Will Oculus drive PC upgrades?
User Manoko asked Palmer what his options for VR tech look like, given that his system hardware is “a crappy computer.” Palmer’s response is rather interesting:
“Your crappy PC is the biggest barrier to adoption, which is why we are working with all the major hardware vendors to optimize for VR — if ‘normal’ PCs get good enough to run VR, then the majority of people will be able to buy a relatively cheap headset and just use whatever computer they already own to drive it.”
At the same time, however, Palmer clearly expects Oculus to boost PC sales, noting:
“We have been working with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel since basically the start of Oculus — they know that virtual reality is going to demand better and better hardware, and drive demand for powerful GPUs and CPUs beyond the existing gaming and enterprise market. That extends to PC manufacturers using their components, obviously.
“Most people have not had a reason to own a high-end PC for a long time. VR will change that, much like video-related stuff drove high end CPU adoption.”
In the short term, therefore, Lucky thinks that enthusiast demand for components will increase as VR becomes more popular. In the longer term, however, the goal is to bring those improvements and capabilities down to a larger market. As ExtremeTech’s hardware reviewer and a gaming enthusiast for nearly my entire life, I’m not sure which way this situation will break.
First, the positive: It’s absolutely possible for hardware advances to drive game developers to create new, immersive types of games. The advent of more powerful consumer CPUs made games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake possible. 3D graphics turbo-charged Quake, Quake 2, and every title that followed.
In many other cases, however, the industry has moved more slowly. Multi-core adoption in gaming moved at a snail’s pace past the dual-core mark. Quad cores were available and useful from 2005 forwards, but it took time for the benefits of that purchase to move from the high-end workstation to common consumer software.
In the case of VR, I suspect it’s going to be very difficult to push the technology into low-end PCs. High Bandwidth Memory should give AMD unprecedented APU bandwidth by 2017-2018, but VR targets a constant 90 FPS frame rate — and that’s a very high bar for any kind of mobile chip. There are certain technologies, like foveated rendering, that could theoretically make it easier for low-end graphics cards to deliver high-quality VR experiences by only rendering the area the eye is looking in high detail — but that takes better head tracking than we currently have.
I think Lucky is right when he talks about VR driving enthusiasts to upgrade. I’m much less certain that the technology will prove central enough to drive the entire computer industry towards the myriad technologies that will make VR available on lower-end hardware. But then, as the head of the highest-profile VR company, it’s his job to cast a rosy future for the tech.
