I just had my first proper experience with VR in ED. Up to now, I had always done trading, mining etc and steered away from combat (since the first beta, where we hunted as a group). I'd generally get dismitigrated if I attacked another ship, so I steered clear unless absolutely necessary.

When my Rift came, I had a quick go at the training missions - just to check it out. Impressive! I realised that I seemed to have much more awareness in VR and so when I started up today, I decided to go and look for trouble. I'd restarted last time, anyway, so just had my starting Sidey and Eagle and nothing to lose, really.

Took off from the planet base I was in, and once in space saw a USS. So I locked it and jumped in - found a local cop attacking a federal dropship. Quick scan showed the Dropship guy was wanted, so I jumped in with my standard Sidey.

Long story short - I blew him up with just 30% remaining on my ship and earned myself 38,500 credits from the off. Very nice. In the old days of TrackIR and monitor, I wouldn't have stood a chance.

So now I bought a Viper III and extra pair of gimballed beam lasers in Eranin - ready for some low-intensity combat, I think

Wow, sounds good. So many visuals in ED must be fantastic in VR, a beautiful game.

Well it's almost like a different game - and it's most definitely a completely different experience to playing on a monitor.

Even just the cockpit itself is a huge improvement. I also find the sensor much more intuitive than in flat 2D.

Rift eh?
Spare cash always pops up.
Out of curiosity what video card are you running or does it matter with VR?
Obviously I have not looked or read much.

VR needs a beefy card.My GTX 970 is the minimum for the Rift.Not sure about a Vive but I guess the same.As for CPU an i5 4590 or AMD FX 8350 or greater is needed.

And a GTX 970 is exactly what I have.
Clearly more research is needed.
Thanks!

GTX 970 is all good. I used to have one and played ED a lot with it, first with DK2 and now with Vive. The GPU died on me though and I'm using a GTX 980 which I grabbed second hand from a friend and this helped a bit for other more challenging sims like DCS, but really a GTX 970 should get you going for everything VR with some adjustment in the settings. I'd recommend the Vive over the Rift personally - having tried both I find everything similar between them apart from (1) Godrays effect due to optics which make space sim look a bit worse in Rift vs Vive (2) the roomscale and hand controllers is something to experience - not so relevant to cockpit simming, but for everything else, including shooting and future milsims, wow - can't really describe it without writing a novel, but it's worth the extra cash, believe me.

PS: VR helps in ED for combat, but it also breaks my neck really bad! I recommend doing a short warmup sessions for your neck before any cockpit based VR!

It must be cool if you have to stretch out and warm up prior to playing!

Regarding the cpu - I have an 'old' i5 SandyBridge at 4.2GHz coupled to 16GB of DDR3 2133MHz and it works just fine. Also a GTX970.

I haven't had any performance issues so far, and I didn't change my video settings from what they were for playing on my monitor.

Just wish I had more time...

In fact, I've had no performance issues with any game in the Rift - though if I try to record flights in P3Dv3 at 1920x1080 I get stuttering on playback, though not during the flight. 720 half-HD recording is fine, though.