Can Your PC Run VR? Steam’s Benchmarking Tool Can Tell You

With the launch of HTC’s Vive and Oculus’ Rift happening within the next month, there’s no better time than right now to make sure your PC is up to par for such a workload – if you’re planning to pick one of those two solutions up, of course.

To help gamers figure out whether or not their PC is VR-capable, Valve has released a simple benchmark called SteamVR Performance Test. It’s free, as you’d expect, and takes just a couple of minutes to run. Once done, you’ll be given a clear-cut answer about your PC’s VR capabilities, as well as a simple score that can be seen by expanding the bottom option in the results popup.

When NVIDIA released its GeForce TITAN X last spring, it claimed that it was the “ultimate” graphics card for VR. It’s fortunate, then, that this tool helps back that up:

AMD shot us over a handful of results so that we can better understand where each mainstream GPU is placed right now. It seems at the low-end, no one should go lower than a single GTX 970, which delivers a score of 6.5 with this tool. AMD’s R9 390, 390X and Nano score between 7.0 – 8.0, while the GTX 980 hits 8.1.

Moving up the charts, AMD’s Fury and Fury X score 9.2 and 9.6, respectively, while a single GTX 980 Ti and dual R9 Nano both hit 11. That example is a bit of a strange one coming out of AMD, as a single 980 Ti costs about $650, while dual Nano cards cost $1,000.

Nonetheless, an obvious trend seen here is that to get better performance at the high-end, a lot more GPU power needs to be thrown at a PC. A TITAN X wouldn’t score that much better than the 980 Ti, so to break beyond 11, multiple NVIDIA GPUs would be needed (or dual Fury, but I feel like AMD left out those results on purpose given it did include the dual Nano configuration).

Ultimately, what this benchmark proves is that a wimpy PC is not going to deliver an ideal experience. In VR, it’s not just the headsets that are going to be expensive; at least double the value should go into the PC to deliver what would be considered an ideal experience.