Head over Oculus VR’s “Oculus-Ready PCs” page and you’ll see three manufacturers listed at the bottom: Alienware, Asus and Dell. Asus will have the cheapest starting price of the trio, costing $949 while the other two will have starting prices of $999. Asus also provides additional information as does Alienware while Dell says more information will be “coming soon.”
However, thanks to an announcement by AMD, we now have a hint of what’s to come from Dell. Basically the chip company said that it has partnered with Oculus and Dell to equip the PC maker’s Oculus Ready line with Radeon GPUs. The VR experience will be backed by AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture and LiquidVR technology, which was introduced back in March.
"It's an exciting time to be at the heart of all things Virtual Reality," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, Alliances and Content, AMD. "I'm confident that with Dell and Alienware, we can enable a wide audience of PC users with extraordinary VR capabilities powered by AMD Radeon GPUs."
As we’ve already seen on the Oculus Ready PCs page, the recommended system requirements reveal that in order to have the optimal experience with the Oculus Rift headset, the GPU will need to be an AMD Radeon 290 or better, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or better, or an equivalent GPU. The ideal PC will also need 8GB or RAM or more, an Intel Core i5-4590 equivalent or better, HDMI 1.3 video output, two USB 3.0 ports and Windows 7 SP1 or newer.
As for AMD’s LiquidVR technology, the company revealed this software at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. LiquidVR is actually a “set” of technologies including Async Shaders and the latest data latch mechanism for smooth head tracking, direct-to-display tech for “intuitively” attaching VR headsets, and multi-GPU support for scalable rendering.
With LiquidVR, AMD is pushing to reduce motion-to-photon latency so that users have more of a believable presence within the virtual world. Reducing this latency also makes the user feel more comfortable and lowers the motion sickness that can occur when “moving” around in a virtual environment.
“Reducing latency involves the entire processing pipeline, from the GPU, to the application, to the display technology in the headset,” AMD explains. “AMD GPU software and hardware subsystems are a major part of improving that latency equation, and with LiquidVR, AMD is helping to solve the challenge by bringing smooth, liquid-like motion and responsiveness to developers and content creators for life-like presence in VR environments powered by AMD hardware.”
Slated to arrive in Q1 2016, the Oculus Rift is expected to cost more than $350 for the consumer version. That’s a bit more than what the developers paid for the first two SDKs. Oculus Rift inventor Palmer Luckey said that the added cost is due to the extra technology the consumer version has compared to the older DK! And DK2 kits.
“The Rift is a lot of custom hardware,” he told Road to VR. “It’s using lenses that are some of the hardest to manufacture lenses in any consumer product you can go out and buy. It’s using custom displays we worked on with Samsung that are optimized for virtual reality.”
That said, consumers wanting the ideal VR experience may end up shelling out $1400 or more if they haven’t purchased a compatible PC already.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1LuoNqs
