Just announced at CES, NVIDIA has unveiled a new program called VR Ready. This new initiative aims to make it quick and easy for consumers to figure out what they need to get the best out of the upcoming VR headset onslaught. Starting now, new NVIDIA graphics cards will have a VR Ready logo placed on them if they are sufficiently powerful to run virtual reality games at the defined minimums.
Those minimums are essentially that the game can run on two different screens at a high enough framerate to not cause nausea (probably 90 fps). So, what cards meet the requirements so far? According to NVIDIA they are the GeForce GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti and TITAN X. However, just having a powerful graphics card won’t make your PC magically run VR games.
Oculus VR, makers of the Oculus Rift previously announced their minimum specs, saying that gamers would need the following: “Desktop GPU: GeForce GTX 970 or better, Mobile GPU: GeForce GTX 980 or better, CPU: Intel Core i5- 4590 equivalent or greater CPU, A PC with USB 3.0 support, 8GB+ RAM of Memory/RAM, 2x USB 3.0 ports and HDMI 1.3, and Windows 7 SP1 or newer.”
If your PC meets all of these specifications then you should be good to go when the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive hit in a few months, otherwise you’ll want to start pricing out some upgrade options soon.
Published: Jan 4, 2016 09:02 am