 Virtual reality or VR has been hailed as the next paradigm for gaming and immersion ever since it rolled out then rolled over back in the late 90s with early implementations like Sony's Glass-Tron being described by John Carmack as like looking through toilet paper tubes Fast forward to 2016 though and the tech was awesome, but it still had a big problem the price because on top of the headset Gamers in particular needed to shell out for much more powerful hardware than they would need to play the same game in flat mode But there's some good news since that time Oculus who sponsored this video has dropped the price of the Rift and continued development on some pretty neat invisible mechanisms that work in the background to make VR run on even relatively modest machines And we spent the last week testing to see just how modest a machine you can use and I think you'll be surprised Let's begin with some of the efficiency improvements that are handled by your graphics card because in theory Every frame of an image in VR needs to be rendered twice once for each eye So technologies like NVIDIA's single pass stereo make it so your PC only needs to set up the scenes geometry once And then you can use it to make your graphics card run on the same screen Make it so your PC only needs to set up the scenes geometry once and their lens matched shading actually Cuts off any pixels which would not be visible anyway due to how the lenses in the headset work pretty neat Then we've got the headset specific tech like Oculus's asynchronous time warp and space warp Which kick in any time your machine can't maintain the steady 90 frames per second That's required to prevent motion sickness by generating synthetic Preemptive frames that act like a sort of suspension mechanism to smooth out the low FPS bumps Getting this tech working right was quite a bit of work because GPUs are designed for high throughput, but not Preemptive frame guessing so Oculus worked with both GPU manufacturers as part of NVIDIA's VR works and AMD's liquid VR initiatives, so it's more than a catchy slogan now Let's introduce our bare minimum system, so we paired up Where is it here it is a core i3? 8100 quad core processor and a GTX 1050 Ti and ran future marks VR mark which has a neat feature both the rifts minimum and VR ready performance requirements are baked into the results graph and what we found Was that even our bottom of the barrel actually managed to meet the minimum spec bar so there you go Video done piece out right no that no wrong so upon further analysis We actually found that while our rig was outputting 90 frames per second in the basic orange Benchmark which matches up with the refresh rate of the head mounted displays in the rift The actual target is 109 frames per second This is because aside from the graphics going on on the screen in VR The system also needs to read sensors and do a bunch of stuff in the background so with the overhead of VR The calculation is that 109 frames per second in flat mode should correspond to 90 frames per second in VR and superposition And superposition basically said the same thing so that setup was only good enough for like the very barest minimum spec So we do need to go a little higher, but do we go for? CPU or GPU Well, we were watching our CPU load pattern during the runs and our processor even though It's a measly core i3 well It is a quad core and it didn't look that busy so we bumped our graphics up to a GTX 1060 To see where that would get us Usually people would pair such a card with an i5 class chip But we're focusing on VR here and even with all the trickery it is still mostly GPU bound And check this out so it turns out that i3 plus 1060 combo here Actually looks good to go with a super rating in VR mark orange room and a full bar in super positions Optimum preset so that puts our total system cost at just over 900 US dollars and bear in mind that that is Including the Windows 10 home operating system which Microsoft recently jacked up to 140 bucks So if you have already have Windows or whatever then well you can subtract that Of course though those are synthetics so the next step is to go lab rat mode and put this to the test now Normally I game in VR at home on a GTX 980 Ti So I will be able to tell the difference if this doesn't manage to stay as smooth So let's fire up the Oculus performance profiler analysis tool and head-up display Which should help us pinpoint the cause of any frame rate drops that we experience oh? cool Okay, so this is oculus's redesigned home interface thing now You've got this control panel here that you can move to wherever it is that you want it to go and then you can Go ahead and decide well. You know which menu. Do you want to see oh? Close them so there's my library There's my explore tab here, then you can kind of adjust this one over here. Oh neat You can interact with the desktop as well. Oh, that's trippy Let's go ahead and look at the other monitor the one that's not capturing my experience right now. Ah yes Hey, you can mess with Ivan Hey, Ivan. I am opening your start menu. What are you gonna do about it? Wait I probably shouldn't open perhaps. Oh that just glitched it out I Don't know I don't know what this thing is Yeah, thank you. Let's go are your monitors different sizes. Yep one is 4k one is 1080 dang it Ivan game now right? walk around the Place somewhat because see they made it social so you can invite people to come over to your virtual home Friends currently zero friends online Thanks, that's why you wanted me to open that isn't it all right? What's next? Well, please a rubber equal you've played this game before haven't you I've played VR shooters Dang it Yeah, it's really fun Alright, well, I think that's good. I think that's all the evidence. I need this is working awesome So for our last trick We're trying out the climb kind of the the crisis of VR if you Think about it that way like the graphics in this game are especially when it was first released are Pretty incredible compared to What else there is now what I just? Oh That's a long way to fall huh? This is maximum settings to Yeah Whoo go go go go look at me. I'm like Superman Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Superman falls sometimes Okay, so Actually that went surprisingly well But still the point remains that in a massive surprise to no one just because a benchmark gives you a good score And you can run many VR games well on a relatively inexpensive budget does not Automatically mean that you can run any game maxed out in VR. It's I mean same idea as in Flat mode So just like flat mode if you do have some more budget and you're buying a VR gaming rig It wouldn't be a terrible idea to bump your specs a little if you want to play VR versions of flat games like fallout 4 and Skyrim since VR is more demanding, but Frankly, I've actually found that the most fun that I've had is in games that were designed for VR And what's cool is that the climb in my opinion is more of a challenge in my opinion is more of a tech demo than an actual game and that one still ran decently and Most of the VR games out there that I've tried some of which are good and free like Robo Recall are not Nearly as demanding because it's in the developers best interest to reach as many customers as possible with their games So our PC right here and of course we're not factoring in some of the RGB nonsense and stuff like that in our in our Cost for it, but our PC here can enable a ton of awesome VR experiences exactly the way it is So thanks to you guys for watching Thanks to Oculus for sponsoring this video if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button But if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link In the video description also down. 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