Looking to investigate VR from the aspect of development. In order to do this, I'd appreciate some advice regarding gear.
What's a solid setup that provides me with all the power I'd need to fully experience VR but is as economical as possible and has as small a footprint as possible.
Do you have a Rift already or have one of Pre order that's due after Mid June ? If so it might be worth waiting as theres a new generation of NVidia and AMD GFX cards due out then, so prices of the GTX970 should go down around then, which is a great GFX card if you're on a budget for VR. (Used one with a friends Vive and it didnt seem to have any problems with 90FPS).
Thanks Tadin. I'd want to go down the pre-built PC rather than building my own. With regards to your other question - I don't have any equipment for this setup yet.
@digital_vibe - Not trying to beat a dead horse, but just wanted to make sure you know that going pre built will cost you more money by a good bit. Building is always cheaper.
That said, if you still wanna go prebuilt then by all means do. I know some people just don't wanna build for various reasons. In that case, you kind of have conflicting interests.
VR needs a beast of a PC - Oculus min specs are the specs of a near top of the line PC. You need a CPU that's at least as strong as an i5 4590 and a GPU at least as good as a 970 or r9 290. Getting that in a small form factor isn't really gonna happen unless you build(and even then will be tricky, but can be done).
So basically the first thing is to decide - do you wanna compromise on performance, or do you wanna compromise on size?
I would not be purchasing the equipment myself, rather my company would so while I do want to be as economic as is feasible, I must also balance this with the practicalities of attempting to build my own PC which I have no experience of and little to no time to pursue. If someone can advise the best deals on pre-built PCs which have the power to support VR, I'd be grateful.
Well, you won't wanna go with just the bare minimum then. The main thing is the GPU - if you want it to last two years, and we are talking VR, I really think something like a 980 TI or a Fury (or X) is in order. Which are the top of the line cards currently. CPU wise it's not as big of an issue, CPUs haven't been increasing by nearly as much per generation lately as they used to.
Hardware wise I'd advise you to look for something with:
CPU: Something like: Intel 4590, 4690k, 4770k, 6600k, 6700k (There are no really good AMD CPUs for VR right now IMO. Zen should change that but it's not out yet) GPU: 980 TI or Fury (or Fury X) RAM: 16GB or better Drives: You really want something with an SSD if you can get it. They boost performance by a lot in the OS. 256GB is good. And then you'll want at least a 1TB(but I'd personally go bigger) mechanical in there for data storage(SSD is for OS and games that do lots of loading)
As for where to look: That I'm not gonna be useful on. I've never bought a prebuilt and don't know anyone that really does, so yeah. But at least these guidelines might give you an idea of what to actually look for wherever you look.
Just FYI we are on the cusp of a lot of new stuff - AMD Zen CPUs, Polaris GPUs, Nvidia Pascal GPUs etc. It's kind of like not the best time to be buying hardware, but of course you gotta buy when you gotta buy.
Anyway hopefully that helps. If you find a specific rig and wanna know if it's good or not, I can definitely help with that. But as for finding prebuilts, yeah that's just not my area. Sorry!
just for clarification - when Oculus promote "Oculus Ready" PCs as they've done here: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/ is that not strictly speaking, true?
