Bethesda VR was one of the few things that truly surprised the gaming world at E3 2016. It had avoided leaks and most people’s speculation, and gamers were excited to hear that Fallout 4 and DOOM were playable in VR at the BE3 Plus celebration, as well as on the show floor. We got to try them out, and you can see what I thought of Fallout 4 VR right here. While we were there though, we had to find out what it took to power these things, and it’s not looking good for budget gamers.
Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080’s, that’s what was running them at the show. This is obviously top of the line tech, and with good reason. E3 is where you show off your products in the best light possible. In fact, many console games are shown on PC at E3, just to give them a boost in the graphics department. There is almost no way that this type of setup is required to play these games, but it is still telling of something.
In my Fallout 4 VR demo, the game was definitely not running at its highest graphics settings. Dogmeat in particular looked pretty low res, with textures and effects seemingly turned down quite a bit. This is necessary for VR since you have to render two separate video images, at a very high refresh rate. All of this is totally understandable, however it raises some questions for gamers. Exactly how powerful will their machine have to be to run Fallout 4 VR?
Bethesda hasn’t released this info yet, but it’s probably going to need to be higher than the current minimum recommended card, the GTX 970. Running smaller games in VR works fine with this setup, but a full-fledged open world RPG takes a lot more than something like Audioshield (which is an excellent game that every Vive owner should buy).
Fallout 4 VR hits in 2017, so Bethesda also has time to work in some refinement and optimization. There’s certainly no reason to panic, but for now you might want to assess your machine, and your potential budget for upgrades.
