Getting Your Gaming PC Ready for VR

A lot of people are drawn to the increasingly popular VR devices of all kinds that are slowly multiplying and saturating the market. You may be curious about getting one and playing some VR games on it or using it for some other appealing VR application. The big question here is, if and when you do invest in a VR headset, will your PC hardware be enough to give you the performance you need for VR?

This is a very difficult question to answer, especially given the diversity and wildly different requirements of many VR games and applications. When wondering what parts to upgrade or whether to get a whole new system, the obvious (but useless) answer would be to just get the most expensive hardware to be sure that your setup can perform well in any VR app through sheer brute force.

In the current GPU market, with the extreme shortages of GPUs, this is both virtually impossible and extremely costly. So what is your next best bet?

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   Always check the system requirements of the apps you intend to use the most and base your purchases on them

Before you even buy your VR headset, sit down, have a good look around and search for VR games and apps that you really want to try. Once you have half a dozen of those, you will have a much better idea of the sort of hardware you are looking at.

For example, Half Life: Alyx, arguably the biggest and most successful VR game of the last couple of years, only lists a high-end i5, 12 gigabytes of RAM and a GTX 1060 with 6 gigabytes of VRAM as its system requirements. Chances are, if you are looking into VR at all, you already have better hardware, so maybe don't go looking for that RTX 3070, because you don't really need it to play the games you want comfortably.

2. Give priority to GPU power over CPU power

Of course, RAM and CPU should not be completely overlooked when building a system for VR. However, the biggest workhorse when playing anything in VR will be your GPU. Bear in mind that most popular VR hardware will need to render the scene you are currently looking at twice, translated slightly for each eye. This means double workload for your GPU, compared to rendering the same game or frame of a game for a regular monitor.

When you are considering your options, first and foremost, try getting a better, beefier GPU, because the nature of VR is such that it places the heaviest workload on your graphics card.

3. Consider a SLI or Crossfire setup

If you cannot get your hands on a very beefy GPU (which is a very likely scenario, given the current state of the GPU market), consider installing two less powerful GPUs to use in Nvidia's SLI or AMD's Crossfire dual-GPU setups, respectively.

Most popular VR hardware will allow you to use one GPU to render the image for one eye, while the second GPU takes care of the image for the other, which can greatly help.