you probably already know that if you want a game in virtual reality on your
home computer you need a powerful enough graphics card and you've been inundated
with information about just how much money you should invest in one but what
about the CPU are there any special considerations you should take into
account for your vr rig or can you just plop in any chip that isn't bargain
basement quality and be done with it we're going to answer that question today and thank our friends at oculus
for sponsoring this video about this topic let's start with some simple
advice check the recommended specs on the vr headset manufacturer's website
and make sure that your CPU is at least up to that standard but seeing that you
might find yourself thinking well the listed CPU actually isn't all that high
end for example oculus only recommends a
2014 vintage core i5 4590 for their rift
s which is their current pc connected offering at the time we shot this video
unfortunately that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to only pay attention
to the recommended spec you see the reason that vr headsets need powerful
hardware is because you need to push more pixels than a standard gaming pc
for example the aforementioned rift s has a 1440p display that runs at 80
hertz and while those specs might be a luxury for conventional gaming it's more
of a baseline for virtual reality this is because lower resolutions and frame
rates in vr aren't just an annoyance they can break immersion to the point
where you'll actually get motion sickness so if you thought stuttering in
regular games was irritating just wait until you're throwing up on your living
room carpet because of slowdowns in a vr title
this also means that there's more to consider than just making sure that your
GPU is pushing out enough frames you want to have good and consistent frame
times meaning each frame will be displayed on the screen for roughly the
same amount of time for smooth animations without stutters and
inconsistent frame times can be caused by a number of things one of which is a
CPU that can't keep up with handling and scheduling all the data that it sends to
your graphics card you see the CPU has to give the GPU something else to work
on once the GPU is done rendering a frame and if your GPU is spitting out
tons of frames per second like you would need to gaming vr the CPU is going to
have a harder time keeping up if it isn't up to scratch traditionally
rendering requests such as draw calls were single threaded but newer apis like
directx 12 allow draw calls to be spread over multiple threads so unsurprisingly
it can really help in vr to have a couple of extra cores and a little more
speed than whatever the recommended specifications are and this is
especially true if you are streaming in vr
even if you're using your graphics card to encode your video stream instead of
the CPU your CPU still needs some dedicated cores to handle receiving the
encoded frames from the graphics card especially when you consider that the
CPU already has to work a bit harder not only due to the frame time issue we just
discussed but because it's more taxing for your CPU to handle vr head tracking
than it is to simply process keyboard and mouse inputs with a conventional
game so given that six cores is a baseline for modern gaming rigs
especially as games are becoming more and more complex and better at taking
advantage of multiple course we'd say an 8 core modern architecture processor for
vr is probably a good bet and a 10 core
wouldn't hurt if you're streaming with CPU encoding
you know what else wouldn't hurt listening to today's sponsor bit thanks
again to oculus for sponsoring today's video if you don't want to worry about
picking out the right CPU then check out the oculus quest 2. it doesn't need a pc
because it's oculus's most advanced all-in-one vr system and gives you
blazing fast performance next-gen graphics and 50
more pixels than the original quest each panel has a sharp 1832 by 1920
resolution powered by the snapdragon xr2 platform all in a headset that manages
to be 10 lighter than the original quest there's also new touch controllers a
built-in ipd adjustment mechanism and it's backwards compatible with all quest
titles you even get pass through plus which enables you to check your
surroundings whenever you step outside of the guardian system and if you do
want to use it with a pc no problem use oculus link to connect to a computer and
access pcvr games in the rift library pick up yours today starting at just 299
us at the link below thanks for watching guys you can like dislike depending on
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but in a weird way