This PC has an i5-10600K CPU in it and an AMD RX 5600XT GPU
and it has one very big problem...
It's not powerful enough!
Last year I gave this PC to my Father-in-law for his 82nd birthday
so he could do one of his favorite activities with it, which is playing
Microsoft Flight Simulator. At the same time my wife and I also got him an Oculus
Quest 2 so he could take his Flight Simulator experience to the next level and fly in VR.
However, his PC isn't good enough to offer the kind of visual quality and frame rate
I'm wanting for him in VR. Thanks to all of you watching my videos and putting up with the ads
though we're going to be upgrading his i5 to an i9-10900K and his 5600XT to an RTX 3080ti.
Yeeeaaahhhh!!!
Aaaannnnddd, build montage!
The 3080ti is an absolute monster of a graphics card. It's able to play Fortnite at 1440p with
all the graphical settings set to their maximum at 100 to 120 frames per second in Solo matches.
Hey! Wait a minute! I thought this video was about
upgrading your father-in-laws PC so he could play Flight Simulator?
Um... yah... It is, I just wanted to show what a 3080ti can do in a few other games too...?
Even in Team Rumble I saw the same kind of frame rate.
I like testing in Team Rumble because it's Fortnite's most chaotic game mode in my opinion,
and gives you a good idea of the lowest frame rate you can expect from your GPU in Fortnite.
Toward the end of the match when we had all the players packed in really close together
the frame rate did drop down a bit but was still averaging between 90 and 100fps;
and I should mention, these numbers are not using DLSS.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a 5 year old game now but it's still super impressive looking
and a whole lot of fun to play; especially when you squad up with your buddies.
I did all my testing in this game in the heavily wooded areas where there's a lot of trees and
other vegetation because all that geometry pushes GPU's pretty hard. And once again at 1440p with
all the graphical settings turned up to Ultra my average frame rate was in the 80's and 90's.
The Division 2 is probably one of the most visually stunning games I own and even with
all the eye candy cranked up to Ultra at 1440p the frame rate ranged from around 100
to 130 fps when running around outside and between 150 to 160 fps in interior areas.
Switching over to some VR titles now...
the first one I wanted to take a look at is Half Life: Alyx.
Benchmarking VR games on the Oculus Quest 2 works a little differently than benchmarking regular
games on monitors and stuff. The maximum frame rate is limited to the refresh rate of the VR
headset which is 120Hz in the case of the Quest 2. The two graphs you see overlaying my gameplay here
show the current frame rate and our hardware's performance headroom. What we want is to keep
our performance headroom above 0% so our hardware will keep spitting out a consistent frame rate.
Virtual reality is all about maintaining a high, consistent frame rate. If the frame
rate gets too low, or more importantly the frame times are all over the place,
then you get hitching and stuttering and in VR this can be nausea inducing. Anyway,
I set the refresh rate of my Quest 2 to 120Hz at a render resolution of 4707 X 2384 and as you can
see Half Life Alyx really pushes the 3080ti to it's limits. Yes I was able to hit 120fps
but we were right on the edge of the 3080ti's capabilities. As you watch the graph you'll notice
the frame rate quite frequently dropping down to 60fps; that isn't because that's all the better
the 3080ti can do in those moments. This is just how the Oculus software works to keep the frame
times as consistent as possible because even in those moments when the frame rate took those dives
I never noticed any stuttering, hitching or anything of the sort. Gameplay felt
perfectly smooth. I then lowered the Quest 2's refresh rate to 90Hz to see what would happen
and this target frame rate was no problem for the 3080ti. As you can see on the
graphs this gave us just enough performance headroom to keep an almost unwavering 90fps.
For Contractors VR I upped my Quest 2's refresh rate to 120Hz again keeping the render resolution
at 4707 X 2384 and the 3080ti had no problem whatsoever maintaining a constant 120fps in this
game. Contractors is an absolute blast, I love this game. If you haven't played it before and
are into VR shooters and are looking for a Call of Duty like experience then look no further.
It was over 60 years ago my Father-in-law enlisted in the United States Marine Corps
with ambitions of becoming a pilot. As many of us know life has a way of not always working out
quite according to our plans however and his aspirations of becoming a pilot,
sadly, were never realized. While I am unable to help him become an actual pilot I do have the
ability to give him what I feel is the next best thing; that being, being able to pilot virtually
any aircraft in the world in VR so the final game I tested was of course Microsoft Flight Simulator.
I first tested it just on my 1440p monitor and to keep things simple I set the Global
Rendering Quality to Ultra and then turned off motion blur because I freakin' hate motion blur.
I decided to do a little sight seeing over London, England and the lowest frame rate I saw was in
the 30's while I was doing some pretty low fly bys but when I increased my altitude the frame
rate came up to the mid 40's and more or less hung out there as I continued to fly around.
This game is absolutely gorgeous with all the settings maxed out but now it's time
to get to why I made this upgrade and see what our performance is like in VR.
In my efforts to get a good balance of visual fidelity and performance I ended up using a
settings guide put together by a YouTube channel called Pie in the Sky Tours and I've linked
the video I used of his in the cards and the description if you're interested. Performance in
VR isn't as good as I had hoped sadly. You can't see it in this capture footage but what I wanted
was the graphics in the headset to be as sharp and clear as they are in games like Half Life Alyx
but Flight Simulator is just too demanding. I set the Quest 2's refresh rate to 90Hz and the
render resolution to 4128 X 2096 and while the performance of the 3080ti is a definite step
up from the 5600XT it appears to get the kind of visual clarity
I'm wanting in this game we're still one or two or maybe even three graphics card generations away.
My Father-in-law is happy with it though so I'll count that as a win.