AMD Outdoes Nvidia in SteamVR Tests for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive

It looks like more AMD graphics cards are worthy of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive instead of Nvidia if these SteamVR tests are to be taken for granted.

With Oculus Rift talking about preorders at $599 and HTC Vive also being confirmed for $799, we are looking at a year full of Virtual Reality. Many of you will want to know if your system is good enough for the head-mounted devices while others would want to know what is the best they can get.

SteamVR test allows you to figure this out by running a demo that weighs a device and gives it a score out of 11. While you can use that from this link to figure out how good your machine is, we have got the comparisons between a total of 11 different graphics cards for you.

Before we dig deeper, you should know that the recommended specifications for both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are the same:

  • GPU: AMD Radeon R9 290 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 equivalent or greater
  • CPU: Intel i5-4590 / AMD FX 8350 equivalent or greater
  • RAM: At least 4GB, 8GB or more recommended

On to the graphics cards comparisons now. You would be surprised to know that out of the top performing 11 graphics cards, only four belonged to Nvidia while AMD stood way head with seven cards making it to the list that can be called VR Ready. Check out the graphical representations below.

Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, SteamVR

As you can see, the least scoring cards in the list have at least managed something above six, this is because any thing scoring below six on SteamVR is not considered VR Ready.

The GTX 700 series didn’t really make the cut here which is pretty surprising because a relatively cheaper (consider prices some months ago) R9 290 managed to slide in at number 11.

Thanks, WCCFTech.

Sarmad is our Senior Editor, and is also one of the more refined and cultured among us. He's 25, a finance major, and having the time of his life writing about videogames.