EVE: Valkyrie
For many early adopters of Oculus’ Rift, EVE: Valkyrie was the experience that got them enthused about VR. CCP Games continues updating EVE, most recently with beta Touch support.
We ran our tests after the developer added Ultra-quality settings, applying volumetric lighting, multi-sample G-buffer anti-aliasing, specular highlights, Lens-Matched Shading, and Multi-Res Shading. These features were added specifically for owners of Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, 1080, and 1080 Ti cards.
The Station 27 chronicle we used for testing isn’t particularly taxing, but it’s far more consistent than a chaotic dogfight would be. Consequently, we observe fairly even frame times from each platform.
All five CPUs work well enough with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti to enable >90 FPS throughout our 200-second recording. The Core i9, Core i7, and Ryzen 7 deliver particularly clean-looking runs, while Intel’s Core i3 encounters a couple of additional dropped frames. FX-8350 drops 64 frames during the course of its benchmark. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given higher frame time variance and a propensity for breaking above the 11.1ms mark.
That brings up an interesting point: how are we seeing frame times in excess of 11.1ms from the FX-8350, but still experiencing 90 frames per second without dropping into ASW mode? If you look back at our Chronos results, the same thing happened. We did explore this phenomenon in FCAT VR: GPU And CPU Performance in Virtual Reality and determined that “...the envelope can expand/contract due to preemption/parallelization done by the VR runtime. Oculus' adaptive queue ahead feature is designed to facilitate this, so an 11ms cut-off is not absolute, though it’s generally true. In short, optimizations are not enough to keep you from dropping frames if you render at >11ms for an extended period of time.”
All of the calculated unconstrained frame rates exceed 100 FPS. However, Core i7-7700K’s frame times afford it a 36% advantage over FX-8350, a 22% lead over Core i3-6320, an 18% edge on Ryzen 7 1800X, and even a 9%-better finish than Core i9.
The Core i7, Core i9, Ryzen 7, and Core i3 frame times look good all the way through our 99th percentile measurements. FX-8350 is consistently ~2ms higher than the Core i3. And those two spikes visible in the frame time over time plot show up in this chart when we single-out each CPU’s worst frame time result.
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