Today Oculus Rift unveiled three new VR-ready PCs that excited, ready-to-be-completely-immersed gamers can pre-order in one week. The new PC towers, from Dell, Alienware, and ASUS, are designed to handle the powerful new VR graphics, which take a massive amount of rendering power to bring games to life in your headset.
To no one’s surprise, they don’t come cheap. Expect to pay between $1,000 and $2,500 for a Oculus Rift-ready PC—but if you were one of the enthusiasts that pre-ordered Rift, you may be eligible for a discount. And if you already own a super computer, there’s a chance that it might already be Rift-friendly already. You can test with Oculus’s compatibility tool, which you have to download so it can scan your system’s current capabilities.
A traditional 1080p game requires 124 million shaded pixels per second to render the visualizations. Oculus Rift’s VR program needs about three times that rendering power. According to the company blog, a Rift runs at 2160x1200p on dual displays and requires somewhere in the range of 400 million shaded pixels per second. TL;DR, most computers are way too weak to run VR headsets.
So what will people will be able to do with their new VR-ready PCs? Well considering Facebook acquired Oculus Rift for $2 billion dollars last year, and keeping in mind that the platform now counts over one billion users, the company is certainly poised to do big things.
Oculus already boasts an impressive roster of immersive experiences, including porn, reading a book on a beach, or playing golf with robots.
