I don’t have answers to all questions regarding 4.38 but as I said many times in the past, the responsiveness performance-wise of 4.38 compared to anything before, will be mostly pixel-bounded. So everything will mostly come down to resolution. What GPU you need? Tell me what resolution you will be running and I’ll answer. My estimations according to self-experience (YMMV…) - BTW all my recommendations are with AFx16 forced from Nvidia setting and Multi-sampling enabled in BMS (Set to “Application controlled” in Nvidia panel)
1080p FHD - I’d say anything at the area of 1070/2060 will be fine. ~3 years ago I used to run FHD with my 3GB 1060 and it was performing fine (FPS was 45-100+, depending on altitude). But today we are a bit a head of that and probably more demanding than 2 years ago, so I’d say 1070/2060 is a minimum.
2K (My monitor res 2560x1440):
My old 1080 was doing fine so I’d say roughly that 1080/2070/3060 is recommended
My 3060TI was a little better, with MS at 8
3080 was overkill for that res and my current 3090 is running mostly at 150 FPS but sometimes can get to ~90 at worse cases.
4K - No real experience with that Res, but I’d estimate a 2080/3070 at least. I’d recommend a 3080 to be on safe side.
VR - The best you can afford ?
Here with a Reverb G2 on casual DFs and empty TEs I’m getting with 3090 FPS of ~35-60 mostly, with MS set to 2 and everything else on. I guess on a real mission it’ll be ~30 at worse cases (Because GPU effort would be ~same as TE).
How is my VR experience? I’m very sensitive to motion-sickness, at the start it was a disaster, I really couldn’t were the headset for more than 10 minutes, but after a couple of tries it became easier and now I’m almost out of that feeling. I wouldn’t say the experience isn’t smooth, I have a short DF video recorded which feels pretty smooth overall. But sometimes FPS tanks to the 30s area and you feel it in VR.
4.38 will come with many graphics improvements, it’ll be a “whole new world” literally. However, some of the stuff will be flexible (Not everything though), it would be possible to remove/cancel if necessary, which will for sure help GPU. However, my recommendations will probably be the “Minimum you will need” as you can see even my 3090 is struggling in VR.
I have a 12700K CPU BTW. I’d recommend at least this level of CPU, i.e some i7 K of the latest generations.