Need Video Card Recommendation for Oculus Rift PC

[wayner]

I am not generally a gamer so for PCs that I have built over the last five years or so I have been more than happy to go with the integrated GPUs on Intel CPUs. So I haven't paid attention to video cards.

But I am intrigued by VR so I have pre-ordered an Oculus Rift. The minimum specs for the Rift say the following for video cards: "NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater ".

Does anyone have an opinion on which card I should get?

The next question is noise - I have put together my recent PCs to be very quiet. But now that I will have a powerful video card should I give up worrying about noise?

When using the VR headset noise from the PC is unlikely to be an issue as the goggles have integrated headphones. But I may put this PC in the same room as my main Home Theater so if I do that it may make sense for this PC to do double duty as an HTPC as well. If the stock coolers on the cards are noisy should I get an aftermarket cooler? If so which one.

[dshreter]

I've been doing a lot if research into the same thing, but it is tough to come by solid info right now. I believe the 970 minimum requirement will hold true for games published in the Oculus store, but the Rift will be compatible with games outside of the Oculus store as well.

As an example I looked at the recommended specs for playing Elite Dangerous in VR and they were recommending a 980. This says to me that there will be a benefit to going beyond a 970 already, and you can expect that will only be more true over time.

How much you want to future proof is really up to you though. I'm personally looking at getting a Strix 980 ti, which runs with zero fans at idle, but haven't completely made up my mind quite yet. Come back when you've made a decision because I'll be interested to know what you come up with.

[wayner]

Anyone know how the AMD card compare to the Nvidia? The numbers for AMD are confusing to me as the minim is an R9 290. But there seem to be a lot of different model numbers available.

With Nvidia at the high end it seems to be either 970 or 980 with a few variations on those.

[nagi]

Anyone know how the AMD card compare to the Nvidia? The numbers for AMD are confusing to me as the minim is an R9 290. But there seem to be a lot of different model numbers available.

With Nvidia at the high end it seems to be either 970 or 980 with a few variations on those.

I hope this is what you are asking for:

290X was the top single chip of the 2xx series. (I have one) 290 was the slightly cut down version, and there was (is?) a dual-chip version (like a one-board SLI).
390(x) are the refresh versions, slightly better.
Fury(X) and r9 nano are a completely new architecture. In terms of power, fury < nano < fury x, though nano is likely to thermally throttle. There are no lower-end cards with this architecture.

The current board are the 3xx and fury series. Yes, two architectures at the same time. The fury are aimed at 4K, but with only 4GB of ram, albeit that 4GB has an insane bandwidth. (manufacturing problems limit the chips to 4GB right now.)

The 290X can be quieted down, but most boards sold are somewhat loud, even those with multiple fans. There is no 3rd party cooling for the fury series, and the X actually comes with closed loop liquid cooling. As a rule of thumb, unfortunately the 2/3xx series are all more power hungry than the nvidia equivalents. So far the lack of 3rd party solutions has dissuaded me from buying a fury, as I do not consider AIO liquid cooling solutions to be quiet enough even on idle.


...and frankly, right now the best solution is waiting unfortunately. But since you preordered it, that is not an option. I'd say go with the 980 to be sure.