There's no question whether or not the 3080ti can play games in VR or not. The
question is how well does it play games in VR? And that's what we'll be taking a look
at. For this video I've paired the Aorus RTX 3080ti Master with a Ryzen 9 5950X
CPU and 64GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz CL16 RAM. Now, let's dive in.
The first game we're taking a look at is Vader Immortal. This is an older title but
still a very popular one... because it's Star Wars... and it's Vader...
I started my test off at my go to render resolution of 4704 x 2384 and refresh rate
of 90Hz. I set the Graphics Quality in the game to High and at these settings the 3080ti
handled this game without even breaking a sweat just as I thought it would. Since we
still had a ton of Performance Headroom at this resolution and refresh rate I decided
to crank things up in the Oculus app and see how far we could go. I maxed out the
render resolution at 5408 x 2736 and set the refresh rate to 120Hz and as you can
see the 3080ti still wasn't even phased. It was easily able to maintain 120fps and our
performance headroom only dropped by about 10% which I felt was, most impressive .
Next I fired up another game I knew the 3080ti would absolutely crush; Beat Saber.
Once again I started off at a render resolution of 4704 x 2384 and a refresh rate of 90Hz.
In the games graphics settings I set everything to it's highest value, the Rendering Scale to 1.8
but turned anti-aliasing off because when running games at this high of resolution you really don't
need it on. Not to mention anti-aliasing can impact GPU performance a fair amount so turning
it off with the resolution and render scale set as high as I had it actually made the graphics look
better in Beat Saber and improved performance. With tons of performance headroom to spare I then
decided to do like I did with Vader Immortal and cranked the Render Resolution up to 5408
x 2736 and set the refresh rate to 120Hz which the 3080ti still had no problem with whatsoever.
Another game the 3080ti was able to crush was Contractors. This game is my go to VR
shooter. I love it's fast paced game play and it has a metric crap ton of mod maps you
can add to it giving the game an incredible amount of replay value. At 4704 x 2384 and
90Hz with all the game settings set to Ultra, except for anti-aliasing which I set to Low,
you can see the 3080ti was spitting out a constant 90fps with the performance headroom hovering in
the high 70's to low 80's. This of course meant I needed to crank things up to 5408 x 2736 and 120Hz
and even then the 3080ti crushed this game. As you can see on the performance graphs we
had a pretty consistent 120fps frame rate with plenty of performance headroom left to spare.
Moving on to one of VR's more popular titles that I only recently picked up and I haven't
had much time to really play through yet is The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners. I started out
with the Oculus Render Resolution set to 4704 x 2384 at 90Hz and set the Pixel Density in
the game to 150% and all the other settings to Ultra but turned anti-aliasing off which
kept things looking super crispy. At these settings the 3080ti had no problem whatsoever
with this game. The performance headroom did drop quite at bit though during moments like
this when I was taking on some walkers with a screw driver so I decided not to push things
any further by increasing the resolution or refresh rate although I probably could have
had I lowered the pixel density and some of the other settings. That being said,
at the settings I tested at, this game looks incredible and runs nice and smooth.
Next up we have Red Matter 2. This is a really good looking game. The only in game graphics
options you can adjust are the Resolution Scale which I set to 1.8 and Indirect and
Dynamic Shadows which I both set to On and at 4704 x 2384 and 90Hz the 3080ti performed
really well. Depending on the lighting effects going on in a particular scene
though the performance headroom would drop down pretty far and cut into our frame rate
a little bit. Thanks to how the compositor works though I never noticed any dip in the frame rate
while in the headset and as you can see on the graphs these performance dips were very brief.
Just for giggles I turned the in game Resolution Scale down to 1.5 and increased my Quest 2's
refresh rate to 120Hz leaving the Render Resolution at 4704 x 2384 and again the
3080ti performed like a champ. The majority of the time it delivered a constant 120fps but just like
at 90Hz when there were scenes like this one with more complex lighting effects going on,
our performance headroom quickly evaporated and while looking at this particular scene
dropped our frame rate below 120fps, but also just like at 90Hz the game play in
the headset still felt smooth and as soon as I turned my head away from
these rockets and continued on with the game the frame rate jumped right back up.
Bone Lab was only recently released so this is another game I have only spent a couple hours
playing and haven't gotten very far into yet. The parts of the game I've played so far though
I've been playing at 4704 x 2384 at 90Hz. In the in game settings I've set MSAA to 1X,
SMAA to Disabled, Render Scale to 1.0 and Level Of Detail Bias to 2.0. All the other
settings I've set to their maximum value and as you can see this has pushed the
3080ti pretty close to it's limits but it's still maintaining a constant 90fps.
To be honest I'm a little disappointed with this performance because overall
I don't feel like Bone Lab is all that visually impressive. BUT it is a pretty
physics heavy game so since the GPU has to do a lot more calculating of
that stuff I'm guessing that's why our performance is lower in this game than
it is in a game like Red Matter 2 which has much more stunning visuals in my opinion.
Continuing on the trend of games I've only recently started playing;
Lone Echo 2 is a phenomenal game. It's a visual feast for the eyes and story and
game play wise it's fantastic. It's also one of the few games
I tested that really pushed the 3080ti right to the edge of it's capabilities.
Since I like my graphics sharp and crisp I set the render resolution to 4704 x 2384
and my Quest 2's refresh rate to 90Hz. In the games Graphics Settings I set Multi
Sample Anti-Aliasing to None, Temporal AA to Disabled, the Render Scale to 150% and all
other settings to their maximum values. This resulted in what you see on screen right now.
Normally I don't like pushing the Performance Headroom this close to Zero but so far this
game doesn't seem to get the drastic dips like I've experienced in other games so using these
settings has been working out just fine for me. The worst performance I saw was in this area where
there was some complex lighting and volumetric effects but as you can see performance was still
good and I can attest that in the headset visuals were super sharp and the frame rate was smooth.
Next up is the most hardware intensive game I know of; Microsoft Flight Simulator. This game is
absolutely insane. It has amazing visuals but at the same time even to run it on a monitor you need
some serious hardware and taking it into VR is even more demanding. I spent hours messing around
with different settings trying to get this game to run at an acceptable frame rate and in the end
I kinda just threw my hands up out of frustration and set the Render Resolution in the Oculus app to
it's lowest value of 2432 x 1216 and the refresh rate to 72Hz. In the VR graphics settings in
Flight Simulator I set everything to it's lowest value and at first tried using DLSS Quality for
the Anti-Aliasing to see what that would do for us and while it did help give us better performance
it made the graphics look really blurry when combined with the 2432 x 1216 render resolution.
I then turned anti-aliasing off and cranked the render scale in the game to 200 to try
and increase the visual clarity and it did sharpen things up quite a bit but
our performance headroom took a big hit and I wasn't able to get the frame rate
to consistently stay at 72fps. The 3080ti would manage it at times but as you'd look
around the frame rate was regularly dropping below our target of 72fps.
And this was in the training flights where there wasn't very much complex geometry for
the GPU to draw. When I took it to New York City for a fly over things got much worse.
I want so bad to be able to play Flight Simulator at max settings in VR because
it would be amazing but I don't think even the recently released RTX 4090 can do it.
To end this video on a positive note let's take a look at Half Life Alyx.
This is a not only a great looking game but is the best VR game to be released so far
in my opinion. At 4704 x 2384 and 90Hz on the games Ultra Fidelity Performance
Option Preset the 3080ti delivered an absolutely fantastic experience.
The game looks absolutely amazing at these settings and the 3080ti kept us at a constant
90fps with just enough Performance Headroom still available to make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
So returning to our Question at the beginning of the video; how well
does the 3080ti play games in VR? Other than Flight Simulator, it plays VR games Very Well.