Good Enough for VR? – GeForce RTX 3050 VR Performance

So maybe you already have an RTX 3050 or you’re looking to buy one; either way you want to know, is it good enough to run PC VR games? Well, the Bone Lab footage you’re seeing right now was captured to my Oculus Quest 2 and was running via Air Link on my test PC which is sporting a Zotac Gaming RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU and 16GB of 3600MHz CL 16 DDR4 RAM. As for the settings I used to play Bone Lab, in the Oculus PC app I set the Render Resolution

to 3936 x 1984 and the refresh rate to 72Hz. In the Bone Lab Options I first set the Graphics to the Medium preset and then turned MSAA to 1x, Disabled SMAA and cranked the Level of Detail Bias all the way up to 4.0. This left the game looking pretty good and running quite nicely. In some areas these settings were no problem at all for the 3050 but pushed it right to the edge in others. Overall I felt this was a pretty good showing for the RTX 3050. For Red Matter 2 I kept the Render Resolution

at 3936 x 1984 and the refresh rate at 72Hz and in the game I set the Resolution Scale to 1.2 and turned both Indirect and Dynamic Shadows On. This

pushed the 3050 about as far as I dared. This game is one of the best looking Stand Alone Quest 2 titles and the PC version looks even better and the 3050 does run it pretty decently. As you can see on the performance graphs we were able to maintain an almost constant 72fps at these settings. For those wanting to go up to 90Hz, the 3050 can do it

but you’re going to have to sacrifice some of the eye candy in order to do that. I prefer my games to look as good as possible so I’m ok with 72Hz in this situation. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners was another game the 3050 did fairly well with at 3936 x 1984 and 72Hz. I set the games Pixel Density to 100%, set the view distance to Far, turned Anti-Aliasing Off and all the other settings to Medium. It’s amazing to me how good modern games look at medium quality settings. When I was a kid I hated

having to turn my games down to medium because they looked like poo, nowadays though Medium still looks pretty darn good. I saw pretty similar performance in this game at these settings as we’ve seen in Red Matter 2 and Bone Lab. The frame rate stayed at a constant 72fps and the performance headroom was averaging around 30%, but whenever I’d get into fights with walkers the frame rate would drop in half. This is something I’ve noticed even on high end cards I’ve tested like the RTX 3080ti and RX 6950XT. I’m not entirely sure why this is happening

because this is something I typically only see when the performance headroom in a game drops below zero but here you can see it’s still just above zero but the frame rate is being cut in half anyway. As you can see even though the Application is dropping frames in this instance the compositor never drops a frame so game play still felt smooth to me even during all this mayhem. Beat Saber is probably the most popular VR game to be produced thus far and the 3050 runs this game very, very well. Just like with the other games

we’ve looked at so far I set the Render Resolution to 3936 x 1984 but bumped the refresh rate up to 90Hz. In the Beat Saber Options I turned the Render Scale all the way up to 1.8, turned Anti-Aliasing Off and all the other graphical settings to their maximum value. This did push the 3050 right to it’s limits but MAN!!! Beat Saber looked CRISPY!!! Had I turned the Render Scale down we probably could have bumped this one up to 120Hz but like I said before I like my games looking as sharp and detailed as possible and

this fit that bill perfectly. Vader Immortal is more of an interactive Star Wars story than it is a game really but if you’re a Star Wars fan it’s totally worth playing and the 3050 performs pretty well in this title. Once again I set the Render Resolution to 3936 x 1984 and the refresh rate to 72Hz. In the game there’s only two different video settings Low and High and of course I set it to High. At these settings the 3050 gave us a solid 72fps. Certain sequences did push our performance headroom almost all the way to

zero but the 3050 had just enough juice to power us through. When it comes to VR shooters Contractors is one of the best in the business and is my personal favorite. For this test I kept the Render Resolution at 3936 x 1984 and the refresh rate at 90Hz and in Contractors Graphics settings I set everything to High except for Anti-Aliasing which I set to Low. In mod maps like this one from Call of Duty the 3050 had no trouble at all maintaining a 90fps frame rate. Most of the time the performance headroom was well above

50% which means the 3050 could most likely do 120Hz on a map like this one. When I switched over to Parking Lot though, which is one of Contractors more graphically intense maps the performance headroom fluctuated a lot more and in some areas almost evaporated completely. It was because of this I decided not to push the refresh rate any higher and in any case I felt 90Hz with High Graphics settings in this game was a pretty respectable result for the 3050. The rest of the games in the line up are a bit more demanding than these

last few have been but for those of you wondering what kind of performance an RTX 3050 can muster in some of VR’s most demanding games; this is for you. Microsoft Flight Simulator is by far the most demanding game I know of and performance in this game with the 3050 wasn’t great. I set the Render Resolution in the Oculus app as low as it goes to 2432 x 1216 and the refresh rate to 72 Hz. In Flight Simulators VR settings I turned Anti-Aliasing Off, set the Render Scaling, World Scale, Level of Terrain Detail and Objects Level

of Detail all to 100 and set all other settings to their lowest values and turned off every setting that was able to be turned off. This left the graphics looking pretty pixelated in the headset and as you can see in this training flight footage our frame rate was never quite able to reach 72fps. The compositor never dropped any frames however so even though the frame rate was low, thanks to Asynchronous Space Warp game play felt fairly smooth. I then put the 3050 to the ultimate test and cued up a flight over New York City. To

be honest I was expecting worse performance than what I got. Yes the frame rate was low. The 3050 struggled to even stay at 36fps at these settings but what surprised me was the compositor didn’t drop any frames and Asynchronous Space Warp did it’s job which meant overall game play, was once again, fairly smooth. The frame rate was of course noticeably low but since Flight Simulator isn’t a super faced paced action game the experience, while not great, wasn’t completely horrible either. Assetto Corsa has a lot of different settings so rather than going over each of them

one at a time I’m just going to list them all on screen here so those of you that really want to know what settings I used can see them all. Like I did with most every game I set the Render Resolution in the Oculus app to 3936 x 1984 and the refresh rate to 72Hz. It was at these settings the 3050 was finally able to spit out a constant 72fps. While this game capture looks OK, in the headset the graphics were A LOT more pixelated looking, so while the 3050 can technically play this game in

VR, if this is a big important title to you I would recommend going with a GPU with more horsepower like the GeForce RTX 3060ti or if you’re not opposed to going with team red the Radeon RX 6700XT. Yes, both of these GPU’s cost more money, but they are also significantly more powerful than the 3050. After Flight Simulator, Lone Echo 2 is the next most demanding game I own. For this test I took the Render Resolution down a notch to 3616 x 1840 and kept the refresh rate at 72Hz. In Lone Echo 2’s graphics settings I

first enabled the Low Graphics Quality preset, then set the in game Render Scale to 100%, Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing to None and disabled Temporal AA. Just like with Flight Simulator and Assetto Corsa this left a lot of jagged edges on objects; especially on things that were far away. The game did run smoothly though which was good and in most areas the 3050 was able to keep the frame rate above 72fps. In some areas though the 3050 wasn’t quite enough and our performance headroom dropped below zero and cut into our frame rate a little bit. Once again though

the compositor kept doing it’s job and didn’t drop any frames and since Lone Echo 2 is slower paced, game play stayed smooth. Half Life Alyx is probably the one VR game everyone with a VR headset wants to play; and for good reason too. Graphically it looks amazing, the story is great and the game play is even better. The 3050 was able to run Half Life Alyx at 3936 x 1984 at 72Hz on the Medium Fidelity Performance Option within Half Life Alyx. Even at Medium Quality this game looked really good and on top of it the

3050 was able to deliver a pretty solid frame rate. Yes our performance headroom was right on the edge and our frame rate would briefly drop below 72fps from time to time but as I’ve mentioned with other games in this video the compositor kept delivering frames on time so those moments when performance was at it’s worst went completely unnoticed by me and overall the experience was very good. If you’ve reached this point of the video and are feeling underwhelmed by the VR performance of the RTX 3050 consider subscribing to the channel to see what kind of

performance you can get with other GPU’s. Maybe the RTX 3060ti will be more to your liking. You can see how it performs in this video right here.