Should soon run on a GTX 680. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2016/03/21/valve-steamvr-hardware-requirements/1
The price of entry will reduce over time as GPU performance naturally increases and headset prices drop.
Well, as GPU performance increases, so too, does performance demand from video games. For every generation of GPUs, there will always be games that demand every ounce of performance the cards can muster, and then some. To have the best experience at any time, you're always going to need to highest-end kit on the market. But VR headsets certainly will drop in price. Second-gen and third-gen headsets will be much cheaper, just because the first generation is the one that has to recoup all the costs of years and years of R&D. By the second and especially third generations, that mountain of R&D cost will have been made good on, so the cost per unit goes down, so the price tag goes down.
The downside is, these techniques cannot be applied after-the-fact, they must be built into the game engine. Valve have announced (but not yet released) a Unity plugin that will help implementing these techniques, but if you're not using Unity then at the moment you'll have to write things from scratch.
And then you wonder why the game developers focus on console gaming. The profit is where the masses are. And the masses aren't spending a couple grand every three years on computer parts. This elitist attitude is strangling computer gaming.
Not even sure that VR headset will drop in price with each new gen. They'll continue to improve feature, use better screen, etc... I really see the VR staying a niche product for wealthy gamers. I'm glad that I'm not an enthousiast then...
Valve probably by now had the initial pre order figures for both VIVE and Oculus and realised they are too small to make a profit on long term. And need to find a way to reduce the cost of entry to make there devices more attractive. Facebook suggested the other day oculus rift needs to sell 50-100million units long term for Facebook to break even on there investment to date. That seems like a awful lot of oculus rifts. Stabilised specs are meaningless, Elite already broke them. You need a Nvidia 980 or equivelent and 16gb of ram is there suggested specs. Which is above oculus recommended specs already. Oculus fixed specs only apply to games sold in there own store and that's the thing a lot will struggle to understand. Games on there will always work with CV1, Newer released games will likely need more hardware. New gpus are out this year it won't reduce the cost of entry though.
Frontier have since recanted/corrected this as: A 970 will run Elite in VR at medium settings, a 980 will run at 'high', and a 980ti will run at 'ultra'. computebase.de tested 'high' and 'ultra' and confirmed this.
People keep using nvidia cards as standard when talking about the Vive, when all demonstrations they run on CES and such use AMD graphics cards. I have the impression that if you tried to sell a person a system with a Fury-X for the same price as one with a GT970 people would think they were better off with that GT970 for VR. They make it seem like only nvidia exists. And you have to wonder how many palm are greased in this whole process.
While both AMD and Nvidia do throw money at people in the form of support - that is, after all, the entire point of Nvidia GameWorks - the main reason most developers talk about Nvidia first and AMD a distant second is simple market share: Nvidia has the overwhelming majority of the discrete GPU market. You could use AMD card numbers as a yardstick, but those numbers mean nothing to the majority of your customers; use Nvidia card numbers and the majority of the market can make a direct comparison. Naturally, what companies should be doing is using both.
I've seen some games use a benchmark number to describe required performance. That seems pretty useful and neutral.
His post was blunt but I don't think it was an infraction of 0, or are you referring to my post? Edit: Does your post not break rule 0 in that it suggests if someone grinds your gears be the bigger man and step away? Edit 2: My mistake, I thought he was referring to console users for some reason, rather than actual poor people. Which makes my initial post look quite dickish indeed. My apologies.
