Condor 2 VR - Frame rate

[k6chris]

Interested to find out what frame rate others are getting from Condor 2 VR? On my GTX 1050 Ti graphics card I am getting anything between 45 fpm (on very highly detailed landscapes, with a lot of trees, for example the 'ridge flying' lesson) to 85-90 fps on landscapes with little or no added detail. Does a much more poweful graphics card increase this drastically??

[Lensman]

I've tried a few of the built in free flight 'missions'. Frame rate is pegged at 90. This is with all graphics set to high, MSAA at X2 and pixel density at 1.4 (set in Oculus tray tool). I also have ASW set to off. This has to be one of the best optimised VR flight sims around at the moment
My rig:
Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.5GHz. Asus-Z170-PRO MB
CORSAIR H105 HYDRO CPU COOLER.
EVGA GTX 1080Ti FTW3 Elite.
16GB DDR4 2666MHZ HYPERX SAVAGE.
SAMSUNG M.2 SSD 128GB SM951 Boot Drive.
SAMSUNG SSD 500GB EVO Working Drive.
Windows 10 Professional

[Mas]

Hi Chris - a 1050Ti is at the very very minimum spec for running a RIft - they only reduced the spec to this when they brought in ASW ( Asynchronous Time Warp ) which allowed use of VR with low steady frame rate of 45. i have a 1060 which is some what better and i can report that running high end games with settings maxed where you use ASW all th etime definately gives me nausea after a while . Running at 90 FPS is still a much sounder way for VR .

I will try Condor VR and let you know how my 1060 goes . If you were upgrading i would recommend a 2070- the 1060 are still expensive and the cheapest 2070 is around same as the older 1070 and the 2070 is a new generation much more powerful card . You'll be wanting the best for VR anyway . Once you have better card you can use super sampling which gives a much sharper looking image and smoother textures .

[Mas]

Ok had a bit of a play in the default Condor 2 scenery . With my i5-6600 and gtx 1060 and 1.2 X S/S I was getting about 50% of the time locking into 45fps with ASW switched on . In all my experience with VR and flightsims I find ASW does not work great in that it does promote nausea. The dials looked fine - quite solid and clear - if I want extra detail I could lean forward slightly .

Then switched on the Oculus Performance graphs in Oculus tray tool and switched off ASW and set S/S to 1.0X . There is now a slight sensation of occasional pixelising in the instruments . Frame rate is pretty solid ay 90fps with available GPU overhead of 10 -25% with some big ocassional frame drops below 90fps but didn't notice any jitter.

So my take is that a 1060 is not quite good enough if you want to use any supersampling ( which is desirable ) .

Will have to put a 2070 on th eshopping list and sell my GTX 1060 .

[SteveK]

.... If you were upgrading i would recommend a 2070- the 1060 are still expensive and the cheapest 2070 ....

Crikey!!!!

I just looked up 2070's and even the least expensive are around 500GBP. I'd previously been looking at 1060's and was baulking at the prospect of spending 225GPB on one of those....

My (very brief) research also suggests that the 2070 cards seem to favour "Display Port" interfaces and have one HDMI, so caution for anyone upgrading if they have older connectors on their screens (i suppose adapters are available...)

[janjansen]

A 2070 has to be overkill for condor, and with the RTX series you pay a large price premium for its RTX ray tracing capability and AI features that are useless in condor (and frankly, in just about all other games for now). Others are reporting steady 90FPS in VR with supersampling and maxed out condor settings on much more modest videocards. Of course, it will depend on cloud settings, scenery etc, but perhaps Mas is being held back somewhat by his CPU? He also didnt specify if his 1060 was a 3gb or 6gb version. The latter not only has more vram, its also considerably faster as it has twice the GPU memory bandwidth which matters lot when you need to calculate this many pixels.

Based on what I read elsewhere, if you are shopping for a condor VR capable card, you probably want to look at the newly released radeon 590 or a geforce 1070 at most. You can find a 590 for ~240 GBP a 1070 for ~330 (and considerably cheaper if you dont mind picking up a used mining card, which is what I did). The 1070 I have, is enough to drive triple HD screens at 120+ FPS with 2xmsaa and maxed out everything else. According to Uros, VR performance is a little worse than when using 2 screens, so my triple screen setup may be fairly representative of VR performance.

[Mas]

The cheapest GTX 2070 cards over here in Australia are the same price as 1070's- which is why I said _I_ would be in the market for a 2070 . 1070 's are superseded cards - they are on the way out. v1.5 HMD's like Samsung Odyssey , Vive pro have higher resolution screes which will take advantage of this extra power now . ( 1440 X 1600) . next gen VR will probably have 2070 as a minimum spec if it doesn't use foveated rendering .

The only reports I'm seeing here of Condor 2 running well with 4 X MAA , everything maexed and 1.4X supersampling ( needed to read instruments well )) is a 1080ti which is probably somewhere in power close to a 2070 at least .

Ive finished my testing last night and conclude that my 1060 6gb I have is not adequate to run maxed settings on Condor at solid 90fps with anything near 1.4X supersampling which is the ideal . My i5-660 CPU is no where near bottlenecked -Ive checked- VR is a GPU intensive application . It is much more intensive on a GPU as it has to run 90fps on a larger rendered resolution than a normal monitors ,X 2 ,and then supersampled again .

It is no good switching of ASW ( which allows to sync at 45fps) as youll get 90 fps with dropped frames , like constant subtle jumping in the view . ASW ( sync 45 fps ) does not work well for flightsimming - in a turn you see ghosting edges moving around as you are turning which is quickly nausea inducing . There is a big difference between getting a passable view in VR with a low end card and actually being able to sustain a few hours flying without getting VR sickness- and having headroom on your GPU will really help with this .

Jan - I can see you like to make detailed judgements about VR based on your triple monitor setup ,from the sidelines ,as to whether it is useful or not at this stage, resolution , cards etc - please don't muddy the waters with comments that are pure guesses when experienced VR users are making informed reports and recommendations based on actual experience with Condor 2 VR i look forward to your valuable comments when you have some real world experience of Condor VR to report .

A 2070 has to be overkill for condor, and with the RTX series you pay a large price premium for its RTX ray tracing capability and AI features that are useless in condor (and frankly, in just about all other games for now). Others are reporting steady 90FPS in VR with supersampling and maxed out condor settings on much more modest videocards. Of course, it will depend on cloud settings, scenery etc, but perhaps Mas is being held back somewhat by his CPU? He also didnt specify if his 1060 was a 3gb or 6gb version. The latter not only has more vram, its also considerably faster as it has twice the GPU memory bandwidth which matters lot when you need to calculate this many pixels.

Based on what I read elsewhere, if you are shopping for a condor VR capable card, you probably want to look at the newly released radeon 590 or a geforce 1070 at most. You can find a 590 for ~240 GBP a 1070 for ~330 (and considerably cheaper if you dont mind picking up a used mining card, which is what I did). The 1070 I have, is enough to drive triple HD screens at 120+ FPS with 2xmsaa and maxed out everything else. According to Uros, VR performance is a little worse than when using 2 screens, so my triple screen setup may be fairly representative of VR performance.

[janjansen]

Mas, Ill take your word for your performance and VR experience on your rig, but I stand by my advice against a 2070 for Steve who lives in the Uk, as current prices on amazon UK and Scan for a 2070 are way above a 1070, even above 1070Tis and some 1080s which will give better performance in condor and pretty much anything that doesnt use raytracing (which is to say, pretty much everything right now). Prices will change, but right now, its an easy choice. Even easier if you factor in the second hand market being flooded right now with GTX and radeon cards, I see used 1070s being sold for 150 GBP on ebay, less than a 1/3 of a new 2070.

As for my 1070 recommendation, it was based on JBr's testing with both a vive and a rift, where he claims steady 90FPS, and Uros who says on his rig he has 50% "performance overhead" in rift debug tool @90FPS. Ill also note that a 1070 can perform up to 50% faster than a 1060 in some VR tests and it may only require a fraction of that boost if you happen to fall just below the 90FPS treshhold, which seems likely since you are getting 90FPS at times.

[szymonbartus]

I am about to buy a new laptop for work and I'm thinking about paying slightly more for ThinkPad X1 Extreme, which has a 1050Ti 4 GB GDDR5 card. This is probably the best card I can get in a lightweight laptop. How bad does it feel to use Condor 2 + Oculus Rift with it - is 45 fps with ASW enabled good enough to be realistic? Is the performance so bad that I should rather buy a separate computer just for Condor?

[janjansen]

This is probably the best card I can get in a lightweight laptop

I think a lightweight laptop and VR is just not feasible yet. You should consider using an external GPU, which requires your laptop has thunderbolt 3 support on USB-C (the thinkpad you mentioned has that, and most modern intel based mid range laptops should have it by now). External enclosures are still pricey, but cheaper than an entire desktop PC, and that way you'll be able to mount any (desktop) GPU you like and upgrade later, and you can keep your laptop thin and light.

[k6chris]

This is probably the best card I can get in a lightweight laptop

I think a lightweight laptop and VR is just not feasible yet. You should consider using an external GPU, which requires your laptop has thunderbolt 3 support on USB-C (the thinkpad you mentioned has that, and most modern intel based mid range laptops should have it by now). External enclosures are still pricey, but cheaper than an entire desktop PC, and that way you'll be able to mount any (desktop) GPU you like and upgrade later, and you can keep your laptop thin and light.

Interesting. Is a 10 Gbps USB-C port sufficient in terms of data transfer from an external GPU? Any recommendations??

[janjansen]

Thunderbolt 3 delivers up to 40Gbps in theory. If you have TB1, I guess the answer is "it depends". If you use an external display, the performance hit seems to be ~ acceptable in combination with a 1060 6gb:
https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-s ... play-test/

20% hit compared to a desktop GPU with PCI-E. Other tests will show 10-15% but numbers seem to be a little all over the place. Interestingly in that test I see no difference between TB1 and TB3 as long as you use external display.
Of course, the higher end you go with the GPU, the more that interface could become a bottleneck, although again some other tests seem to contradict that.

I cant recommend any models, I dont have experience with any of them.

[Mas]

Sure I agree that a 1070 is a good choice !


My findings is that you will want to run 1.4X S/S and not use ASW at 45fps if you want to stave on nausea and avoid juddereing , then a 1060 is just not adequate so for anyone building a new system I recommend 1070 minimum - be it second hand or whatever . There should be plenty of S/H cards coming on th emarket with new 2070 cards coming in etc . If you are in USA are Australia where cheaper 2070 are same price as 1070 then 2080 is a no brainer to take advantage of gen 2 VR that is coming in th enext few years . BTW with with no S/S and not all settings maxed in Condor I get about 20-25% % GPU overhead with the 1060 .

Mas, Ill take your word for your performance and VR experience on your rig, but I stand by my advice against a 2070 for Steve who lives in the Uk, as current prices on amazon UK and Scan for a 2070 are way above a 1070, even above 1070Tis and some 1080s which will give better performance in condor and pretty much anything that doesnt use raytracing (which is to say, pretty much everything right now). Prices will change, but right now, its an easy choice. Even easier if you factor in the second hand market being flooded right now with GTX and radeon cards, I see used 1070s being sold for 150 GBP on ebay, less than a 1/3 of a new 2070.

As for my 1070 recommendation, it was based on JBr's testing with both a vive and a rift, where he claims steady 90FPS, and Uros who says on his rig he has 50% "performance overhead" in rift debug tool @90FPS. Ill also note that a 1070 can perform up to 50% faster than a 1060 in some VR tests and it may only require a fraction of that boost if you happen to fall just below the 90FPS treshhold, which seems likely since you are getting 90FPS at times.

[Micheal]

I have an I7-8700 with the EVGA GTX 1070 SC. I've maxed out all settings and it runs great.

[Jtl]

I am using a Omen laptop by HP – 15-ce0xx – with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80 GHz, 16 GB installed RAM, Windows 10 Home 64 bits. The graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050.

The video options in Condor are Fullscreen, 1920x1080x32, MSAA supersampling 4x, Oculus Rift and Mirror rendering both selected. Video RAM 3072 MB.

The graphic options are visible distance – very high; Terrain mesh quality – super fine; Objects level of detail – super fine; Canopy reflections – reduced; Trees density – very high; Terrain mesh fadeout – low (best quality); Textures quality – high.

While flying in the Jura_Mont-Blanc2 scenery, in the Aoste area, I have frame rate of 36-40 with minimum of 32 and peak of 49.