Did a little bit of a PC upgrade this week. My gaming PC has been pretty static for the last 4-5 years. It's been doing the job I've asked of it, and playing the titles I wanted to play at acceptable framerates.
BUT, I want to use it to play PCVR, which is a LOT more demanding. Also, the Oculus Quest 2 has a 90hz refresh rate, which is significantly higher than my TV, meaning I'll be wanting to push 90fps rather than 60fps like on my TV.
My core i7 3770k is old and venerable, but should do the trick a little while longer. I bought 2x8GB of DDR3 RAM to add to my existing 2x4GB sticks, for a total of 24GB of memory. Most VR games seem to need 16GB at minimum, so I should be covered.
To squeeze a little extra life out of my CPU (to replace it would necessitate a complete platform change - motherboard, RAM, and CPU - $$$$), I bought a new AIO cooler (Corsair H100i) so that I can overclock it. I overclocked my CPU from 3.5Ghz stock to 4.2Ghz stable. I could have gone higher (I managed to get it to 4.6Ghz stable) but temps were creeping up a little high for my liking). Anyway, that OC should squeeze a little more performance out of an old but still capable CPU.
And finally, my old GTX960 video card wasn't going to cut the mustard anymore. It's 4-5 years and 3-4 generations old. Not to mention it was a mid-level card when I bought it. I benchmarked it with 3dMark's latest DX12 benchmark (Timespy) and it pushed out 14 FPS. 14!!! It was like watching a slideshow. I then benchmarked it with 3DMark and Unigine's VR benchmark, and it performed poorly there, too (32FPS).
Enter the new video card: An AMD RX5600XT. This is another mid-level card, but a thoroughly more modern one (current gen). After some faffing about trying to get it to output a signal (turned out I needed to update my Motherboard's BIOS), I finally got it to work and ran some benchmarks. In 3DMark's Timespy, it pushed 50FPS, a 3.5x improvement over the GTX960. In the VR benchmark, it pushed out 84FPS - an almost 3x improvement over the old card, and very close to my 90FPS goal.
Anyway, my gaming PC should be good for another few years. I'll probably start shopping around for an architecture change in a couple years.