4Game

My gaming platform was a beast circa-2014 – almost a decade obsolete now, wow – but is it enough to play this circa-2023 game at high-quality high-fps 1440p? I'm a little concerned about the GPU card(s), epic so many years ago but weak specs compared vs newer generations of GPU products. I know many games use multi-GPU poorly but I don't know if Elite Dangerous is one of them. I also don't know if one monitor is a good way to play this game, most of the setups I see online have multiple monitors.

Asus X99 R5E motherboard
Xeon E5-1680-3 CPU (8C/16T, 3.2GHz-3.8GHz)
32GB DDR4-3000 RAM (4x8GB)
two GTX980 GPUs (x16/x16 SLI)
two Samsung 850 PRO 512GB SSDs (SATA3, RAID0))
Comay BladeDrive E28 3200GB PCIe SSD)
Asus PG278Q monitor (27", 2560×1440, 144Hz G-Sync)
this mobo doesn't have M.2/NVMe SSD slots, so my SATA RAID was for performance and my PCIe SSD was for bulk storage)

Is this game specifically optimized for Nvidia, AMD, Intel products? As in, do people report that it runs noticeable better/worse with each brand's otherwise-equivalent hardwares?

I played 8-bit Elite decades ago on an Apple II+ with a joystick – and I just can't imagine playing any sort of flight game without a joystick. Any recommendations for a decent joystick? Or is this game playable with keyboard/mouse?

I see many people talk about playing this game with VR. A different experience. But is it better?

I also don't know where to start with the game editions, expansions, DLCs, etc. Or which platform(s) it might be on other than Steam … I intend to play it on a PC, which software is best to start?