Decades after the 1992 flick The Lawnmower Man got our hopes up (and the ill-fated Nintendo Virtual Boy dashed them a few years later), virtual reality (VR) is finally happening in a big way. (Really, this time! We mean it.)
The simplistic, though still impressive, Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR platforms have both been around since 2014. And Google’s updated Daydream View landed in late 2016, upping the sophistication and comfort factor, while delivering a more robust environment for developers. These modest VR setups had you strap your smartphone into a viewer fitted with lenses, allowing your phone to become both the screen and the graphics-rendering device charged with creating an immersive world.
These were impressive early attempts at “cheap VR,” but the screens on most smartphones just don’t pack enough pixels to deliver a sharp image a few inches from your eyeballs. And even since then, today’s smartphone graphics chips aren’t quite up to the task of rendering complex 3D worlds with high-resolution textures in a way that passes muster up that close. It’s tough to feel truly immersed in a virtual world when you’re staring at a grainy screen, blocky text, and distant mountains that look pixelated.
Those who want their virtual reality to look a little more, well, “real” will be more interested in today’s powerful mainstream VR headsets, or head-mounted displays (HMDs)—the Oculus Rift (and the Oculus Rift S), the HTC Vive, the HTC Vive Pro, and the Valve Index—as well as the ‘tweener category of Windows Mixed Reality headsets. The Oculus and HTC HMDs require a fairly powerful PC to create lush environments right in front of your eyes.
Here’s how to assess what you need to use them. Spoiler alert, though, in case the headline wasn’t a big enough clue: The graphics card matters. A lot.
First: A Look at the Headset Specs
The Vive and Rift have rather similar core specs, and as a result, have similar minimum hardware demands.
Both have an effective resolution of 2,160 by 1,200 pixels (that is, 1,080 by 1,200 pixels per eye) and a refresh rate of 90Hz. And both use OLED screens for rich blacks and vivid colors, just like Samsung’s high-end phones and tablets.
The Valve Index, meanwhile, has an even higher resolution. Dual 3.5-inch 1,440-by-1,600-pixel AMOLED screens drive its display system, for an effective resolution of 2,880 by 1,600 pixels. The result? A significantly sharper picture, with a remarkably high pixel density of 615 pixels per inch. At $500 just for the headset ($1,000 for the full kit), it’s awfully expensive, though. Then there’s the Vive Cosmos family, with slightly higher-res 1,440-by-1,700-pixel screens.
Beyond the HTC, Valve, and Oculus offerings are a handful of so-called Windows Mixed Reality headsets, which combine aspects of VR with reality-overlay augmented reality (AR). They haven’t really taken off on the consumer side, but this category of devices includes the Samsung HMD Odyssey, which has the same resolution and same refresh rate as the Vive Pro, and the Dell Visor, with dual 1,440-by-1,440-pixel screens and a 90Hz refresh rate. They have lower hardware requirements than the Valve, HTC, and Oculus headsets, but these requirements can vary according to their intended usage cases. They’re not entirely about immersive gaming (not all VR games work on these headsets) and can be used in situations involving interactive training or other specialized work usage cases.
What Your VR PC Needs: The Minimums
If you’re putting together a gaming PC now to use with one of these headsets, or updating your existing desktop to make sure it’s ready for VR, just what will you need? The short answer: a fair bit of graphics muscle.
The resolutions of the Rift and non-Pro Vive headsets aren’t exactly ground-breaking, especially for PC gamers who are already gaming at the much higher resolutions of 1440p (2,560 by 1,440 pixels) or 4K (3,840 by 2,160 pixels). But the 90Hz refresh rate that VR headsets demand means that your games will have to be running at or close to 90 frames per second (fps), or ideally higher, to look as smooth as they should. Don’t downplay the necessity of that: Frame-rate smoothness matters a lot more in VR than it does in traditional gaming, because judder and screen tearing while you’re moving your head around in a virtual world can cause dizziness and nausea.
The minimum hardware requirements for the HTC Vive and Vive Pro include an Intel Core i5-4590 or an AMD FX-8350 or better processor. In general, that means any recent-model Core i5 or Core i7 desktop CPU, such as the Intel Core i5-11600K or one of AMD’s Ryzen 7 chips, should be more than sufficient. Given the similarity of the screens in the original Vive and the Rift, it’s no surprise that Oculus’ published minimum recommendations for the Rift include the same Intel CPU suggestions. For either HMD, you’ll ideally also want 16GB or more of RAM, though 4GB is given as the bare minimum for the Vive and 8GB for the Rift. If you don’t want to be standing for long stretches in virtual darkness, waiting for your game’s levels to load, we’d also strongly recommend opting for a solid-state drive (SSD) in any VR-ready system.
The graphics card is the key piece of hardware, though. If you have an older video card, for use with the Index, original Vive, or Rift (and the Rift S), you’ll really want at least a GeForce GTX 1060 card from Nvidia, or a Radeon RX 580, Radeon RX 590, or Radeon RX Vega card from AMD. The GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti won’t cut it for the Vive, though an even older-gen GeForce GTX 970/980 or Radeon R9 290/390 might just squeak you by. The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is given as the bare minimum for the Rift and the Rift S. With newer cards, a Radeon RX 5600 Series or a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is where you want to start. Or any of the GeForce RTX cards will do. (More on those in a moment.)
For the Vive Pro or newer Vive Cosmos HMDs, you’ll want to look a little bit higher up the card stacks; the squeak-by cards are the same as for the regular Vive, but the recommended baseline is higher. More on that in a moment.
Up the Stack: Higher-End GPUs for VR
If you’re strapped for cash, the abovementioned “borderline” cards should deliver playable performance for all but the most demanding current flagship VR titles.
But given that these cards are the baseline recommended cards, it’s likely, down the road, that a PC built around one of them might not run all future VR games perfectly at their highest settings. And if you’re building or upgrading a PC specifically for VR, you want to be sure that you’re allowing for some performance overhead, so your system can play VR titles that haven’t hit the market yet, not to mention hot AAA games outside of VR at your resolution of choice.
For that extra breathing room, you’ll want a more powerful graphics card than the threshold GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 480/580 cards. Traditionally, those looking for peak possible non-VR gaming performance have sometimes opted for a multi-card setup with two or more high-end GPUs. You could do that for VR, but the roster of VR titles that properly support SLI (Nvidia) or CrossFire (AMD) multi-card configurations is small, and support for SLI has almost evaporated in the last two generations of GeForce cards (the GeForce RTX 20 and 30 series). This, combined with the potential for frame-timing wobbles and other issues that plague multi-card setups in in general, makes a single powerful graphics card by far your best bet for smooth VR at the moment.
So, then, which powerful cards? As 2021 kicks off, Nvidia cards based around Nvidia’s “Pascal” 10-series graphics processors have yielded the floor to the company’s GeForce RTX GPUs, in both the “Turing”-based RTX 20 Series as well as the newer “Ampere”-based RTX 30 Series graphics cards.
The VR-friendly GeForce RTX line is currently spearheaded by the flagship GeForce RTX 3080 and runs down, at the moment, to the more budget-minded GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3060. Any of the GeForce RTX cards released to date are more than good enough for VR gaming in the state it’s in today.
So are AMD’s top 5000 series offerings, the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, as well as the newest generation of RDNA 2 cards, the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT. The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is also a strong contender for AMD, though its somewhat lower frame rates in certain games that use the DirectX11 API might give some legacy VR players some pause.
If these top-enders are out of your price range, but you’re still looking for something that’s a step above the VR GPU baseline, a good middle-ground card is one based on the GeForce RTX 3060, or even the GeForce RTX 2060, if you can still find one on the market. (All of the 10 Series cards higher than the GeForce GTX 1060 are end of life, in favor of the high-end GeForce RTX cards and the GeForce GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, which are the new baseline for VR among current Nvidia cards.)
Note: The GTX 1070 is also HTC’s recommended baseline card for use with the Vive Pro HMD, so if you’re looking for a card to use with that headset, you ought to be in this premium-card mindset to start with.
So, Which Card to Buy?
To be sure: Here in 2021, video card prices are high, and availability is spotty as the industry works through its shortages of GPU production and supply bandwidth. But know that the more overlooked mainstream cards in AMD’s and Nvidia’s lines (the higher-end GeForce GTX, as opposed to RTX cards, and the RX 5700 Series Radeons) can get you in on the VR action without spending four figures from an eBay scalper. You don’t necessarily need the very latest and greatest card, unless you also aim to play AAA games outside your VR headset at resolutions like 1440p or 4K.
One last item to think about in light of VR on the latest video cards, before we get to our card picks: Many cards based on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 GPUs, and some RTX 2060 cards (including the “RTX Super” equivalents for models that have them), have on their backplane a port called VirtualLink. (That’s not to be confused with NVLink, the edge connector now used for bridging a few choice RTX GeForce cards for twin-card SLI.) VirtualLink ports are actually special USB Type-C connectors that also support DisplayPort output and a certain amount of power delivery; the VirtualLink spec outlines an operating mode that allows for data, power, and video to future VR HMDs to run across this single-wire connection.
That said, that future may never arrive. No current VR HMDs support VirtualLink at this writing, nor are we aware of any coming, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’ve seen mention of it. (Valve planned a VirtualLink adapter for the Index and later canned it.) Both Nvidia’s latest RTX 30 Series line and AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series have done away with the VirtualLink port altogether on the reference cards, which may be cementing VirtualLink as yet another “come and gone” technology before it even had a chance to get off the ground. There’s been no VirtualLink action in new 2021 cards, either.
As for the cards below, bear in mind that the AMD Radeon RX cards and Nvidia GeForce Founders Edition cards we tested in 2020 are reference cards, or the chip makers’ baseline versions of cards with their GPUs. Many other card makers issue cards, not reviewed here, with the same core graphics processor that will deliver close or better performance. You can consider those equivalents in the same class, as well.
