One of the reasons we speculate that could be holding back adoption of VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive would be the requirements needed for a PC in order to support it. This effectively puts it out of the hands of many casual PC users who might not have the need or budget for a powerful PC, thus limiting the headset’s potential reach.
However this is something Oculus plans to address. During the Connect 3 conference, it was announced that the Oculus Rift’s SDK will be getting an update and a new feature called “asynchronous timewarp”. This is meant to simulate a 90fps experience by filling in gaps for lost frames, which also has the added benefit of preventing users from feeling sick.
Ultimately what this means is that because of this, lower-end computers should be able to run the Oculus Rift. As a result, the minimum specs needed to run the Rift has been lowered to an Intel Core i3-6100 processor, 8GB of RAM, HDMI video, 3x USB ports, and an NVIDIA GeForce 960 GPU or better.
This is a much more reasonable setup than before, and it won’t cost users an arm and a leg to build. Granted the need for a discrete GPU still means a lot of basic computers won’t be able to run it, but hey, it’s a lot better than before.
Filed in . Read more about Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality (VR).