How Much Does A Vr Setup Cost

Jumping into the new and exciting world of virtual reality has more dangers than merely suffering from motion sickness or bumping your knee on the coffee table while wearing a giant set of goggles. Sticker shock is a very real side effect of the devices leading this first generation of virtual experiences.

Imagine this nightmare scenario: After paying $599 for an Oculus Rift or $799 for an HTC Vive (already a serious investment), you connect it to a reckoner -- maybe one that you purchased concluding year or even last month. (The Vive runs £689 in the Uk and around AU$i,340 including shipping to Australia. The Vice will cost you £499 in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and AU$835.47 in Australia.) But that new Rift or Vive takes i look at your computer and laughs. Why? They're just not compatible. And if you've got a Mac, forget it.

The solution is to invest in a new loftier-end desktop computer that meets the rigid specs demanded past virtual reality gear, simply that's not going to be cheap.

Just the specs, ma'am

The commencement thing to remember about VR is that the new headsets require a desktop computer. That's right, I said desktop. With a pocket-size handful of expensive exceptions, even a brand-new gaming laptop doesn't have graphics hardware powerful enough to run a VR headset.

The minimum computer requirements to use both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are an Intel Cadre i5-4590 or better processor, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970/AMD R9 290 graphics card or better. The former requirement is mainstream enough, but the latter is where things can get expensive.

How much are we talking? Well, the least you can expect to pay for a premade VR-ready desktop PC is about $999, only that gets yous just the bare minimum specs you need. So think of that $999 equally the starting line, not the finish.

"Anytime anybody says minimum," says Kelt Reeves, president of gaming PC builder Falcon Northwest, "but be aware of what you're getting." This may hateful a system that can probably play all the Oculus and Vive games and apps today but may not exist fix for the more ambitious games of tomorrow.

"Usually these PCs are the heart of someone'due south universe," says Reeves. "To give you an example, we outset at nearly $2,000 and proceed up from in that location. That's the ballpark that we play in."

Origin PC Chronos, $1,799
Sarah Tew/CNET

Kevin Wasielewski, co-founder and CEO of Origin PC, another high-end gaming calculator company, is more pointed. "Y'all don't want to buy a high-end headset and then get something cheap to ability information technology," he says. "It'due south like: 'Let me purchase this super-nice Porsche, but let me go the slowest possible engine.' I look nice in my Porsche, merely I'm driving 20 miles an hour."

Tuned for VR

Of class, those in the business of selling really expensive gaming PCs are naturally going to insist you need a really expensive gaming PC. But fifty-fifty more than mainstream PC makers acknowledge that going with the absolute minimum required specs for VR undersells what you lot'll need to fully relish the VR experience.

Think of information technology like this: VR headsets are substantially a pair of tiny figurer monitors strapped to your face up, and each of those screens needs to display 90 frames of animation per second in social club to look and feel right. (Past comparing, a television program is but xxx frames per second.)

Mike Nash, vice president of customer feel and portfolio strategy at HP, agrees that the $999 VR reckoner won't fly. "If you don't get the operation right, you lot tin actually get kind of nauseous because yous're getting an experience that is not fluid," he says. "The whole thing almost virtual reality is, your optics and the device are playing a play tricks on your brain. If yous don't execute that trick pretty flawlessly, it can make you a picayune bit move-sick."

Naturally, Nash thinks the solution is a computer designed peculiarly for the needs of virtual reality, such as HP'southward Phoenix (since renamed as the HP Omen desktop), a $1,199-and-up gaming desktop built and tuned with the HTC Vive headset in heed. "You lot want to spend minimal time tinkering and maximum time enjoying virtual reality," he says. "By having a device that is pretested, pretuned, preconfigured for virtual reality, the theory is the customer spends less fourth dimension tinkering, and all their time experiencing."

Is pretuning a computer to have all the correct drivers and settings already baked in for a specific virtual reality headset more important than splurging on the most powerful processor and graphics card you lot tin can afford? Nash says information technology's a balancing act. "I once knew this personal trainer who would ask this play a trick on question: What'south more of import, flexibility, cardio capacity or strength? The answer is, they're all of import. What'due south more than of import, having the right drivers, having the correct chassis, having the right parts? The respond is they're all important because they all deliver the experience."

Bundles of joy

Don't despair that virtual reality is forever out of achieve of real reality budgets. Oculus links to officially endorsed $999 desktops from Asus and Dell on its website and even gives Rift purchasers a disbelieve on bundled hardware, with an average of $200 off a Rift-plus-reckoner combo.

Dell XPS 8900, $999 (after $200 Oculus package discount)
Sarah Tew/CNET

Zvi Greenstein, general manager of GeForce and VR at Nvidia, gives a qualified endorsement of the lower-end computers that striking the minimum required specs. He says that Nvidia'due south GeForce GTX 970 graphics card (about $325 on its ain, or bachelor in computers priced from $999 to $1,299) "volition support a bully VR experience. Information technology will ensure ninety frames per second consistently, with low latency. That'due south the card that we recommend for the minimum bones VR experience."

Simply Greenstein also admits the extra power in the more-expensive footstep-up GeForce 980 and higher cards ($500 or more on their own and typically plant in $1,500-and-up PCs) can make a large difference. That's because VR headsets put their visuals mere centimeters from your eyes. He says the ability of improve, more-expensive cards to creepo in-game detail levels -- from textures to shadows to reflections -- to their highest settings is "even more important in VR, simply because the resolution in VR is relatively low. In-game settings will brand a bigger difference in terms of the terminate user feel." [Editors' note: Since this story was originally published in CNET Mag, Nvidia has announced newer, faster GeForce 1080 cards.]

One thing is clear. Virtual reality will toll a lot, even on tiptop of the expensive headsets. But that doesn't mean there'southward not notwithstanding a huge fizz around these new immersive experiences. "We're on the cusp of something and then exciting, something and so incredible. I mean, there's never been whatever jump similar this in gaming," says Origin PC'south Wasielewski. "It's impossible to describe it to somebody who hasn't done it. You can't understand it until you exercise it."

This story appears in the summer 2016 edition of CNET Magazine. For other mag stories, click here.