I’d love to say that VR and ultra HD gaming are reasonably available in 2016, but they just aren’t. Those pleasures are reserved for the enthusiasts. Actually, I’d love to believe that all of the enthusiasts are romping around in VR and playing The Witcher 3 on 4K displays, but that’s not true either. I’m an enthusiast, and I work with a team of enthusiasts – none of us get to bitch about how hard it was to set up our HTC Vive space. The barrier to entry here is cost, and it’s a serious problem.
If you’re an average enthusiast – you know, Joe or Jill Gamer – you’re probably stuck in the dull, backward world of 1080p and non-immersive gaming like a muggle. To be on the cutting edge you need a cutting edge PC, and that’ll set you back about $1600. Want to know that you can handle the most graphically demanding VR games thrown at you, or play games in 4K resolution while maintaining 30 fps and above? You’ll likely be directed to one of two Nvidia cards when building your PC: the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which will set you back about $650, or the GeForce GTX Titan X, which will cost you a jaw-dropping $1000.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though, and it won’t be for long. Something just happened that’s going to make everyone happy. It’s going to make the wealthy, power-hungry early adopters happy, and it’s going to make Joe and Jill Gamer, eager as they are to break into the unbelievably expensive world of PC gaming, extremely happy. That something is Pascal. No, not the antiquated programming language. This Pascal is a brand new architecture which has led Nvidia (after billions spent on research and development) to build the two most powerful GPUs on the planet. The crown jewel is the GTX 1080, which will likely be the most powerful GPU for at least a few years to come.
Pascal has changed everything, and this marvelous architecture enabled Nvidia to produce a card that is twice as fast as the Titan X and sells for almost half the cost. In fact, Nvidia’s second, less-powerful card based on the Pascal architecture, the GTX 1070, is said to be almost as powerful (some even say a little more powerful) as the Titan X, and its priced very aggressively at $380. That’s insane. In a few months you’ll be able to buy a card for $380 that’s almost five times as powerful as the card you would have paid that much for a month ago.
You know what that means, don’t you? The price of Maxwell cards is about to plummet. The minimum recommended GPU for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive is the GTX 770. Variations of that card can range anywhere from $300-$650, but soon people will be dying to get $150 for them as they trade in for 1070s and 1080s. Heck, I bet six months from now you’ll be able to score a 980Ti for a song. This is a budget PC builder’s dream come true.
And I haven’t even mentioned AMD! AMD is on the cusp of unveiling its own new architecture called “Polaris.” AMD/ATI has always been the more modest (and more modestly priced) alternative to Nvidia, and while its Polaris cards almost certainly won’t be as powerful as what we’re seeing out of Pascal, you can bet they’ll at least be competitive, and cheaper! That also means older AMD cards will fall in price. Come January 2017, the prudent buyer should be able to construct a virtual reality and 4K-capable gaming PC for around $1000.
How many of you are celebrating and augmenting your holiday budgets for a new gaming rig? Everyone expected Pascal to be powerful, but no one expected these cards to be so efficient and so cheap. Do you guys think that this will open the floodgates and bring more console gamers over to the PC realm? I, for one, know what I’m buying for myself this Christmas.