VR games, let’s take a look at our Test Configuration on the next page.