2080 or 2080TI to run 8kx

Anybody have an opinion on what it’ll take to drive the 8kx? I’d say my 2080 is doing ok with the 5k+.

it should do ok with the 8kx as well, as long as your expectations are realistic. just like the 5k+ too high settings will cripple any gpu but chances are you’re already super sampling higher on the 5k+ than the native resolution on the 8kx.

3 Likes

As always, depends on what you want to run. Beatsaber, no problem. If you want to get the best out of DCS World then you’ll benefit from maximum horsepower. Agree with BNP, supersampled 5k+ is probably asking roughly the same from the GPU as a native 8KX.

Then again, it’s going to take a next gen card (or the one after that) to get decent Large FOV performance on many sims instead of Normal, a 2080 Ti isn’t enough except in low demand applications.

So all down to what you want to achieve, how soon, and how much you’re willing to spend on it :+1: Maybe it’s a personal thing, but if you have already spent cash on a 2080, consider skipping a gen. You can at least afford to wait and see how the 8KX performs with your card, and go from there.

I did the same when I got the 5k+, had a 2011 PC and a 980 Ti. The answer to that was pretty much nope :smile:

2 Likes

Is supersampling the only decent way of killing jaggies?
What if i try to get the 5k+ running at it’s native resolution of 2560x1440 and use anti aliasing instead?
Sorry for being slightly off topic btw.

Supersampling. AA just cleans up some specific stuff the game engine isn’t doing well enough, like vector graphics lines, flight deck buttons, etc.

3 Likes

What i still dont understand, is why these problems never occurred on my “old” 1080p monitor when i played games on it, in that resolution. At the time i had never heard of ss. All modern games always looked super smooth and sharp and… just super nice. You had a decent graphics card and pc, turned the settings to their max and on you go. Now in a hmd, all of that is suddenly a big problem to achieve, despite of even more powerful hardware and higher resolution of panels. I can’t wrap my head around it.

1 Like

It is due to the VR lenses. The rendered image needs to be warped, to counteract the lens distortion. Traditional AA doesn’t help much in this situation, because it’s not just a linear stretch.

4 Likes

I have 8kx on pre-order and currently own 1080ti I don’t except the GPU to be able to keep up with the 8kx native res. I’m going to try to hold out for the 3080ti (due this summer, maybe).

3 Likes

No and yes. :slightly_smiling_face:
The lenses warp the image, the distortion profile is supposed to correct this. But due to the resolution and the way traditional AA works, it just makes the rendered image soft and blurred. Combine this with screen size and it’s distance to the eyes and a Fresnel lense in between to get the image into focus, and you have a bunch of “big pixels” when you the apply said traditional AA to that mix it just becomes a soft blurry mess :grin:
I personally hate AA even for pancake gaming, never used it as it made games slower and blurry.
This is why my hopes for the 8KX and it’s native 4K might be enough for rendering just the native resolution and not having to SS the hell out of it :smile: “and NO AA” :+1:

4 Likes

On your 1080p monitor your eyes are not 7mm from the screen. If you could focus on your 1080p monitor at 7mm you would see massive jaggies (and massive SDE too). Quality images within VR is a totally different proposition than a monitor.

6 Likes

Wow I would love to see that monitor!

Back in the days of my first 27 inch 4K monitor, playing Fallout 4 in 4K resolution, I still remember constantly being frustrated over aliasing and jagged edges, despite 4K. I had to use tweaks for MSAA to get rid of that but it also killed the framerate.

Playing any game on a 1080p monitor, you will see lots of aliasing, unless the game has some sort of AA enabled from start.

When it comes to VR, many games (especially Unity) doesnt use or even have an option for AA as it would kill the framerate.

Having that said, you will have no problem with a 2080 and 8KX, at least in majority of the games. And with some tweaking you can get most games running in 75fps, unless the game is poorly optimised or a CPU hog, like Fallout4VR, DCS World, Xplane 11 and similar.

2 Likes

It’s quite simple really.

The closer your eyes get to a screen the higher the resolution needs to be to look equally sharp. As each pixel takes up a greater proportion of your eyes field of view.

The ratio shifts very dramatically!

And VR screens are super close to your eye.

Try sticking your face to that 1080p monitor and see how it looks!

That is why it takes around two 4k screens in VR to be getting to the same/equivalent level of sharpness as a 1080p monitor at a distance.

Plus VR needs two screens to create depth perception rather than one, and at higher framerates. Creating even higher rendering requirements vs normal gaming.

2 Likes

Thank you all, this was enlighting :):grinning:

I Indeed had for instance the latest battlefield games in mind wich looked amazing (from a distance to the monitor)
Yeah, its all a while ago when i gamed for hours on :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Higher resolution requires more VRAM

Please let me clarify three things.

Fine details in HUD graphics, on a desktop monitor, can be aligned to display pixels. VR applications must locate these 2D textures on 3D objects in space, which are not aligned to display pixels. Thus, ‘supersampling’ is required to minimize aliasing between virtual texture pixels and display pixels.

Unfortunately, VR HUD graphics are also put through the same rendering pipeline as the rest of the application, so this expensive supersampling happens to everything all the time.

VR makes these artifacts, as well as any dropped frames, MUCH more apparent than one might expect. Human eyes track objects which remain in place as the head rotates. A desktop monitor does not have to render a new frame to keep up with this. A VR headset does. There are some tricks apparently used to minimize this problem, but they are not perfect.

Worst of all is when the headset gets ‘stuck’ on an old frame. The sudden sensation that the world is moving with your head can be extremely uncomfortable.

Therefore…

  1. Much more expensive supersampling required to sharpen HUD graphics.
  2. Lack of a dedicated pipeline for HUD graphics, forcing expensive supersampling on everything.
  3. Far worse user experience when frames are dropped/stuck.

@Virtual
VRAM exhaustion issues with VR is not so much worse than Desktop. There is a little more temptation to set ‘Textures’ to ‘High’, there may be a few overlays running, but it is not nearly as expensive as supersampling requirements.

5 Likes

This is a question of running an 8KX with each card. The 8KX is a higher resolution headset. I’m just pointing out as resolution goes up you need more VRAM.

Additionally supersampling is the same as running a higher resolution as the image is first rendered at a higher resolution and then shrinking it to the desired size.

Of course nothing is stopping a 8KX owner from feeding it a lower resolution but that kind of defeats the purpose and I do not think that provides the best answer for this question.

I’m already struggling with not enough VRAM with a 5k+ and 5700XT to run the settings I would like and I’m running it at less than 100% resolution. Resolution, texture size and AA are all memory hungry. It is very easy to run out of VRAM in VR in an effort to eliminate jaggies and shimmering with a reasonable sharp and detailed world.

That makes the 2080ti a significantly superior card.

1 Like

True, but it’s quite expensive. I’m going to wait until the next generation of nVidia’s GPUs ship. They should provide a lot more bang for the buck. Or, if you have your heart set on a 2080 Ti, the price will likely drop at that time.

4 Likes

Having 12gb of vram I’m often surprised of how much of it is actually in use. and while i only hit the ram ceiling when I actually try for it the real performance hit when it happens literally makes the virtual world come crashing down.

3 Likes

I‘m still happy with my oced 1080ti and the performance difference of 2080ti is not worth an upgrade, at least to me.
Only thing I‘m wondering though how much the, unfortunately, RTX exclusive features have become more of a selling point…
Like fixed foveated rendering and the new adaptive SS (not sure on the exact name)

we know about the roughly max 15% performance advantage of the 2080ti vs 1080ti but I‘m curious if it is still the case with the new features if a game supports it.

When I tested FFR (early version) with an rtx from a friend of mine I had roughly 3-7% improvement, which ain‘t much but still something that may add to other features saving performance.

Any 2080ti user may want to comment on that?
How big is the impact of the RTX features?

1 Like

I have a oc’ed 2080 (non-Ti). I’ve been enabling FFR conservative mode lately. It allows my 8K to reach 80 FPS, most of the time. It seems to increase my framerate by 20%-30%.

I have also been enjoying the ray-tracing feature, specifically in Quake2 RTX, which is (unfortunately) not a VR-enabled program.

2 Likes