I recently bought a Valve Index VR headset and it made great first impressions. A significant improvement over my older HP Windows Mixed Reality headset. Even though display resolution was only slightly higher than my old headset, it is now refreshing at 120Hz for smoother movement and a much more enjoyable experience. On the downside, my existing computer couldn't keep up and I learned stutters at 120Hz are far more annoying (in the "discomfort leading to motion sickness" sense) than stutters at 90Hz or 60Hz.

When I bought my HP Windows Mixed Reality headset, it was paired with a laptop equipped with NVIDIA GTX 1060 mobile edition GPU. This barely met minimum system requirements for VR and I was no stranger to stutters even at 60Hz. A few years later, shortly after NVIDIA launched the RTX 2070 Super, there was a brief window of time when RTX 2070 (non-super) were discounted to a level I felt tolerable so I got one for VR duty. This was a big step above my laptop, but it could not keep up with a Valve Index.

Looking around the GPU market, NVIDIA recently launched their RTX 4070 which is reportedly on par with the RTX 3080. (Quick model number decoder: 3xxx vs 4xxx means earlier generation. xx8x vs. xx7x means higher tier product in that earlier generation.) Combined with easing of electronics component shortage and the cryptocurrency crash (about damned time), vendors clearing out older inventory dropped RTX 3080 market price drastically relative to insane heights of just a few months ago.

But if the new RTX 4070 is a newer GPU that is about as good for roughly the same money, why am I looking at the older RTX 3080? Because when I dug into RTX 4070 reviews and their associated comparison tests, I found that the RTX 3080 gets its benchmark scores from brute force pixel-pushing power while RTX 4070 gets them with help of features like DLSS. This is fine for most games, but such features add a bit of latency which is very bad for VR. As I'm looking at a GPU specifically for VR, the raw power of RTX 3080 is preferable to fancy smarts of RTX 4070.

I started looking around for a standalone RTX 3080 video card upgrade, then it occurred to me to look at Windows Task Manager to verify my GPU is indeed a bottleneck. The good news is that Task Manager confirmed my GPU utilization occasionally maxes out. The bad news is that I also noticed my 7th-gen Core i5 processor has its hands full. I was under the impression that games only care about single-core performance, but this information tells me newer VR titles are multicore aware and four cores won't cut it anymore. I need to upgrade my CPU as well, which meant a new motherboard, which wants new DDR5 memory... at this point I might as well look at an entire new computer system.

Fortunately, the same pricing pressures on RTX 3080 video cards also lowered prices for complete systems prebuilt with a RTX 3080. Stacked with Memorial Day Sale discounts, I found several complete systems available at a reasonably small premium over what it would cost for me to buy parts from lowest-bidder retailers and build my own. Some of these are name brands who probably aren't buying bargain-basement components from questionable Amazon/eBay/Newegg vendors as I would. Over Memorial Day weekend I evaluated all the deals I could find, and a Dell XPS 8950 looks very promising.