Like was in said in Game of Thrones, everything before “but” is horse crap, right? Well, not completely, not this time.
So, you are wondering if Oculus Rift works with GTX 980ti well enough to play some sick and awesome VR games in 2018?
Or maybe you are on a verge of purchasing this graphics card?
Well, there are quite a few of you that still are interested in that card, so let me tell you what you should be aware of.
First of all, it’s powerful. Although it is from the last generation of NVIDIA cards, it is more than capable of playing any VR game that is out there. 
It outperforms almost any GPU from Maxwell family, and it can even rival some of the Pascal cards as well. If you were to compare it to 1xxx series, I would say it is almost like GTX 1070, with a tiny bit more power.
However, if you are contemplating whether to go with 1070 or 980ti, I would recommend 1070. Unless you see a huge price difference, GTX 1070 can provide you a better proof for future games, is more optimized, costs less, and it has better stock cooling. At the moment, GTX 980ti has a tendency to overheat a bit and be very loud, whereas with 1070, this problem isn’t as big.
But, if you already have a GTX 980ti, or you are seriously planning to go and get that, it’s no problem at all. It performs well and even has some space left for supersampling. I also have an article on supersampling and how to use it with Oculus Rift. For those in a hurry, it’s basically like anti-aliasing for VR, which gives a huge visual boost to any game that supports it. All the edges won’t be as jagged and squarish, but you would definitely need a strong GPU for that, and fortunately, 980ti delivers.
Asynchronous Warp, as well as many other features, have been specifically integrated into 900 series GPU’s. NVIDIA started working on it as soon as they heard about Oculus Rift and VR, and they started making changes so that we could reap the maximum benefit from our graphics cards while in VR. Fast forward to 2018, it is still strong and kicking.
As you can see, if we compare GTX 980ti to GTX 1080ti, it has its own moments where it tries to keep up with holding a steady frame rate but misses it, unfortunately. Of course, the game itself isn’t easy on the GPU and it challenges it well, but it does show you that you might experience some dips, especially when the scene is open and lots of things are happening at once.
Interestingly enough, 1080ti, a card that is considered to be the king of GPU’s, is also struggling to maintain a steady 90fps from time to time, so that shows that it kinda depends on how well the game is optimized.
I started making VR games last year, and I truly understand the moment where you just want to fit everything inside without worrying about frame rate. But sadly you do have to keep the frames in mind, you can’t escape that.
See also: Get the best VR PC for your budget!
So, in my personal opinion, I would recommend GTX 980ti only if you already have it, or by some miraculous reason, you got a crazy discount. I mean, all this crypto stuff drove the GPU price up like crazy, so it would be surprising to see cheap products.
At the time of writing this article, 1070 is only 500 bucks, whereas 980ti add 200 to the price. I tiny boost in VR isn’t really worth the money.
So, GTX 1070 is what I would suggest to you. ↓
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