The story so far: Virtual Reality headsets have almost hit the common man in the street, but not quite. While Oculus Rift is being pre-ordered and the HTC Vive is going to follow suit in a week or so, the amount of money it would cost for you to purchase the headset and arrange for the suitable PC configuration to use it, is stellar. This means that not too many people will be able to afford VR, and this bodes well neither for the developers nor for the fans.
A simple market survey has been done as follows – the minimum graphics cards required to play VR is NVIDIA GTX 970 or the AMD Raedon 290. Both the said cards cost 350 dollars, making it difficult for the layman to purchase it on top of the $599 VR headset. The market survey simply took the sales figures of the graphics cards stated above, projected it to get a picture of the total available market of the VR world. AMD’s Polaris Cards seem to be the only force in the world right now that can prevent VR from being a marketing failure.
AMD’s GPUs that use the Polaris Architecture have been successful in bringing about a shrink of the card to 14 nanometers, which decreases the price greatly. The website wccftech.com passed an opinion saying that the cards will be available as low as $250, which would mean that virtual reality will be available to the world at least $150 lower than that was expected earlier, and AMD can be hailed as having saved Oculus Rift’s life.