Barrier to entry for PC VR lowering thanks to new rendering tech

The near high-end requirements for PC VR solutions might be coming to an end with new rendering technologies.

Oculus uses “Asynchronous Timewarp” (ATW) and the recently announced “Asynchronous Spacewarp” (ASW)  in order to improve VR rendering performance. So confident in its rendering techniques that Oculus released the following minimum PC spec guidelines:

Video Card: NVIDIA: GTX 1050 Ti / GTX 960 or greater | AMD: RX 470 / R9 390 / R9 290 or greater
CPU: Intel i3-6100 / AMD FX 4350 or greater
Memory: 8GB RAM
Video Output: free HDMI 1.3 output
USB Ports: 1x USB 3.0 port plus 2x USB 2.0 ports
OS: Windows 10 64 bit
Premade PCs that meet the above guidelines can be bought for a mere $500 USD.


Valve has released a similar solution for the Vive. With continual improvements to VR hardware and VR rendering techniques, such as foveated rendering which is currently under development, it's likely we'll see mainstream adoption of VR sooner rather than later.