Is 2016 the year of VR explosion? Nvidia says you are overthinking it

The popularity of virtual reality has encountered a tricky problem: there are simply not enough PCs that can support it.

We are talking about head-mounted VR that needs to be connected to a host, which is not the same as the cardboard box that holds the mobile phone. The former places very high demands on computer performance: compared with ordinary PC stand-alone games, VR games require 7 times more powerful image processing capabilities.

Nvidia is the world's largest graphics card supplier, accounting for more than 60% of the market. According to Bloomberg, Nvidia expects that 13 million computers will be integrated with display chips that support VR next year, which accounts for less than 1% of all PCs on the market next year.

"I think VR has huge potential. But from the perspective of short-term technological development, we still have to be realistic and VR still faces many challenges," said Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at market research firm IHS.

According to the forecast of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the sales volume of VR equipment will reach 1.2 million units next year, with total revenue reaching 540 million US dollars. Although this is 6 times that of last year, it is still far less than the 2 billion US dollars that Facebook acquired Oculus last year.

This means that we will not see the "big explosion" of VR in 2016, although Oculus, Sony and HTC will release consumer products this year. There will also be more than 40 VR-related exhibitors at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held next month, which is 77% larger than last year.

Oculus has also talked about the issue of PC performance before. They have also developed a cooperation plan "Oculus Ready", joining forces with Dell, Asus and Alienware (Dell's gaming brand) to launch a batch of "Oculus certified" PC consoles.

Oculus Ready certified consoles

The configuration standards of these consoles are 8GB of memory, Intel i5 processor, NVIDIA GTX970/AMD 290 GPU - this is the hardware requirement benchmark that Oculus has set for developers and consumers. In other words, only by purchasing a PC console that meets this standard or directly purchases an "Oculus certified" console can you guarantee the Oculus experience.

This kind of console is not only rare, but also expensive, and the first one will cost you $900. Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe once revealed at a conference that the cost of using Rift is $1,500 (about 9,700 RMB).