Not everyone has been able to access NVIDIA’s latest RTX 5000 graphics card series. I’m one of the few who bought one, given that I live close to the Micro Center in Tustin, California, and this brick-and-mortar location seemed to be one of a handful of places to stock a decent number of the new cards.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been putting the card through its paces and that of course includes testing it out for PC VR. While I own both a Meta Quest 3 and a PlayStation VR2, I mostly tested things out on Quest 3, due to my VR setup being far more conducive to wireless VR.
Using Virtual Desktop at Godlike settings, 90Hz and a 100% SteamVR render scale, I got to work seeing exactly how far you can push the new RTX 5090 card.
The answer? Quite far. Every game I’ve thrown at it (so far) worked like a charm.
PC Specifications
My PC VR setup includes an Eero Wifi 6E router a Ryzen 7 9800x3D, 64GB of DDR5 6200c30 memory, and a 1000w ASUS TUF Gold Power Supply. The 9800x3D and the RAM are both tuned; in the CPU’s case, a Precision Boost Overdrive offset of 200MHz with a -15 Curve Optimizer undervolt. For the RAM, the stock EXPO configuration for the 2x32GB sticks is DDR5-6000c30. I tuned the memory subtimings and managed to get things stable at a slightly faster clock rate of 6200MHz.
I also set the 5090 with a 250MHz overclock to the core clocks, and a 1000MHz overclock to the memory. You could argue that makes the footage I captured below unrepresentative of the 5090 itself, but I argue the overclocking helps offset the overhead drawn by recording 4K60 footage to OBS while simultaneously pressing the PC to wirelessly stream its top tier visual experience to my Quest 3. Yes, performance on a natively PC VR headset without the additional Quest 3 streaming and capture may differ from what I show below, but I doubt it would be by much.
UploadVR asked me to look at a range of PC projects that might convey the power of this particular graphics card for the prospective NVIDIA buyers out there who might be waiting for their card to arrive. Or if you’re thinking about taking the plunge yourself? See below to get a sense of what the views look like from this card inside VR.
Video is hosted at up to 4K on YouTube above and 1080P in the clips below.
Fallout 4 VR Mad God Overhaul Classic
Fallout 4 VR is a bit notorious for how rough of a release it is, especially without mods. Using Mad God Overhaul Classic, however, the game sees a fairly massive improvement. With my PC VR setup, the game runs at a very solid 90 FPS, nothing short of transformative – even with any remaining technical faults.
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Arken Age On Max
In Arken Age fully maxed out in the settings with even the LOD (levels of detail) set to max, the game looks and runs perfectly, much like Fallout 4 VR did. I didn’t experiment with it for this piece, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I could push the in-game render scale as well as Virtual Desktop’s own 150% scaling through Godlike settings.
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Flight Simulator Ultra
By far the most demanding game on the list – Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. For this one I used the Ultra preset, with DLSS set to Balanced and the .dll overriden with the new Transformer model. I also used reprojection for this test, due to how demanding the game can be on the CPU, depending on where you’re flying. The end result is a shockingly impressive and smooth image, especially for Flight Simulator, as you can see when I completed a high-speed rally race challenge while in the cockpit in VR.
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Future Tests?
While readers are surely looking for benchmarks on this graphics hardware too and, while those are certainly useful, my first look at the 5090 in VR simply aims to capture the vibes you can get when you have this much graphics power solidly delivering that many top tier PC VR software configurations, including some with mods.
I do believe this says most of what PC VR enthusiasts might be looking to see when it comes to the RTX 5090 and VR. Comment below if there are any suggestions you might have for something myself, or others, should explore in VR with a graphics card as capable as this one.
