Sooo… I’m wanting to give vrchat a shot, but I haven’t upgraded my PC in a long time since I haven’t needed to. And I mean, I guess if it can’t be done then it can’t be done.
So here’s what I have now: ryzen 1700x w/16gb of ram and a b450 mb. I can go to 32gb if needed, it has 4 ram slots. The GPU is a rx 570 4gb. PSU: uh… I’ll have to look. it was ok at the time, it’s like a 550w psu.
So clearly that isn’t going to give a very good PC VR experience. I mean I’m sure it would run vrchat on desktop just fine but that isn’t what I want.
So here’s what I WAS thinking:
5700/xt - $150 ish used - unfortunately the power consumption on this is kinda
high and makes me think a new psu would be in order. but throwing it out there anyway.
5600/x - 130 ish used
extra 16gb of ram if I need it - $30-40
Oculus quest 2 - preowned(I'm fine with preowned for everything). $150-$200
AX router or usb adapter in ad-hoc dedicated to airlink - $30-60(adapter -> basic router)
So that comes out to be about $550 ish usd. Really, not terrible.
But after more research I can already see some issues with this. For one, I’ve heard about lots of issues with pc VR and amd cards. 1. HEVC encoding performance. 2. driver issues. Secondly, just simply issues with VR chat and amd cards. 3. vram issues. I’ve been reading that 12gb is the bare bare minimum for an ok-ish vrchat experience. And I guess it isn’t such a big deal but it seems like the ordering for performance and CPUs goes - 1. AMD x3d cpu 2. intel 12th gen or better 3. AMD non-x3d cpus well behind
So… making adjustments for all that.
the lowest cost alternatives
12gb GTX 2060 - $160-200 or 12gb 3060 - $280
Titan X pascal 12gb - $170-200
The soon to come 5600 x3d - $230
So the main issue with the titan x pascal is that it uses 250w+ and will likely require a better psu. Also, it is very old at this point and But to be fair so would the 5700, although I could go with a vanilla 5700 instead of the xt.
I guess what is disappointing in all of this is that for about $250 used I could get a 6700xt 12gb and that would blow all of that stuff out of the water in most games. Yeah, I would need a better psu but at least I’d be getting something out of it.
so what is the budget? I mean, the truth is I could technically afford to spend up to$1000 upgrading my pc, but personally I don’t think that is worth it just for vrchat. So I’m trying to walk this tightrope of get stuff as cheaply as I can without being too cheap.
And here’s the thing. Let’s say I get the 3060, the 5600 x3d and 16gb of ram. Now we’re looking at nearly $800 and the resulting pc upgrade is rather paltry. Like, a 12gb 3060 is just a terrible value. But hey, I can be reasonably assured that it will work.
If I managed to find a good deal on a 2060 12gb - and just went with the 5600 then not much changes for the price, I just lose a bit of the performance, but I’m not sure the 2060 12gb is going to cut the mustard either? Also, if things have changed and an amd card will work well then I might as well do that.
Anyway this has gotten rather long winded, not to mention I might also want to spend a bit on a better harness, some facepads, etc things like that which I haven’t even gotten into. and virtual desktop is $20, not sure how needed that is anymore.
In my opinion if you’re upgrading ONLY for VR, then I would spend the bare minimum you could get away with. VR tech is always changing and we’ve yet to see many AAA releases with demanding system requirements.
If you do actual gaming on this machine, then my advice is always to spend as much as you can afford, without being wasteful. 3060 is still a great card that can push high refresh rate 1080p.
I have little knowledge of AMD cards but do know that driver support in general leaves a lot to be desired.
Basically, the #1 most important upgrade you’d wanna make for PC VRChat is VRAM, so if you only have enough money for 1 part go for something like a 12GB RTX 3060. You can probably also use a Radeon RX 6700 non-XT with 10GB for about $250 but those are harder to find. After that, a CPU with more cache would be next in line like a 5600X, especially a 3D variant, and then 16GB RAM should already be enough
I’ve personally not had issues using AMD in VR, not in SteamVR at least, but I also have a 6800 XT so take my experience with a grain of salt.
If you have money to upgrade your CPU, I’d recommend a Ryzen 5 5600X for about $150ish if your BIOS supports it. Not all B450s are the same, so make sure to do some research beforehand. If not, a used Ryzen 7 3700X should work good too. Try to look for options with more CPU cache
After that, spend the rest of your money and life savings on full-body trackers /s
Yep, ended up getting a great deal on a 3060 12gb so I bought that. I was going to upgrade my cpu/ram but most of the time I’m in worlds where there aren’t a ton of people so it hasn’t been such an issue. I might still do it though, I do get issues sometimes but most of the time it’s “fine”. Generally on your average world with a handful of people I get mid 30’s fps.
Yeah sadly 30ish FPS is about normal for VRChat lmao, even on Quest where assets are supposed to be “optimized”. And unfortunately the GPU doesn’t handle stuff like avatar dynamics or interpreting VRChat’s high-level Udon language, so for world with more advanced mechanics like Test Pilots or a lot of avatars with dynamics (or both) that’s where a new CPU would shine. The reason VRAM is still so important though is that, when its filled up, it KILLS performance as opposed to a CPU bottleneck which is much more gradual, because the GPU then has to load textures and stuff from the disk, passing through the CPU and RAM first, every frame or just refuse and crash lmao
