Higher gaming and higher hardware requirements
As hardware evolves, VR games grow in ambition.
With all-in-one viewers, the types of game you can play are limited by the device’s built-in hardware. Options range from small to casual games (Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs to moderately demanding games (Superhot VR, Beat Saber), depending on the individual capabilities of the viewer.
Because inside-out viewers depend on the hardware on your computer, they allow you to play more ambitious games. Titles like Stormland* from Insomniac Games and Lo-Fi*, the spiritual successor of VR launch title Technology* (intended to be released in 2020) feature larger game worlds with open-world play, while Lone Echo 2* ready at Dawn, also scheduled for release in 2020, features more complex mayore sy environments than the original.
With these more advanced games, naturally, higher system requirements appear. Half-Life: Alyx* comes with higher minimum system requirements than VR games only a few years before.
- CPU: 7th generation Intel® Core ™ i5 7500 processor
- RAM: 12GB
- GPU: GTX 1060 / RX 580
Compare that to The Lab* , Valve’s previous game, released in 2016.
- CPU: 4th generation Intel® Core ™ i5-4590 processor
- RAM: 4GB
- GPU: GTX 970 / R9 290
Other VR games aren’t far behind, with growing storage, memory, and processing requirements. Installing the VR fantasy game Asgard’s Wrath* it demands 121 GB of free storage space due to the game’s texture detail. In the meantime, DiRT Rally 2.0 needs 91.63 GB of storage space. And while before players could pass with 4-8 GB of RAM and a mid-level CPU for many titles, the coming games demand more. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinnersfor example, it recommends 16 GB of RAM and an Intel® Core™ i7-8700K processor.
One reason for the increased demands is the improved visual fidelity of the latest games. We expect this trend to continue as more top-tier developers enter the VR space. The requirements of big budget games often surpass those of standalone games, which at present are the majority of VR releases. Better hardware is often needed to support these graphical advances and reproduce consistent frame rates.
Even more, running the latest games in a high-end viewer requires an even more capable computer. So how do you know what to choose?
