Few people own hardware capable of fully supporting Facebook's Oculus Rift or HTC's Vibe. It is estimated in 2016 just 13 million PCs worldwide will have the graphics capabilities needed to run VR, according to an estimate by Nvidia, the world's largest maker of graphics chips. VR headsets create immersive 3D environments the wearer can interact with and explore. Facebook will sell its first VR products to consumers near the end of March 2016, says Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey in a December 22, 2015 tweet. Filling that desktop tower with new, or more, plug-in graphics chips, video-game sound cards, and a speedier microprocessor is a good idea. Making VR seem real requires an increase in the amount of computing power your PC has, for example video-games always have a minimum hardware requirement for them to run. Most computers struggle to meet the needs of VR. To bring your computer to tip-top Oculus Rift processing power, Facebook says, you should include the following new or additional things in your upgraded PC: Nvidiia Ge Force 970 or AMD Radeon 290 graphics card (approximately $300), an Intel 15- class processor, more than 8- gigabytes of memory, and two USB 3.0 ports. If you don't want to upgrade your old desktop tower, you can purchase a laptop with comparable computing capability for about $1,500.
VR is a step beyond 3D. While Oculus Rift and Vive require more powerful PCs, without the required 90 frames per second on two video projections (one for each eye) we will not be convinced the image we are viewing is real. The average PC runs at 30 frames per second. HTC in on track to put its Vive headset in stores in April. See also, www.pcworld.com.
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