 A VR gaming GPU for 200 US dollars? It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? I mean, that's really cheap for a performance metric that has been held in this nigh-impossible space for so long. This card being able to stand up to this feat would be wonderful and could be a great boon for the market adoption as a whole of VR. So the question is, can it perform in VR? And if so, how well? The VITESSE mouse from Phoenix features a lightweight design and a Navago 3310 optical sensor. Check it out to get a chance to win one at the link in the video description. Before we get into how the RX 480 itself feels, let's talk a bit about why VR benchmarking is so difficult. Unlike traditional 3D games, VR games have to live within a specific set of parameters to avoid causing serious issues such as motion sickness for the user. To accomplish this, VR applications always have vertical refresh sync, or v-sync, on. And the current headsets are capped at 90 Hz, meaning that results of higher frame rates shown by traditional benchmarking tools like FRAPS aren't always necessarily representative of an increased user experience. As you may or may not know, most in-game settings for VR experiences are variable to accommodate for the necessary 90 Hz frame rate and avoid issues like motion sickness. This is why we can't provide traditional benchmark results like 72 frames per second on ultra settings. Part of your run may be at ultra, but certain settings may also drop to high or even medium at some points in order to maintain your frame rate. This is a good thing, I'm not complaining, but it does have a side effect of more complicated benchmarking procedures. There are some ideas about what we can use to test VR applications like motion to photon latency, frame times, missed frames, CPU and GPU time used in each frame, and specific components like response latency of specific head-mounted displays. But current programs don't have the proper capabilities needed to measure these stats. Well, Luke, I know how you can bench VR. Score-based benchmarks! Why, yes, keen viewer, score-based benchmarks for VR do seem like the cat's freaking pajamas. And they are coming. Futuremark's VRMark, which is based on DirectX 11 and measures display latency and persistence via external hardware, is apparently coming soon. Whatever soon means. And basemark VRscore, which is being made in cooperation with Crytek, supports both DX12 and DX11 and features multiple test types including interactive VR, static VR, and VR spatial audio. It's sort of available, but still needs to be validated by a large sample set from a number of reviewers and the community. The inherent problem with synthetic benchmarks is they are not real-world performance metrics. We need to see how relatable these results are to the actual experience of using various setups and make sure the scale actually works properly. However, some of the massive advantages to score-based benchmarks like the ones listed above are that since they're automated, they are very easily repeatable. They may become widely used and cited, thus becoming a great resource overall, collectively, for prospective VR headset buyers. So if you're concerned about system compatibility, you can actually see how your system may perform before buying a headset. The only additional problem I see here is when new, harder-to-run games come out. Hopefully gaming companies will be good about review copies and let reviewers see what hardware people will need for various experience levels before the release of the game. With all of that said, how did the RX 480 fare? Actually quite well, especially for a $200 card. Now I can't check myself how the settings change and stuff throughout the games, but watching John play raw data, it was fine. He didn't notice any big problems and everything was okay. Now we have seen certain things from sites like PC Perspective where they put cameras inside and you can see the frame timings and stuff isn't as good on cards that aren't as powerful. So we will see how it fares once VR benchmarks come out, but if you want to just be able to game in VR, the RX 480 can get you there, man. And for $200, that's pretty sweet. They passed this test. Now when AMD was launching the RX 480, they had a little meeting with a bunch of the reviewers talking about how benchmarking VR wasn't really a thing yet. And I hope to have a meeting with Nvidia relatively soon to talk to them about the situation soon. So hopefully soon enough I'll be able to give real performance metric based VR benchmarking result information. But right now it's just a, she did pretty good. It's good enough. Style review. So hopefully that's good enough for you guys. Hopefully you liked this video. You can press the like button if you did or dislike the video if you didn't. Get subscribed. Check out the Amazon store if you're interested in checking out an RX 480. Also check out the link in the description to buy a shirt. That's cool. And talk on the forum about what you think about VR benchmarking. Check out this video if you want to see the actual review of the RX 480 and I'll see you guys next time.