Does anyone know of a list of PCs that meet (or exceed) the recommended hardware specs for the Rift? Not that I'm going to run out and buy one of these machines in anticipation of the Rift's release next year, but I'm interested in knowing roughly what a premium VR experience costs today (excluding the headset, obviously)
Edit: To rephrase my question, can anyone point me to a list of PCs manufactured by companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. that meet or exceed these requirements?
Today you really need a Titan X or 980 GTX Ti for a premium experience across the board.
I don't think anyone can predict the future as there is currently so much optimisation going on across all the involved parties - Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, Oculus, Valve, Epic, Unity, etc. They are all focussed on getting the best performance and experience out there.
This is a great summary of what Nvidia are currently doing:
Assuming Nvidia's VR SLI pans out, dual 970 TIs should get you 80% of the perf of dual 980 TIs for a cost comparable to a single 980TI. But, wait until VR SLI is demonstrated and tested in the wild. Until then, the added latency of AFR SLI is counter-productive to VR.
> To rephrase my question, can anyone point me to a list of PCs manufactured by companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. that meet or exceed these requirements?
Buying a prebuild is a bad idea. Apart from being overpriced, they often have strange custom motherboards and cases which make upgrades complicated.
There's always those places where you select the parts and they assemble the machine for you, but I can't recommend them. I bought a machine from Cyberpower UK a few years ago and had nothing but problems with it.
Just grab the parts from Amazon and assemble them. It isn't difficult, you're simply buying it in 7 parts and plugging them together. That way you'll know it's been done correctly, all the parts are standard, and you didn't pay over the odds.
Anyway, your question was for a hard price. I would budget $900 USD for all the parts (including 4690K CPU and GTX970 graphics crad). For a really high end setup for Rift (980Ti), the next step up would be about $1200.
a) Want something that physically looks good enough to have in their living room - modern prebuilds are sleek and small while making a small-form-factor custom is super-hard
b) Have more money than time. Who has time to track parts compatibility and figure out the upgrade path for your device, only to drop half of the cost of a new unit on your upgrade? There's a reason Apple has been so successful while ignoring upgradeability: the hardware market has never made upgrading easy-enough to be in-reach of the majority of users. While physically installing the parts is simple, compatibility is always frustrating.
Well shoot, upgrading rarely works well even for power users unless you're upgrading very often instead of only when necessary. By the time your CPU can't keep up, Intel has a new socket and you need a new motherboard. By the time your video card needs replaced, you'll likely need a new PSU to handle the new power requirements. RAM changes slow enough that you might get two or three upgrade cycles from your RAM, but you'll likely need more... and if you bought 4x1 GB and now you want 16GB, you're throwing it all away anyway. Hard drives are the only things that are easy enough to replace every day, but hard drive tech doesn't move that fast. Upgrade to even a slow SSD and you're golden for quite a while.
I bought my computer five years ago. After two years, the only things original were the hard drive, the RAM, and the case. After four years, only the case was original (and even that's trashed now as pieces and parts have broken).
Mini-ITX is easy enough. Micro-ATX is easy as pie. There are very nice cases for both. If you know of a sub-mITX OEM build that has 4690K+980Ti level performance, I'd like to see it.
>compatibility is always frustrating
Not really. A graphics card, for example, has two things to check to verify compatibility:
* Will it physically fit in my case? (Check the length)
* Is my PSU powerful enough and has the correct connectors?
That's it. Every graphics card has been PCI-E for a decade. If it fits and has power, any card will work in any motherboard.
CPUs are also not too obtuse. If you have an Intel 9-series motherboard, you can install any Haswell or Broadwell chip. This kind of stuff can easily be googled. It's no harder than getting the correct speakers for your home theatre.
Every graphics card has been PCI-E for a decade. If it fits and has power, any card will work in any motherboard.
You do want to pay attention to the mobo choice if the card itself requires PCI-E v3.0. There are still a lot of v2.0 mobos for sale. Most mobos have at least one 16x slot, which is the one you'll want to use. Things get a little more complicated with multi-GPU card builds.
>You do want to pay attention to the mobo choice if the card itself requires PCI-E v3.0.
Nope. PCI-E 3 capable cards work perfectly in PCI-E 2 motherboards. In fact, no graphics card currently on the market can significantly benefit from the boost offered by PCI-E 3. This includes Titan Xs in SLI: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7089/geforce-gtx-titan-twoway-...
>Things get a little more complicated with multi-GPU card builds.
Sure, but I would speculate that anyone going that route is an enthusiast who knows what they're getting into and is happy to do the research.
Nope. PCI-E 3 capable cards work perfectly in PCI-E 2 motherboards. In fact, no graphics card currently on the market can significantly benefit from the boost offered by PCI-E 3
Ah, OK. When shopping for a GPU compute server, I was paying attention to PCI-E 3.0 vs. 2.0 on the server motherboards.
I had assumed that it was a similar situation with consumer graphics cards these days, given how long v3.0 has been out.
Specifically, he got two GTX 970s to run in SLI, but the motherboard didn't end up supporting SLI. Neither him, nor the PC shop that built the machine for him, picked up on that.
It didn't help that the motherboard was branded as a 'Pro Gamer' motherboard (Asus H97-Pro Gamer: https://www.asus.com/au/Motherboards/H97PRO_GAMER/). How can something be 'pro gamer' without SLI support?!?!
Fails all around, but yeah you definitely need to be careful about the motherboard you pick.
I had my last gaming rig built at a small PC store. Not a big chain or online or anything, just one where I could walk in, sit down and talk to the guy about general components, pick all the pieces I wanted and then have them order them in and build them.
Build quality was great, he did a really good job with the cabling, I got all the boxes/manuals/extra parts. Have no complaints.
I've done some upgrades to that machine myself over time (RAM, graphics card, PSU, a drive change). PC assembly has gotten incredibly easier than it was in the past. It's the little touches. I notice that tolerance on cases are a lot better these days (things tend to align much more easily than they used to). PCI-E slots are a lot easier to put cards into than the older ones. RAM sticks generally have heat-spreaders on them, so you don't have to worry as much about handling them as you used to. Drive cables are easier (cabling in general is easier as most things are keyed these days), thumbscrews are almost ubiquitous, as are easily removable drive bays.
The only thing I still get nervous about is CPUs and their heatsinks. I haven't fitted a CPU in a long time and a mate of mine did my heatsink replacement for me.
All that said, I'd still pay someone money to assemble my PC from scratch. Someone good that assembles PCs for a living is going to do it way better and way faster than I would. At least, I'd hope so :)
I haven't built a computer since, roughly, 2006. It's just not very interesting to me. My computers today are an iMac and a MacBook Air, both of which work wonderfully. I normally play games on a PS4 or PS Vita. Again, they work seamlessly. I don't want to mess around with finding the optimal power supply. I'm too old for that.
If you did want to build a gaming computer again, probably the easiest thing is to find a build guide on one of the popular PC sites like Tom's Hardware. They often come out with several different builds in different price ranges. Theoretically, if you just order the same components, it should work with little trouble.
Early 30s, no kids, good amount of disposable income, and a keen interest in VR. How am I not in the target market for an ultra-high-end PC gaming peripheral? Because I don't want to spend hours figuring out what today's best set of gaming PC components are? That's silly. I am the personification of the "Shut up and take my money" meme with regard to buying a Rift.
well, for a start, by list you gave you don't own a PC per se (albeit apple is just rebranded overpriced PC with their proprietary OS, from my humble point of view). or do you consider PS4 a PC? Your post doesn't make much sense to me...
I normally build. But recently I was helping someone purchase a new desktop. I noticed that it is extremely difficult to match the price of some pre-built systems. What he ended up getting came equipped with a Gigabyte motherboard as well as a load of standard parts that I costed out to be more than the purchase price.
Neither Dell (Alienware) nor Lenovo sell reasonable pre-built hardware configurations.
Companies like http://www.ibuypower.com/ let you start with a base system and configure it until it meets the requirements. The recommended configuration costs about $1300, a premium one would be $1600.
I would imagine you'd get the best results from an Alienware style sub-brand of the listed companies; very few stock PCs come with the high-end GPU's you'd want to make the rift a good experience.
All in, a headset plus a machine to drive it will probably run you ~ $1,500 at launch, though the cost of the PC will come down over time.
Interestingly, Oculus has noted that the target spec. for the PC "will not change for the lifetime of the product." In other words, they seem to realize that this is expensive now, but that it's better to deliver a really high quality experience that gets cheaper over time than to launch with a sub-optimal experience that eventually fires on all cylinders.
This is likely going to be the biggest turn-off. People don't have those big PCs any more. Most people have just laptops/MacBook. I guess nobody would want to bring back those beasts in their living rooms again just to use Oculus Rift. They should have really considered full device experience where you get everything you need and hardware is exactly designed to give optimal Oculus experience. World has long moved on from knowing which graphic card you need for your PC. I really hope this has good enough performance on typical Lenovo/MBP at least.
> I guess nobody would want to bring back those beasts in their living rooms again just to use Oculus Rift.
If they like to play PC games in their living room, they already have a PC there. If they don't, this won't change that.
>"They should have really considered full device experience where you get everything you need and hardware is exactly designed to give optimal Oculus experience."
So... sell the Oculus together with a gaming PC? What's the difference between that and getting your own separately?
>World has long moved on from knowing which graphic card you need for your PC.
Except for those people who play video games on their PC. Those people generally do know what video card they have.
>I really hope this has good enough performance on typical Lenovo/MBP at least.
It will not. A powerful desktop gaming computer is absolutely required for acceptable VR performance in any interesting game.
The entire PC gaming industry would beg to differ, which is likely the initial target market. Of course that will change. Also I wouldn't exactly consider my desktop a beast. Form factors are pretty small these days.
Sure, this will be a hot product among PC gamers but they are not the mainstream consumers. I wanted to buy the device for my mom and have her use it. I think the vision should be to bring VR mainstream that is usable by all without technological friction.
Yea, I am sure that is the goal. But in order to provide a clean, seamless experience, you need to render what is roughly 3x the amount of data compared to normal 1080p monitors. You'll also want to make sure you don't have dropped frames as that would have a huge impact in the experience. You need high framerates and responsive feeback so that motion sickness is minimized. As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why a high-end graphics card is required. So yes, that is the goal but we can't get there right now.
The mainstream experience will be on high-end smartphones, not PCs. When Carmack and Facebook talk about getting a billion users into VR, this is how they plan to do it.
Something like this may become more mainstream [1]. Use your laptop on the go, and plug it into a high-power graphics card at your desk (along with monitor, keyboard, etc., and now Rift!)
Edit: To rephrase my question, can anyone point me to a list of PCs manufactured by companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. that meet or exceed these requirements?