This video did not go at all like I was expecting it to.
I bought an Arc A770 GPU, installed it in my test PC and was ready to play some VR
games and see how the A770 performs and as I go to launch Air Link I see this.
It turns out, Oculus officially, only supports Nvidia and AMD GPU's. At this point in time
Intel's Arc GPU's are not supported in the Oculus software. And when and if they will
be remains to be seen. I don't think they're in any hurry to add support though because taking
a look at the December 2022 Steam Hardware survey, which is the most recent survey at
the time I'm making this video, there is not a single Intel Arc GPU on the list.
Just because they aren't officially supported doesn't mean it doesn't work at all though.
Thanks to Guy Godin and his Virtual Desktop app I was able to run several games and get
an idea of what kind of VR performance the A770 is capable of in it's unofficially supported state.
Now if you've seen my other VR graphics card benchmark videos;
for those I used the Performance overlay in the Oculus Debug tool. Since the A770 is
not officially supported though I was unable to use that tool; so instead, in this video you'll
be seeing Virtual Desktop's Performance statistics overlay. Also, Virtual Destop
doesn't give you different render resolutions to choose from like the Oculus PC app does.
You instead choose based on what graphics card you have, from a Potato all the way up to Ultra.
So yah, for Beat Saber I was able to select Ultra Graphics Quality at 120Hz in Virtual
Desktop and in Beat Saber's settings I set the render scale to 1.5, turned MSAA off,
turned Smoke and Screen Distortion effects On and Max Shockwave Particles to 2.
For not having official VR support the A770 performed really well. It was almost always
a few fps below 120 as I was playing but gameplay was smooth and Beat Saber looked sharp and crisp.
Oh, I should mention my test PC is rocking an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance
DDR4 3600MHz CL16 RAM and of course the 16GB Intel reference model of the ARC A770. And as is
recommended to get the best performance possible out of the A770, Resizable BAR was enabled.
Since Beat Saber worked fine through Virtual Desktop I next fired up my
favorite VR shooter Contractors leaving the Virtual Desktop settings the same
and in Contractors graphics settings I set everything to High except for Anti-Aliasing
which I set to Low. At these settings, again the A770 did well. It wasn't quite able to hit
120fps at these settings but it did stay above 100fps the majority of the time,
so I turned the refresh rate down to 90Hz and just to see what would happen increased the in
game graphics quality to Ultra and the A770 delivered some very solid performance. 90Hz
at Ultra Graphics Quality in both Virtual Desktop and in game were not a problem.
With the success of those two games I decided to try firing up Steam VR and see how the A770
handles Half Life Alyx. Initially I was able to load into the game just fine and navigate the menu
but as soon as I tried to load up a game that's when everything went wrong. The game locked up
and eventually crashed out to the Steam VR home environment. To make sure this wasn't just some
one off fluke I tried loading up Half Life Alyx half a dozen or more times after this and every
time it crashed. Sometimes I could get to the menu again but other times the game would act
like it was going to start up but would then lock up and crash before ever getting there.
Based off it's performance in Beat Saber and Contractors I'm confident the A770 can run Half
Life Alyx just fine but I don't know who needs to update their software to get it working properly,
Intel or Steam? I'm guessing it's Intel though. Anyway, I wasn't able to get Alyx to run at all
so I decided to see if this is a Steam VR problem or simply a Half Life Alyx problem.
I then fired up Assetto Corsa and on my first attempt things did not go well. So
I tried again. This time I was able to run the in game benchmark in VR just fine which
is the footage you're seeing right now but when I tried to actually cue up a race it would fail
to load and I'd be kicked back to the Steam VR home environment once again. I tried at
least a dozen times to get a race started and every time I was met with some kind of
problem. Sometimes it wouldn't recognize my racing wheel and pedals and other times the
race would never load. After about an hour of messing with it, I just decided to call it.
I then tried Microsoft Flight Simulator and it exhibited similar issues to Assetto Corsa.
To be fair when the game starts up you do get a warning message saying your computer
does not meet the minimum requirements and that you may encounter some issues so yah,
there is that. The main problem I had though was when switching to VR mode sometimes it
would switch over fine and others the game would lock up leaving me in this infinite Waiting loop.
One of the few times I was able to get into VR and cue up a flight I had Virtual Desktops
Graphics Quality at Medium, and the Flight Simulator settings as listed on screen. As
you can see I got about 50fps in this training flight but I should draw your
attention to the bottom right corner of the Performance Overlay as this was with
Synchronous Space Warp active. Turing it off cut the frame rate in half meaning the
A770 was only able to muster around 25fps on it's own at these settings. But again
the majority of the time I wasn't even able to get Flight Simulator to run in VR so yah.
At this point it was looking a lot like the A770 and Steam VR don't
like each other all that much so I went back to my Oculus Library
and tested out one of my Favorite VR games from last year Red Matter 2.
Unlike the Steam VR games; it ran great. I was able to set Virtual Desktops Graphics
Quality to Ultra and the refresh rate to 90Hz. In Red Matter 2's graphics settings I set the
resolution scale to 1.1 and turned both Indirect and Dynamic Shadows on. With Synchronous Space
Warp disabled the A770 kicked out an almost perfect 90fps throughout all my testing. I
did see it dip down close to 80 when I was playing around with the reflection of my
scanning tool laser in this window but the game still ran smooth and looked great in the headset.
Keeping the settings in Virtual Desktop the same I then tried out The Walking
Dead Saints and Sinners and was able to set the pixel density to 100% and
all the other settings to Ultra, except for Anti-Aliasing which I turned off.
As you can see the A770 had no problem at all with this game. There were fairly frequent dips
down into the 80's but just like Red Matter 2 overall the game both looked and ran great.
The last game I tested was Lone Echo 2. To get this game to run at what I
feel is an acceptable level I had to lower the Graphics Quality in Virtual Desktop to Medium
and the refresh rate to 72Hz. As for the game settings I set most things to High but rather
than go over them one by one I'm just going to list them on screen so you can see them.
Overall the A770 kept the frame rate at our target of 72fps. In some parts of the game
though the frame rate did fall down into the 60's but the frame times remained consistent
because while playing I didn't notice the change in frame rate really at all.
Even though I was able to get some VR games to run with the A770, and run pretty well in
some instances, it probably goes without saying that I would NOT recommend buying one for PCVR.
At least for now.
The fact that there isn't any official support for VR at the time I'm making this is a huge
knock against the A770. Yes it can run VR games, but having to purchase a 3rd party
app in order to run them isn't all that exciting I'm sure to most people; and the simple fact that
Steam VR games are basically unplayable means your money will be much better spent elsewhere.