Be Prepared To Pay A Lot For An Oculus Rift Ready Rig
When many gamers think about the future of the industry they care so much about, to a point, the major consensus lies in virtual reality. The Oculus Rift, with its hugely popular Kickstarter campaign and its high profile acquisitions (both in personnel and in the company itself) was the first to bring that notion to the forefront, and it’s where many look to see how the platform will work out. Turns out, the platform will be initially expensive, as Re/code reports that the Oculus Rift headset, in addition to a PC powerful enough to run it, will cost “in the $1,500 range.”
The price range for the Oculus Rift was confirmed by Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. “We are looking at an all-in price, if you have to go out and actually need to buy a new computer and you’re going to buy the Rift … at most you should be in that $1,500 range.” That’s not including the cost of the multiple possible control input devices that are Oculus Rift ready, which are to be revealed during E3 (or in the leadup towards the show floor opening). “Long term, there’s not going to be a single input device,” Iribe said. “In VR, it’s going to be several different devices.”
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Depending on how many devices will be absolutely necessary to play on the Oculus Rift (as special controllers might be required for specific sets of games), we’re talking closer to $2,000 after taxes to have the full VR experience at launch. At the moment, an NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 graphics card, an i5-4590 or equivalent CPU, 8+ GB of RAM, 2 USB 3.0 ports, compatible HDMI 1.3 video output and Windows 7 SPI are the baseline PC requirements to get VR working as best as possible at launch. I built my current gaming rig early last year with a GTX 770 and already my tech isn’t enough to get it running properly!
With that, the idea of virtual reality becoming a widespread entity in PC gaming should take a long time to develop. Furthermore, with E3 2015 just around the corner, now it’s up to Sony and Project Morpheus to take the ball handed to them by Oculus Rift and slam it on home with an affordable price point. The PS4-era Morpheus games might not look as photo realistic as on a powerful PC rig, but with a console + headset price likely to cost about half the price, it should be enough to take some of the PC’s VR thunder.
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